Craig Dodge Taiwan

How many times have you learned something in a class that you remember 5 years, 10 years or even more than 20 years later? Not many, I'm sure. I want to share something with you that I studied in college back in 1982 that has stuck with me ever since.

One of the most interesting classes I took in college was on second language acquisition. There were several issues about language that the teacher brought up that really made an impression on me. The primary text book we used was called Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, by Stephen Krashen. Since I was in the process of learning a second language myself, the validity of what he wrote was so clear to me. While this is not meant to be a complete analysis of the book, or that course, I want to share something he wrote about how we become functional in a language, and specifically what he said about studying grammar.

Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language--natural communication--in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition (Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi, 1973), but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process (Snow and Ferguson, 1977).(BOLD is mine)

Approximately 80% of our proficiency in a language is through this natural acquisition process. The remaining 20% is from studying language rules, or grammar.

Follow up:

The Role of Grammar in Krashen's View

According to Krashen, the study of the structure of the language can have general educational advantages and values that high schools and colleges may want to include in their language programs. It should be clear, however, that examining irregularity, formulating rules and teaching complex facts about the target language is not language teaching, but rather is "language appreciation" or linguistics.

The only instance in which the teaching of grammar can result in language acquisition (and proficiency) is when the students are interested in the subject and the target language is used as a medium of instruction. Very often, when this occurs, both teachers and students are convinced that the study of formal grammar is essential for second language acquisition, and the teacher is skillful enough to present explanations in the target language so that the students understand. In other words, the teacher talk meets the requirements for comprehensible input and perhaps with the students' participation the classroom becomes an environment suitable for acquisition. Also, the filter is low in regard to the language of explanation, as the students' conscious efforts are usually on the subject matter, on what is being talked about, and not the medium.

This is a subtle point. In effect, both teachers and students are deceiving themselves. They believe that it is the subject matter itself, the study of grammar, that is responsible for the students' progress, but in reality their progress is coming from the medium and not the message. Any subject matter that held their interest would do just as well.(BOLD is mine)Stephen Krashen's Theory of Second Language Acquisition

If you'd like to read Stephen Krashen's book, it's available free online at : Second Language Acquisition and Learning. It's not an "easy read" as it uses a lot of difficult language, but if you can handle it, I highly recommend it.

So perhaps you're wondering why there is a drawing of a pendulum at the top of this post. Well, most people in Taiwan have been learning English by having grammar rules lectured to them in Chinese. There is very little exposure to English in context on a subject that would actually interest students enough for them to acquire the relevant language.  I believe it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way and favor content over grammar. I strive to find content I believe would be interesting to my students, providing them an opportunity to read, absorb and discuss it, in English. In my own language learning experience, this was most effective.