I have been thinking about my next topic for a while and I thought grammar would be a good one to explore. Comprehensible input is very infamous for its take on grammar and its limited use. A lot of people do mistake the message though. Guess that’s what you get for focusing only on form, haha.
This time around I will be exploring why grammar is limited and what use it has. I also will give you some personal experiences which, hopefully, will give further insight on how this whole thing actually works. Also, if you haven’t read my previous issue, please read it, because I will be referring to the terms mentioned in it.
The Monitor Hypothesis
Let us take a look once again at this part of the Natural Approach (NA further on). As mentioned in the previous issue, grammar is an editor. It corrects our acquired system, which also corrects itself, but there are times when we simply haven’t acquired the certain rule yet and have to rely on conscious learning. Which again, is the knowledge of language, a.k.a. grammar. This can happen in a few situations, but three conditions must be met.
- You have to have enough time to think of the rule and apply it correctly.
- You have to be focused on form. Sometimes we are so deeply focused on a good conversation that we totally forget to correct ourselves or to focus on correctness. We just want to get our thoughts across even though they might be a little bit incorrectly structured.
- You have to know the rule. This is the most difficult one. English is probably the most studied language in the world and there isn’t a single person who knows every rule, every exception, and every little detail.
These three conditions mainly come true during a grammar test. Other examples might be a formal letter, a speech, and a scientific publication. As you might have noticed these are all formal, not a single one is casual. So I ask you, if you are talking with your best friend, will they really eat you for messing up an irregular past? Of course not. They probably won’t even notice half of the time.
In the NA we mainly focus on communication, meaning. In my opinion you are way better of getting plenty of comprehensible input instead of learning a grammar point or two. A lot of times students do not want to be locked into this endless cycle of definition, drill, definition and so on. Also, there are cases where people are way to self-conscious about their form and they stress out. High affective filter prevents acquisition, do not forget this.
Researches
Let me present some interesting facts. I won’t quote these researches, because that is not my main point, but feel free to look them up.
In a research which was conducted to analyse how often parents correct their children’s mistake it was found that most of the time only sentences which had an error in meaning were corrected. This means that even though grammatically it was wrong, if they understood the message it wasn’t corrected.
Also, in quite a lot of studies which examined how well Comprehensible input (further on CI) does when compared to a grammar based, traditional classroom, teaching found that in all cases CI based method was just as good or even better as the grammar based studies. This means that even though no grammar was taught the students did just as well as the other group or even exceeded them. A very important thing to think about.
Lastly, in reading programs students who encountered unknown grammatical structures usually could navigate around them by focusing on meaning. So, by using semantics and syntax they could outweigh the unknown structure.
To summarise, even though grammar is not taught explicitly in the NA, students still acquire grammar. This type of grammar knowledge is the feeling we get when we reread a sentence and it just doesn’t sound right or look at a word which is misspelled and feel like it looks wrong. Of course, when we get to an advanced level this will not be enough, but until then it is plenty. NA strives for a good balance of conscious learning and acquisition though. Maybe a future topic to explore
Personal Experience
To further strengthen my stance on why grammar is really limited here is how I acquired German and English.
When I was very small we switched from our TV channels to German ones, the gist of it is that Hungarian TV was very bad, still is…
Time passed and one day my mother heard my voice from the other room, but when she came to check on me what is going on, she found a little me talking to the TV, in German. Now, a child’s brain is ultra-good at sucking up knowledge, it’s like a sponge. As time went on I slowly acquired German just as a German kid would. I grew up on German basically. As you might have guessed there was little use for it and later on in high school I dropped it.
English was more relevant, I finally got internet and access to youtube. Thus began my English journey. After my first year I felt way behind, even though I wasn’t actually. So, I did what I thought is best, to watch a lot of youtube videos which were to my interest. Next school year I sky rocketed during my lessons, everything was understandable and I had very little problems.
So what happened? I only learnt it when I discovered CI. For short, I acquired German just like my first language, because the Affective Filter is very low in children and I watched cartoons which were interesting and simple, after all they were meant for children my age. As I grew older I watched shows which were for older kids and so on. You get what I mean. My German was pretty good and in my elementary school, of course, I got busted and had to go on competitions.
Now a huuuuuge thing. I only watched TV and never read a single word of German. I couldn’t write a single word in German even though I spoke it basically fluently. This means we can indeed acquire grammar throw only audible ways, but it comes with a great price. In languages which use different writing systems this can lead to huge damage. We have to read too.
As you can see or will see in my future publications my English is okay. I can comfortably write and hopefully convey my thoughts correctly so, what is up with my German? I haven’t used it for 6 years or so and now that I have started to reacquire it, it just blows my mind how well it comes back to me. Understanding German wasn’t that big of a problem, but I lost all ability to speak. Now, gradually it comes back, but I think in waves. It is a very weird and interesting experience for sure.
To sum it up. Grammar is limited in CI, because it only has one use, it is an editor. It is a very useful one, but it can be worked around during casual situations or when we are doing things for ourselves (watching a movie, reading a book, listening to music), as long as you understand it or as long as you can convey meaning there is really little reason to stress over grammar rules.
Fun fact of the day. Japanese throws most of its grammar rules out of the window in casual conversations. To the point where you leave out parts of the sentence.
So, that’s it for this time. I hope you liked it, leave a comment if you are interested in a specific topic or want to give feedback. Take care everyone.
ns 172.70.178.199da2
→ Request update
and then Add to home screen.