Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://journals.cambridge.org/ENG
Additional services for English Today:
Email alerts: Click here
Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here
Bridging the Grammar Gap: teaching English grammar to
the iPhone generation
Bas Aarts, Dan Clayton and Sean Wallis
English Today / Volume 28 / Issue 01 / March 2012, pp 3 8
DOI: 10.1017/S0266078411000599, Published online: 06 March 2012
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266078411000599
How to cite this article:
Bas Aarts, Dan Clayton and Sean Wallis (2012). Bridging the Grammar Gap: teaching English
grammar to the iPhone generation. English Today, 28, pp 38 doi:10.1017/S0266078411000599
Request Permissions : Click here
Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ENG, IP address: 128.86.160.173 on 23 May 2013
Bridging the Grammar Gap:
teaching English grammar to
the iPhone generation1
B A S A A R T S , D A N C L AY TO N A N D S E A N WA L L I S
For second language learners, the value of the in a language-oriented degree (such as linguistics or
explicit teaching of English grammar has never French) could identify 12 categories correctly, com-
been questioned. However, in recent times there pared with only 8 for the non-language undergradu-
has been dissent about whether or not to teach ates. But in 2009, language specialists in the same
English grammar to native speakers. From the institutions (Aston University and UCL) could only
late 1960s onwards English grammar teaching in manage 10 categories, and no institution (out of 13
the United Kingdom largely disappeared from the that took part) matched the 1986 figures.
curriculum, and was replaced by teachers focusing
on students learning to express themselves. This The UK National Curriculum is the UK
was in the main not a bad thing, because it made Government’s specification of the curriculum in
students active participants in their own learning, state schools, up to age 18. English Grammar has
and they were expected to think critically and been an explicit – if frequently reworded – com-
express themselves well. The teaching of grammar, ponent of English language education since 1990.
with its emphasis on rules, drilling and learning by However, school teachers readily admit that
rote, was seen as conformist, dull and unnecessary, they are ill-equipped to teach it. Hudson and
and this view seemed to be confirmed by research Walmsley (2005: 616) write:
into the effectiveness of grammar teaching.
Most younger teachers know very little grammar and
However, the result of this has been the
are suspicious of explicit grammar teaching. Not
Grammar Gap: very few UK school teachers
surprisingly, therefore, new recruits entering
teaching English today have explicitly been taught
teacher-training courses typically either know very
grammar, and even if they have been, more often
little grammar or have no confidence in their
than not it was part of learning a foreign language.
knowledge, presumably because they have picked it
The result of this is that grammatical knowledge
up in an unsystematic way. This situation raises
among school leavers in the UK seems to be on
obvious problems for the implementation of the
the decline, as a survey of undergraduates’ gram-
official programme.
mar skills cited in an article by Clayton and
Hudson (2010) for the Times Educational In a current research project at UCL we invited a
Supplement reveals. number of motivated English teachers to a series
of ‘grammar training days’ where they would be
Our evidence for this claim is a very simple test of given training in basic concepts of grammar. At
grammatical knowledge that was taken by incoming the first such event, aimed at A-level (‘Advanced
first-year undergraduates first in 1986, and then in level’) English teachers (i.e. those teaching
2009. The test is based on a 23-word sentence in 16–18-year-olds), only two out of twenty teachers
which students are asked to identify one example of a present could recall ever being explicitly taught
noun, one of a verb, and so on through fifteen English grammar. Other teachers were self-taught,
grammatical categories including ‘finite verb’ and and reported struggling with different frameworks
‘definite article’. In 1986, the typical undergraduate and advice. Part of the problem is that there is
doi:10.1017/S0266078411000599
English Today 109, Vol. 28, No. 1 (March 2012). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2012 Cambridge University Press 3
similar visual highlighting device: a rectangle with Tapping the magnifying glass symbol (upper left,
a white outline, visible here as a shading around the Figure 4) brings up the software keyboard, allow-
rectangles: . Students are taught ing the user to type a search term directly.
a series of novel concepts in rapid succession, As noted above, scattered throughout the course
and we have found that visual cues like this can are many exercises which ask users to perform a
be a useful aide-mémoire. range of tasks, such as identifying nouns, adjectives
Figures 1 and 2 also display glossary links in the and verbs, or heads of phrases etc., or classifying
text. These words are in dark blue with a thick dotted examples by some grammatical criterion. Figure 5
green underline. Tapping the word will open the shows the very first exercise in the course, one that
glossary with an explanation of the term in question. asks users to select all the nouns in the example sen-
(To return, the user simply taps the ‘Back’ button.) tence. The text in the example is large, to make the
Entries can be browsed with a touch, and expanded task of selecting words with a finger achievable.
or contracted by tapping the title. The ticking clock in the upper right hand corner is
The glossary consists of an alphabetically ordered an optional feature, as is the automatic time-out
list of entries. Figure 3 displays the glossary entry after a set number of minutes or seconds. The use
for the particle to. We can see that this entry includes of a timer means that students who achieve a 100%
an explanation of the concept and a couple of score can still be motivated to improve by reducing
examples with the particles underlined and a marker their time. (Necessarily this also means that the inter-
attached. Below this are a series of cross-reference face must be very responsive, which was a challenge
buttons that jump to other entries in the glossary on some low-powered mobile phone devices.)
and a link to relevant material in the course. Users can tap a button to try particular exercises
The glossary is split into ‘pages’ by initial letter, again. Uniquely, they will be presented with a
and the upper part of the display lets the user different example sentence from the SEU’s cor-
switch to another page with a simple tap. pora. This prevents users being presented over