3.1.5. Focusing on special aspects of the language

If you're at all like me, you probably keep wondering when I will get around to talking about learning the grammar of the language, and improving the accuracy with which you speak the language. How do you find your mistakes? How do you overcome them?

Actually, I haven't been ignoring this issue. First of all, I pointed out that the vast majority of grammatical features of the language, and rules for interaction in the language, you will absorb from comprehensible input in your language sessions and real life situations. As you become thoroughly familiar with the language, you will naturally acquire the ability to use the language correctly with respect to countless details. You will not be aware of most of those details. If you are a linguist, you may be aware of a lot of details. But even if you are a linguist, you will acquire far more than you will be aware of, simply by becoming thoroughly familiar with the language, through massive exposure to comprehensible input.

Secondly, I have talked about things you might do when communication is difficult or when it breaks down. This may happen, for example, while you are relating your activities of the previous day to your LRP. In that case the breakdown may occur because you lack certain vocabulary or sentence patterns. Similarly, if you are unable to understand part of what your LRP or friend says to you, it may be because you lack vocabulary or sentence patterns, or it may be because you lack some area of knowledge regarding local life and culture. When the problem involves a sentence pattern that you have not learned, I suggested that you engage in some communication activity that will provide you with a large amount of exposure to that pattern. For example, Carol Orwig recently told me of learning Nugunu, an African language in which there is a special verb tense form that is used for events which occurred on the previous day, as opposed to events further in the past. It was easy for her to get a lot of exposure to this form by getting people to recount their previous day's activities. And it was easy to get a lot of practice using this form by recounting her own previous day's activities.

Most grammatical details will naturally occur with high frequency in specific kinds of speech. With a small amount of ingenuity you should be able to think of a way to engage in communication which will contain a large number of examples of the particular sentence form you wish to focus on. Or you can just make a point of using a particular form even if it is somewhat artificial. For example, one linguist who was learning Japanese spent a half day per week in the home of a Japanese couple. Part of the time they devoted to using English in order to benefit her hosts' language learning, and part of the time they devoted to Japanese, for the benefit of her own language learning. She would sometimes have a particular sentence pattern in mind and try to use it as often as possible. For example, one week she focused on passive sentences in Japanese. So instead of saying, “Someone helped me”, she might say, “I was helped”. This gave her a lot of practice with the sentence pattern, but it may have led to an unnaturally high incidence of this pattern in her speech, or she may have sometimes used the pattern when it was inappropriate. Nevertheless, it was like a game between her and her hosts, and it contributed to her ability to use difficult sentence patterns. (This story is told in Stevick 1989, chapter 7).

If you don't have a lot of background in grammar, you may find this discussion intimidating. You may not remember what passive means. Fortunately, knowing the name of a sentence pattern is not necessary. When communication breaks down because the person speaking to you uses a form you don't understand, or because you need to use a form which you don't know how to use, you can summarize the problem on paper in your own words, or by writing out examples of the sentence pattern. Suppose the sentence causing the difficulty is I was helped. You can focus on this pattern without knowing what it is called. Engage your LRP or a friend in communication about times when you, the person you are talking to, and others known to either of you, were helped, as well as times when you or they were hurt, robbed, tricked, etc., etc. While discussing these things, attempt to use the I was helped pattern, that is, avoiding mention of the person who did the helping (or hurting, robbing, tricking, etc.).

A good exercise for you at this point would be to record the speech of someone who doesn't speak English well. Find each place where the person spoke in an unnatural or incorrect way, and design a communication activity which highlights the problem sentence pattern or vocabulary items. You might want to consider using pictures as a conversational aid in some cases. If you go through this exercise, I think you'll get the hang of designing communication activities which highlight particular areas of grammar or vocabulary. You might also consult Thomson (1993a) where I illustrate communication activities which highlight a large variety of possible sentence patterns from the standpoint of learning to comprehend them.

Something else you will want to consider is reading about the grammar of the language, either in textbooks, if there are any, or in linguistic monographs or articles. You may not in general be motivated to read about grammar, but since learning this language seems to dominate your whole life, you may find that such materials are suddenly interesting and rewarding to read. You may not understand all of the technical jargon, but the fact that you already know a lot of the language will help you to figure out the meaning of the jargon from the language examples that are provided as illustrations of what is being described by the jargon! By the way, don't believe everything you read, especially if the writer was not a fluent user of the language for a number of years.

Now you may have the opposite problem. You may love grammar, and feel uncomfortable if you are not trying to consciously think of every aspect of the grammar of the language as you learn it. But remember that in principle that is impossible. And practically speaking, what advantage is there to spending a lot of time thinking about aspects of the grammar that don't cause you any problem? For example, in English the typical word order in a simple sentence is Subject-Verb-Object, as in “John helped Mary” (here the subject is John, the verb is helped and the object is Mary). In Urdu, as in many languages, the typical order is Subject-Object-Verb (as if we said “John Mary helped”, meaning that John helped Mary). In observing many native speakers of English who were learning Urdu, I did not see a hint of evidence that anyone had any problem with the basic word order, nor have I seen any evidence that native speakers of Urdu who are learning English have any trouble with the basic English word order in simple sentences. People seem to learn the basic word order pattern effortlessly. So then, it wouldn't be a good use of time to focus on it for several hours. And myriad details of the language you are learning will fall into this category. However, there will be times when you discover that you do not know some sentence pattern that you need in order to express a particular meaning. You can focus on that pattern by using it in communication.

People learning English typically have difficulty with the word order that is used in questions. Instead of saying, “Who has John been helping?” they may want to say, “Who John has been helping?” For such people, there may be some benefit in focusing on this sentence pattern. For example, someone learning English could have her LRP ask her hundreds of such questions about photographs which they are jointly viewing, and then the language learner could ask hundreds of these questions of the LRP, as a means of practicing the troublesome sentence pattern in the context of real, extemporaneous communication. But the point is, only put this sort of special effort into grammatical features that you have trouble with. Much of the grammar will come to you automatically, without you worrying about it, or even thinking about it, if you are exposed to massive comprehensible input, and engage in extensive extemporaneous communication.

There used to be a widespread belief that the learner would benefit from drilling in various ways on particular sentence patterns in the abstract, apart from using the patterns meaningfully in communication. The benefits of such pattern drills have been generally called into question. Your goal is not to be able to produce the pattern as an end in itself, but to use it in communication. You can get just as much practice using a pattern in communication as you can manipulating it in a meaningless pattern drill. Also, designers of pattern drills tended to have the students drill on patterns regardless of whether or not they were ones that caused difficulty. In current language courses, such drills are not used nearly as much nor as widely as they once were, since it is recognized that students need to be learning to communicate extemporaneously in the language. When the students' ability to communicate is hindered by their lack of familiarity with a particular sentence pattern, then it is common practice to stop and focus on that pattern. Or if students consistently make certain errors, there may be some focus on the problem. But the more common concern nowadays is to get the students using the language extemporaneously, both as listeners and as speakers.

Closely related to the issue of grammar is the question of whether you should get people to tell you whenever you “make a mistake”. There is a near universal belief among language learners that it is desirable to have every error corrected right while they speak. They may tell people, “Please tell me whenever I make a mistake.” But does this really make sense? Remember, it is normal to start out speaking very “poorly” and gradually get better and better. How can people correct every mistake? For a long time, unless you only say things that you have memorized, almost everything you say will be a “mistake” in the sense that you will not say it in the best or most natural way. But you'll get better if you keep talking and talking, and keep being exposed to language that is correctly formed, and within the range of what you can currently understand. The widely accepted view today is that you should mainly concentrate on communicating. Concentrate on understanding people, and on getting your point across. If you do that, your speech will improve. But if people really were to correct your every “mistake”, you would get very little communicating done, since you would spend most of your time talking about the form of the language, rather than using the language as best you can to convey your desired meaning.

Having said this, I want to nevertheless offer a reasonable approach to discovering weakness and problems in your speech. I say this approach is reasonable because it doesn't take you away from real communication. What you do is communicate something to your LRP and record it as you talk. If you've been following my suggestions above, you'll be doing this anyway. But perhaps once or twice a week you might go over a tape of your own speech with your LRP specifically for the purpose of noting ways in which you might have said things more naturally, more precisely, or with greater grammatical accuracy. Suppose you have made a recording of yourself telling a story to your LRP. Play it back, a sentence at a time, and each time ask the LRP if she can think of a better way to say that sentence. Often she will have no amendments to suggest. When she does suggest an alteration, write it down in your notebook. The page should be divided into three columns. In the first, write your original sentence as you said it extemporaneously while telling the story. In the second column, write the LRP's improved version. In the third column write out what you perceive your mistake to have been. In the process you will learn new ways to express old meanings. Some of the discoveries will feed into your own speaking ability at once. In other cases, you may wish to design communication activities which emphasize a particular sentence pattern or grammatical element, providing many examples of the pattern or element in comprehensible input, and many opportunities to use it in extemporaneous speaking.

Another point at which you may want to think about the grammatical details of the language is during your daily time(s) of reflection and journal writing. As you listen to tapes of your day's language learning activities, you can write down any new observations you might have about the language. I would encourage you also to be making a simple dictionary into which you can daily add new words that you learn. This will provide you a means of keeping track of your vocabulary growth.