[Moderator’s note: split from “PAVC Grammar” thread]
I like learning the grammar, but “sentence patterns” are not grammar any more than surveys are the statistical analysis.
Linguists actually propose different kinds of grammars to explain the structure natural language utterances: phrase-structure grammars, categorical grammars, Montague grammars, case grammars, etc. I’m on the boat with the one that makes it most like predicate logic, but accounts for the most common semantic domains, as well, but as you can probably tell, that’s boring and dull for most people.
However, this has little relevance to what grammarians mean when they talk about “grammar,” since they’re offering more style prescription than they are rules for the construction of comprehensible sentences.
I think that students of all languages need to appreciate some major elements of linguistic syntax and a formal grammar. What is or is not a modifier/adjunct in a sentence? What are the atomic sentences of a language? What are the transformation schemata from one sentence type to another? A sense for those rules makes languages easier to learn because it primes people to seek specific kinds of patterns. You can make them fun. You just turn the practice into a series of puzzles.
Why do they need to consciously seek patterns to acquire a language?[/quote]
Not everyone is geared to some “unconscious” pattern detection, especially when certain biases from a first language hang in the way. Telling them that there are clear, reproducible patterns, gives students a jump from that haze of strings to recognition of said patterns.
Think of IQ tests which ask you to tell the operation that gives the successive string of numbers. Here’s an example: {1, 3, 7, 27, 367, 67347…} Now, unless you’re prompted in advance, you’re going to have a hard time seeing a pattern, and thus will not be able to predict what the next value is. However, if I tell you the pattern, then you’ll know exactly what to expect, and then you can compute the next value.
The fundamental WFF rules for a natural language aren’t too elaborate, but if known, they can give a learner something to expect when she does some reading.
Imagine a sentence where one or two words are completely unknown. With just some basic appreciation for modifiers, closed word classes, etc., we can actually pick a lot out before we even appeal to a dictionary for the additional semantic components.
“The duck didn’t duck, so we’ll need to head to the vet to check the wound on his head.”
By position and placement with CWC words, alone, we actually know much more about the lexemes duck, head, check, and need, wound etc. than we make evident by bare reading of the sentence alone. The problem is that students will generally latch to the first comprehensible interpretation for any given unit, even if it renders the entire sentence ungrammatical and nonsensical. That’s why it’s important to train students to eek out things like the correct parts of speech of the terms when the sentence is unclear to them, so that they take special care when they’re looking up foreign words. It’s also important at a semantic level for sense disambiguation; but generally, we have to have some sense of the syntax of the sentence before we can have any hope of accurately translating it, and that involves compartmentalizing key syntax groups in that sentence.
Plus there are elliptical constructions, which are highly frequent, but are a complete mystery, even to fluent speakers, because the notion of ellipsis in a sentence doesn’t occur to most non-linguists as an optional explanation for divergent sentences.
Consider: “Smith knows fully [that] he should return [to his] home and [Smith knows fully [that] he should return] to the people [who are] watching him.” How, without grammatical instruction, are people going to pick up on the drops that actually make the elliptical and non-elliptical sentences equivalent?
If there are people who aren’t geared to this kind of unconscious pattern detection, wouldn’t that mean that they should have been unable to learn their first language as well? Or at the least, severely impaired and retarded in their progress? Yet this is surely not the case for the vast, vast majority of people who attempt Chinese.
Um, actually everyone IS geared to do this unconscious pattern detection. Not everyone is able to do the conscious version. If you did not have the innate ability to do that kind of linguistic pattern detection unconsciously, you would not have a first language.
Yes. But in language, that is precisely what we DON’T want. Stopping to think and apply a pattern is what inhibits fluency.
[quote]Imagine a sentence where one or two words are completely unknown. With just some basic appreciation for modifiers, closed word classes, etc., we can actually pick a lot out before we even appeal to a dictionary for the additional semantic components.
“The duck didn’t duck, so we’ll need to head to the vet to check the wound on his head.”
By position and placement with CWC words, alone, we actually know much more about the lexemes duck, head, check, and need, wound etc. than we make evident by bare reading of the sentence alone. The problem is that students will generally latch to the first comprehensible interpretation for any given unit, even if it renders the entire sentence ungrammatical and nonsensical. [/quote]
That happens if they are trying to plug words into patterns – they interpret word by word. Students who have acquired language don’t do this.
[quote]Plus there are elliptical constructions, which are highly frequent, but are a complete mystery, even to fluent speakers, because the notion of ellipsis in a sentence doesn’t occur to most non-linguists as an optional explanation for divergent sentences.
Consider: “Smith knows fully [that] he should return [to his] home and [Smith knows fully [that] he should return] to the people [who are] watching him.” How, without grammatical instruction, are people going to pick up on the drops that actually make the elliptical and non-elliptical sentences equivalent?[/quote]
You never had grammatical instruction in English, yet you could comprehend that sentence without it.
Everything you are describing has to do with teaching and learning, not with acquisition. Explicit teaching can sometimes speed up the process to a greater or lesser degree, but in the end, anything that is useful long-term in real situations (no lag time, immediate response to speech and immediate output of speech) is acquisition, not learning.
I used the Integrated Chinese series (first and second year) back when I was an undergraduate (Nyan-Ping Bi – one of the authors – was my instructor) and I have some good news, but first my take on the books: the series is really good at teaching how to read, but really bad at teaching how to speak. Although I have only looked through the PAVC books, they seem worse than Integrated Chinese. Now for the good news: this is the best explanation of Chinese grammar for learners that I’ve seen. Unfortunately, though, it starts with the second-year books: courses.washington.edu/chinese2/smp.html .
Um, actually everyone IS geared to do this unconscious pattern detection. Not everyone is able to do the conscious version. If you did not have the innate ability to do that kind of linguistic pattern detection unconsciously, you would not have a first language.[/quote]
People are geared to do some unconscious pattern detection, no matter the domain, even with language. However, not everyone is geared to them, some to a pathological level. Linguistic nativism is true in some regards, but in many, it’s suffering huge flaws, and people are going back to statistical analysis of learned utterances to account for them, and are showing that people can benefit from heuristics so long as they are not overly complex. As plenty of examples show, prompting ahead of time over what patterns to detect (just like priming people to anticipate plenty of other things) remove a lot of the mystery to comprehension of difficult and seedier material.
Insofar as language learning is inductive, and insofar as people over generations have produced reliable rules for the production of a great mass of comprehensible sentences, there is a significant role for appreciation of the formal aspects of languages, because they inform general production and transformation rules.
Yes. But in language, that is precisely what we DON’T want. Stopping to think and apply a pattern is what inhibits fluency.[/quote]
People can be trained to apply any protocols that they want, insofar as they’re remembered. Recall speed is a matter of exposure and frequency of use. People only stop and think when the associations are weak for them. People can be drilled to the other side, such that the recall rate moves at a fluent pace.
[quote=“ironlady”][quote=“ehophi”]Imagine a sentence where one or two words are completely unknown. With just some basic appreciation for modifiers, closed word classes, etc., we can actually pick a lot out before we even appeal to a dictionary for the additional semantic components.
“The duck didn’t duck, so we’ll need to head to the vet to check the wound on his head.”
By position and placement with CWC words, alone, we actually know much more about the lexemes duck, head, check, and need, wound etc. than we make evident by bare reading of the sentence alone. The problem is that students will generally latch to the first comprehensible interpretation for any given unit, even if it renders the entire sentence ungrammatical and nonsensical. [/quote]
That happens if they are trying to plug words into patterns – they interpret word by word. Students who have acquired language don’t do this.[/quote]
Yes, they do. The “wug” experiment shows this pretty clearly. Proximal CWC’s inform how we regard surrounding word classes, even when words are nonsensical. And the “wug” experiment was done on four-year-old kids, and so is an “acquired” phenomenon.
We also know this because we know that much of phonology is “an error-correcting code.” There was a recent post on this in a pop linguistics blog: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3263 . A part of this is also the trend to detect these in “blocks” which are isolated in the language by their proximity to CWC’s in a given sentence. Failing to know them renders much language learning quite difficult. How else could someone selectively overlook unknown terms in search of fulfilling context or comprehend the general structure of the sentence, without them?
[quote=“ironlady”][quote=“ehophi”]Plus there are elliptical constructions, which are highly frequent, but are a complete mystery, even to fluent speakers, because the notion of ellipsis in a sentence doesn’t occur to most non-linguists as an optional explanation for divergent sentences.
Consider: “Smith knows fully [that] he should return [to his] home and [Smith knows fully [that] he should return] to the people [who are] watching him.” How, without grammatical instruction, are people going to pick up on the drops that actually make the elliptical and non-elliptical sentences equivalent?[/quote]
You never had grammatical instruction in English, yet you could comprehend that sentence without it.
Everything you are describing has to do with teaching and learning, not with acquisition. Explicit teaching can sometimes speed up the process to a greater or lesser degree, but in the end, anything that is useful long-term in real situations (no lag time, immediate response to speech and immediate output of speech) is acquisition, not learning.[/quote]
The easy counter to the first part is that I received twelve years of active grammatical instruction (K-12) plus a wealth of passive grammar instruction and reinforcement through formal schooling from the elementary through university levels. Some of it was purely prescriptive, and some of it was descriptive, that is, aimed at reduction of ambiguous statements and sufficient well-formed-ness for evaluation at a semantic level (e.g. whether the sentence was true or not).
But by your present wording, you appear to have committed a nice “No True Scotsman” fallacy by just labeling “anything that is effective long-term in real situations” as “acquisition,” even if it is acquired by formal instruction (methods of “learning”).
People can and have scanned dictionaries, picked up the grammar rules, read independently, and been quite proficient in foreign languages. Some are super-savants, like Daniel Tammet, while others are able to do this in a number of years depending on a number of factors (e.g. the lexical and syntactic similarities of L1 to L2, the regularity of input and conditions which compel output [outside of contrived formal settings]).
Of course, just telling students what the language means is a lot more effective. But that’s the root of acquisition – hearing language you can understand. That’s what the human brain takes as raw input and uses to construct the grammar of the language in the mind.
Generations are not producing reliable rules – they are acquiring languages that happen to have rules. No one needs to know the rules to produce or transform in a language they have acquired. Linguists and others who happen to be interested in grammar find these things interesting, but the average Joe doesn’t need to know the rules of any language he wishes to acquire, nor do most of them know the linguistic grammar of their own native language.
Yes. But in language, that is precisely what we DON’T want. Stopping to think and apply a pattern is what inhibits fluency.[/quote]
People can be trained to apply any protocols that they want, insofar as they’re remembered. Recall speed is a matter of exposure and frequency of use. People only stop and think when the associations are weak for them. People can be drilled to the other side, such that the recall rate moves at a fluent pace.[/quote]
For production, rules and output will also be less reliable and more time-consuming than acquired output. At some point, portions of rules-and-output taught material can be acquired. ALL purposeful, meaningful language that is produced without thinking or pausing to apply rules consciously is acquired. But learning rules and producing output based on those rules isn’t the most efficient way to get large numbers of people to acquire languages, as language classes all over the US amply demonstrate.
Yes, but these things do not need to be taught. And people can quite easily guess unknown terms in a language without knowing the theory of CWCs. They do it all the time.
Yet you were already fluent in your native language before you ever had a minute of grammar instruction. You had mastered 99% of the grammar patterns of the language before you ever set foot in a class. The remainder are largely items that are changing over time, are not consistently applied across dialects, or are, as you say, purely prescriptive. And acquisition trumps instruction every time.
Because that’s what it is. Not anything that is effective, but anything that does what I’ve described above. The point is that formal instruction is not the most effective way to acquire a language for the vast majority of human beings – and that every human being who does not have some sort of organic brain damage is hardwired to acquire languages without any formal instruction whatsoever.
Uh-huh. Of course, input and immersion are closely related to acquisition, not to rules and output and teaching. No one is saying that no one can “learn” a language. Some people are rather good at it – and a high percentage of those people go on to become language teachers, which is why many teachers think that everyone should be able to learn languages that way. But for the vast majority of humans, it is far more effective to focus on meaningful input as a means toward acquisition rather than grammar instruction and force-memorization of vocabulary.
Let me suggest something that looks like a “middle ground” to me: as much as i like the notion and the practice of language acquisition (not just theoretically but also from experience), at this stage in my life i don’t have the leisure of a child and the world does not give me enough comprehensible input that i could learn the language i am learning right now in a way you could call natural. Grammar (that i consider to be a set of descriptive rules that in the initial stages i treat as if they were prescriptive) has helped me more than once to get to a stage where i can function in a new language, like maps have helped me find my way around in an unknown environment. After all, in real life i don’t have the time and leisure of a child but have to create (put out) adult oriented (and at times complex) sentences long before i have acquired the new language, and by all accounts i am successful with my attempts to communicate and get things done.
I am quite happy to concentrate on learning right now and will leave the acquisition to later (past experience tells me that, at least in my case, the latter becomes easier the more i have done of the former ). Anyway, whenever i end up in a new language environment i don’t start with wanting to speak like a native speaker; i simply start out with an urgent need to communicate (in 4 out of 6 cases i have learned or acquired, as the case may be, a given language because i had to/wanted to function in an environment where that language is the standard medium of communication). My conscious aim has never been more than to get to a functional level, and if i have arrived at (near-)native fluency in some cases that was not because of my own desire. So i can certainly say from experience that starting out with learning does not necessarily close the door to acquisition, although i easily concede that different people may well be different in this regard, therefore i don’t insist that there is a “best way” into a new language. Like ehopi i have studied linguistics and appreciate the tools i have at my disposal as a result (even though it is obvious that many if not most competent speakers of a second language don’t need/use those tools), and like ironlady i think that native-level fluency (something that is not a concern for many if not most speakers of a second language) cannot be learned.
The question “explicit grammar teaching or not” has the same answer as “explicit teaching maps or not?” or “explicit teaching of harmony or not” - i don’t have an aswer for anybody but myself.
Exactly the opposite has been my experience. In fact, I insisted on refusing to take more than two years of Spanish in undergrad school because the classes were getting in the way of my Spanish language acquisition !
When I was among friends and we were using the language, I was actively acquiring more vocabulary and fluency. In class, I was learning grammar rules that made me self-conscious about trying to speak! My friends were more than willing to explain my insistent questions, if I had them, and rib me once in a while if things went too far beyond the pale, and it was natural, without conscious thought, and I can still speak Spanish (sometimes a bit rusty, but it comes back quickly enough) even after a break of five years or more.
I’ve also studied Japanese (a year in university, and as an exchange student in Japan–guess where I learned more Japanese? ), Korean (in Korea), and a bit of Russian. My Japanese teacher was a native speaker who loved, LOVED to drill. Over and over again, constant repetition of sentences. I almost never knew what any of it meant. I still don’t, but can remember it just from sheer exposure, over and over and over. But it will in no way help me if I never learn what it means! (Some of it I did learn when I went there, but for the rest, it’s just a kind of monotone echo in my past.) Most of the Japanese I can speak, then, I can’t read or write because I picked it up in conversation with actual Japanese people while I was there. I didn’t lean it at all. I acquired it. It became a part of me. It had/would have use for me, just like the Spanish I was speaking with my friends.
I studied the Korean, in Korea, with Korean speakers, but only academically. I never used more than “hello” or “fried rice” for actual communication, so that’s all I can now say. I learned to read Hangul, but as I don’t use it, I’ve forgotten most of that, too.
I had the same results with Russian, though I studied in the States. I learned from a native speaker. I learned to read and write, learned a few phrases, but nothing beyond that. Mostly I don’t remember any of it because I’ve never used it.
In fact, I still have more Bahasa Indonesia that I picked up from an old lover, never studying at all formally.
Books are great. Grammar is lovely. But it’s all analytical. You (I, at least) must HAVE language first before I can pick it apart and apply “rules.”
Oh, and Mandarin. I’ve picked up a little here, of course.: acquired through using it to function in this environment. I studied formally for one semester. In that semester, I learned to read a few things I already knew how to say.
I think it depends (in practical terms) on what level your Mandarin is at. I have quite a few beginners and low- to mid-intermediate students who are acquiring with me due to massive comprehensible input. It IS possible to provide the adult learner with concentrated, comprehensible input. Of course you don’t have as much time as a child, but then again you also have better emotional control, more understanding of the real world, useful background knowledge, and lots of other things that help the whole endeavor.
Once the student has unconscious control of all the “sentence patterns” (aka the grammar of the language), they can handle unknowns much better (since, even without consciously applying rules or making judgements about parts of speech, the brain does it automatically at that point), and they can get a lot or all of their own input from more conventional sources. It doesn’t have to be so carefully designed or controlled for maximum effect over the minimum time.
I have to say that in my observation, the students who started out with input (rather than a lot of learning) are more fluent after less time than those who started by studying, even studying hard. Those who studied know a lot of words, and a lot of patterns, but their speech tends to be hesitant. The students who started with input speak (and understand) the language that we have done quite well – they are “micro-fluent” over whatever language they’ve had input on. I don’t have a huge sample size at any given time, and there are obviously different factors at work that can’t be controlled, but that is my gut feeling, and I spend an hour or two a week just talking to each of them in Mandarin, so I can compare in that way at least.
First, he has to know the rules, or else he couldn’t produce the sentences. He just doesn’t have to have a formal means of explaining those rules. There’s a big difference.
Second, the apparatus that helps people acquire their native language sharply drops off after a young age, so it would be very difficult to appeal to such an apparatus that doesn’t appropriately function come adolescence.
There’s no such thing as “grammar” in some standalone sense, but various formalized grammars (plural) which are used to explain the classes of words and class sequences that comprise all of the elements of comprehensible sentences of a given language. Ideally, the markup for linguists would be (a) parsimonious and (b) comprehensive. The linguist is interested in syntax and morphology (places where grammars are most relevant), which a given grammar may inform with differing levels of reliability. Most people don’t know them, but they certainly have benefited from learning them.
Generations (of people) are producing reliable rules in the form of folk grammars. The issue is that folk grammars are highly inadequate across languages, which is where linguists can step in and more rigorously evaluate the matter.
Yes. But in language, that is precisely what we DON’T want. Stopping to think and apply a pattern is what inhibits fluency.[/quote]
People can be trained to apply any protocols that they want, insofar as they’re remembered. Recall speed is a matter of exposure and frequency of use. People only stop and think when the associations are weak for them. People can be drilled to the other side, such that the recall rate moves at a fluent pace.[/quote]
For production, rules and output will also be less reliable and more time-consuming than acquired output. At some point, portions of rules-and-output taught material can be acquired. ALL purposeful, meaningful language that is produced without thinking or pausing to apply rules consciously is acquired. But learning rules and producing output based on those rules isn’t the most efficient way to get large numbers of people to acquire languages, as language classes all over the US amply demonstrate.[/quote]
This is already refuted with a furtherance of the example that I gave. Simply increasing the number of comprehensible examples won’t enable you to detect any pattern, much less produce anything that qualifies as a member of the set. Even if I gave you one thousand more, odds are that you would still struggle to detect any predictive pattern.
WFF rules for formal languages and production rules of sentences are of just this nature – they’re countably infinite, recursive, and decidable. It may take time to pick up a few rules that explain the recursion for all of the components of a sentence, and then for sentences, themselves, but the idea that bare induction would provide it simply isn’t true.
Yes, but these things do not need to be taught. And people can quite easily guess unknown terms in a language without knowing the theory of CWCs. They do it all the time.[/quote]
CWC isn’t a theory. It’s a demarcation of certain classes of words for which there are hardly ever additions. The classes themselves: adpositions, pro-forms, etc. are hardly under theoretical dispute any more than the OWC words (N, V/Adj., Adv.) are. People can acquire many CWC’s via sufficient input (because they’re also highly frequent), but often people neglect crucial ones, or they fail to discriminate their functions, placements, and roles in their sentences. This is where a grammatical tip (telling them what the classes are, what information they provide, and where we can put them in a phrase) is quite useful.
Speaking of theories, let’s keep in mind that Krashen doesn’t even have theories. He has hypotheses and research agendas. Nothing conclusive has confirmed any of them, although there could be a clear falsifying case, one in which students demand answers to a question like, “Why is my sentence wrong, while their sentence is right?” Inability to speak to that very aggravation ought to tell you that people want and need rules. Learners do not want a promissory note that it will come to them unconsciously via an inbuilt intuition, but know that there’s some heuristic or shortcut. They’re just like the ones that they may know intuitively in their native language, but can’t express formally.
Plus there’s a problem with Krashen’s background assumption in general – linguistic nativism (and almost out the window at this point, its persistence into adulthood) – which is under a barrage of empirical attacks from different directions. Here’s a sample: timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/ … homsky.htm
Speaking more generally, some books that call themselves “grammar books” are rather godawful attempts at framing the language’s “rules” as a series of patterns that would be admittedly impossible for even native speakers to keep in their heads. That would be infuriating to be told, “These are the rules,” and, “There are a lot of rules and this barely scratches the surface.” That’s bad linguistics (Actually, it’s bad logic, which has a lot to say on the matter of formal linguistics). We know that the rules of a language can’t be too difficult, and we know them for formal reasons.
[ul][li]Declarative sentences can be modeled into the formal predicate calculi (FOPL, and with some definitional work, HOL). That is, we can essentially treat declarative sentences as claims that a certain group of ordered n-tuples is a member of a labeled set.[/li]
[li]Other sentence forms are, or can be accurately described by, transformations from declarative sentences.[/li][/ul]
Most of what you’re given in books, however, are amateur attempts to compensate for deficits in a native folk grammar, where “measure words” are their own syntactic class, for instance.
However, any decently informed grammar textbook will outline exactly how the production rules are really not so demanding at all. In personal experience, eight-year-olds can appreciate syntax trees and conjugation diagrams once they get a mereological sense of sentences in general, but most grammar texts offer nothing near that. The closest I’ve seen for Mandarin have been the “Schaum’s Chinese Grammar” by Claudia Ross, and (the better skimmed than read) “Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar” by Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington.
In all honesty, though, the “perfect” grammar book, one that gave rules for production of over 90% of possible sentences, with pure formalism, would only span about ten pages and have a decent glossary. Grammar doesn’t have to take forever, but it is crucial for getting that initial framework.
Yet you were already fluent in your native language before you ever had a minute of grammar instruction. You had mastered 99% of the grammar patterns of the language before you ever set foot in a class. The remainder are largely items that are changing over time, are not consistently applied across dialects, or are, as you say, purely prescriptive. And acquisition trumps instruction every time.[/quote]
All aspects of language change over time. Some are just slower than others.
Descriptive grammars only outline that two sentences carry ambiguous meanings, depending on written or spoken conventions.
Uh-huh. Of course, input and immersion are closely related to acquisition, not to rules and output and teaching. No one is saying that no one can “learn” a language. Some people are rather good at it – and a high percentage of those people go on to become language teachers, which is why many teachers think that everyone should be able to learn languages that way. But for the vast majority of humans, it is far more effective to focus on meaningful input as a means toward acquisition rather than grammar instruction and force-memorization of vocabulary.[/quote]
I think you have a bit of a caricature of how people with passing backgrounds in linguistics actually teach formal grammars. It’s nothing near the sort, “I say! You repeat!” I ask more questions than anything when I teach grammar. “What part of speech is this word?” “What can you get when an NP and a PP are together?” “What words can I take away from the sentence and still have a sentence at the end?” People can benefit from this dialectic, and many people often need this if they want to succeed at language learning.
In my experience, teaching grammar has had only one significantly difficult aspect – it demands the acquisition of yet another language, specifically the metalanguage with which one will communicate the rules of the object language. However, since metalinguistic terms have many parallel translations (thanks in large part to lexicographers), it’s not hard to give students a basic training of their fundamental word classes: {D, N, A, V, R, P, C, O}, their constituent phrases {DP, NP, AP, VP, RP, PP, CP, OP}, the basic components of sentences {SENT}, and the semantic domains that each word class can cover. Seeing the elliptical constructions is particularly edifying for kids who have, by acquisition, generated separate patterns for the same general rule and are ambivalent about which one to select for their output.
No, he doesn’t have to know the rules consciously. He has to have them in his head. The brain does that quite nicely, without anyone ever stating the rules for it.
Prove that it doesn’t. My students are acquiring just fine, thank you very much, so it must be functioning appropriately.
Benefited how? The average person doesn’t become proficient in a language from knowing the rules of it. If they are interested in grammar, that’s all well and good, but for getting people fluent, it’s not helpful in the main.
This is already refuted with a furtherance of the example that I gave. Simply increasing the number of comprehensible examples won’t enable you to detect any pattern, much less produce anything that qualifies as a member of the set. Even if I gave you one thousand more, odds are that you would still struggle to detect any predictive pattern.[/quote]
That’s the point. Language is not math. You don’t have to detect a predictive pattern. All you need to do is get enough meaningful input so that your brain unconsciously constructs the patterns of the language and uses them to understand and output the target language. There is no need to state what the pattern is to use a language.
Everything you’re describing is theory. It is an explanation that someone has proposed to explain certain phenomena that occur in natural language.
Try teaching a group of people using comprehensible input and then report back. You don’t get students asking “Why is my sentence wrong and his right?” precisely because students are outputting only acquired language. Students typically make errors when they are forced to output language they haven’t acquired.
Or, of course, you could say that the assumption that linguistic nativism is not accurate is under attack from successful experiences teaching using Comprehensible Input. I know it goes against your theoretical grain, but the fact is that people are becoming fluent quite easily using these methods, which go against traditional thinking about how languages are taught. This also challenges the historic status quo for who controls education and literacy. University professors are loathe to listen to experiences of “mere” high school teachers, even when the high school kids are more fluent after the same period of time than the students in the university language class.
If only an appreciation of syntax trees actually helped people output and understand language.
From your description, you are teaching “Linguistics of English”. I imagine that your students may be very effective in passing grammar-based tests and filling in blanks.
Why not ask some students who are learning languages using CI, and see if they want syntax trees to help them?
[quote]Most adults never master a foreign language, especially the phonology, giving rise to what we call a “foreign accent.” Their development often fossilizes into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. There are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching, and plain talent.
Many explanations have been advanced for children’s superiority: they can exploit the special ways that their mothers talk them, they make errors unself-consciously, they are more motivated to communicate, they like to conform, they are not xenophobic or set in their ways, and they have no first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are unlikely, based on what we learn about how language acquisition works later in this chapter. For example, children can learn a language without the special indulgent speech from their mothers; they make few errors; and they get no feedback for the errors they do make. And it can’t be an across-the-board decline in learning. There is no evidence, for example, that learning words (as opposed to phonology or grammar) declines in adulthood. [/quote]
[quote]Children may also have a heightened ability, compared to adults, to learn second languages–especially in natural settings. Adults, however, may have some advantages in the conscious study of a second language in a classroom setting.
…
But most scientists think children and adults learn language differently.
While they may not do it as quickly and easily as children seem to, adults can learn to speak new languages proficiently. However, few would be mistaken for a native speaker of the non-native tongue.[/quote]
If you’re in want of more substance, you’ll probably want to listen to Patricia Kuhl on this subject, who will give you some very relevant data around around 14:30:
I agree. I read both articles and both were interesting, but in neither does it assert that we lose the ability to acquire languages naturally beyond childhood.
And if we did lose our ability to acquire languages after puberty or adulthood, how did people acquire second (third, fourth…) languages for thousands of years when they were not literate and knew nothing of formal grammar?
“Teaching” languages is a relatively new phenomenon, looking over all of history. Acquiring them has been going on for thousands of years.
), Korean (in Korea), and a bit of Russian. My Japanese teacher was a native speaker who loved, LOVED to drill. Over and over again, constant repetition of sentences. I almost never knew what any of it meant. I still don’t, but can remember it just from sheer exposure, over and over and over. But it will in no way help me if I never learn what it means! (Some of it I did learn when I went there, but for the rest, it’s just a kind of monotone echo in my past.) Most of the Japanese I can speak, then, I can’t read or write because I picked it up in conversation with actual Japanese people while I was there. I didn’t lean it at all. I acquired it. It became a part of me. It had/would have use for me, just like the Spanish I was speaking with my friends.