The hazy line between grammar & lexis (1)

This post is a short anecdotal account of two lessons I taught in 2002.

Why on earth, you must be wondering, would I have any sort of recollection of two lessons I taught nearly ten years ago.

It so happens that those two lessons were very significant because they helped me to finally make sense of something I’d read about but couldn’t fully grasp. Not until then, anyway.

In August 2002, I taught a very advanced, 2-month course called “Advanced Grammar 2”, which, as the name suggests, was, well, basically a grammar course. As part of the syllabus, one day I had to teach my students sentences such as “I objected to his going to” and “Do you regret your having said…”.

The whole lesson was a trainwreck, from start to finish. It was was one of those classes you walk out of wondering whether you chose the right career path. The poor students couldn’t get their brains or their tongues around the new language and needed a heavy dose of remedial work in the weeks that followed.

Cut to October 2002. The group signed up for another advanced course and, for better and for worse, I was their teacher again. This next level, however, focused on current affairs and emphasized conversation and vocabulary. The more laissez-faire nature of the course meant that I was free to build up the syllabus as I went a long, depending on what was in the news at the time.

In one particular lesson, we watched a CNN clip and I decided to extract two sentences with “the odds” from the news report. If I remember correctly, one of them was “The odds of his winning the election are pretty slim”, which happens to be an example of the “grammar” we’d worked on in August.

In class, I showed them the sentence, concept checked it, drew their attention to the use of the pronoun + ING and proceeded to help students make their own predictions using “the odds.”

The lesson was a success – in so far as we can assume that the success of a lesson can be assessed from the teacher’s perspective, of course.

The students were able to express a very wide range of ideas using “the odds” formulaically / lexically rather than grammatically. Interestingly, they did not make any sort of overt -and I say overt- connection between what they’d just learned and the Advanced Grammar 2 syllabus, which, at the time, puzzled me.

In hindsight, it would have made far more sense to teach the “structure” lexically/formulaically first (“The odds of + ING + are slim/high”) and then subsequently help them analyze the underlying grammar – perhaps on the following day or even in the following week.

An obvious parallel is the time-honored habit of teaching students the chunk “What do you do?” in the first few lessons of basic 1, without any sort of overt grammar analysis, somehow paving the way for a full-fledged simple present lesson down the road.

This goes to show, I believe, that moving from lexis to grammar is perhaps a more natural path to interlanguage development than the other way round. Or, to use Michael Lewis’ word, starting with grammaticized lexis rather than lexicalized grammar.

Thanks for reading.

By the way, there’s a very interesting thread about the sheer “naturalness” of grammar in Scott Thornbury’s blog and some of the issues I’ve addressed here are expanded on by Scott himself and his followers.