I am too preoccupied with publishing affairs right now to give this article by Johnson in the Economist the detailed attention that it richly deserves here, but it describes excellently what is wrong with English teaching nowadays. Simply, the teachers know too little, if they know anything at all, about how the language works.
Many school-leavers in English-speaking countries cannot even say what a clause is … But the problem goes deeper, to teacher training. Many English teachers struggle as much as students with phrases and clauses. They can correct common mistakes (“don’t confuse ‘effect’ and ‘affect’”) and teach punctuation (“it’s” versus “its”). But many could not confidently and correctly break the words of a complex sentence down by function. This seems to be due to a divorce long ago between the study of language itself and what college departments teach future teachers in the “English” departments.
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As a result of the divorce of language and literature, linguistics has developed an entire hoard of basic terms to describe sentences that are utterly unknown to English teachers. Take “determiner”. This is a basic class of words that includes the, a, an, three, this, that, my, his, many and many others. The reason linguists talk about determiners is that they all play the same kind of syntactical role, and are quite different from adjectives, the category they’ve traditionally been crammed into. Many other basic terms of syntax, like “complement” and “adjunct”, are virtually unknown outside the field, though they’re crucial for understanding how English grammar works.
I did a solid course in grammar for English language O-level in 1966 and was probably among the last people in Britain to do so. When I came to do my PGCE specialising in EFL in 1977, things had changed. Communicative competence was what we were seeking, and it was true that the English grammar I had learnt, with its eight parts of speech based on Latin grammar, had been superseded. True too that the grammar-translation method by which I had learnt languages (German, French, Spanish and Russian) was hopeless for enabling communication, but the baby went out with the bathwater and grammar had become a dirty word – as had many things that required formal learning in the 1970s. Situations, notions and all sorts of things were to be taught with the assumption that grammar would be absorbed incidentally.
Now I find myself unusual among English teachers, even EFL teachers, in having a sound understanding of grammar.
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