Grammar drills aren’t all in your head… or in your head at all (BlackBox)
Did you know grammar is not a skill you can practice? Read on. And watch this.
It’s already time for the second videocast of the Musicuentos Black Box. Here’s the info.
Ready to watch? This eight minutes (+) will help you understand what it really means to know a language and remind you in a powerful way what it is we should be practicing in the classroom.
The Musicuentos Black Box Podcast is a collection of media resources developed to make relevant research in language learning more accessible and understandable for teachers. The project is cosponsored by Musicuentos and Indwelling Language. For more information on the team behind this project and to help us keep the resources freely available for all teachers, visit the Black Box resource page.
[…] Grammar drills or no grammar drills? […]
Outstanding! Keep the podcasts coming! I appreciate the connection to modern research. Often times, the only research floating around on various language blogs is from Krashen, which while important, isn’t the only voice on language acquisition. Thanks again!
Thanks for the feedback, Josiah! Your (perhaps unintended) contrast of Krashen and “modern” made me smile. 😉
This is a pretty good summary which raises one key question: how does a teacher encourage effective “practice”?
It should first be noted that quite literally 95+% of acquisition is input-driven. A teacher can very easily omit any kind of “practice” and students will do just fine (there is a wealth of data on this). VanPatten has noted that the main “effects” of practice are things like pronunciation and speed of enunciation (in other words, very trivial).
The much bigger question (for teachers) is how to make “practice” in a classroom meaningful and possible. For example, VanPatten and others note that in a typical communicative interaction– what we would call practicing the language– there are a bunch of things going on, including
— hypothesis testing (both conscious and as part of the implicit system)
— sociocultural norm testing and/or reinforcement
— error correction (explicit or implicit)
— comprehensible (quality) input
The problem is that in classroom situations, because we have learners interacting– “practicing”– with other learners, most of what happens in the real world cannot happen. Learners make loads of mistakes, don’t notice others’ mistakes, get impoverished input, etc. So, when we ask learners to “practice” their skills, they are basically providing each other with junk. As Terry Waltz has noted (with Krashen agreeing), “peer to peer communication is the McDonalds of language teaching.”
So the question remains…how do learners “practice” their language? My answer: they needn’t bother, since literally 95% of all the work needed for acquisition comes from getting comprehensible input.
In a tutoring or immersion situation, obviously speaking practice will help, as, as per Swain, it will generate comprehensible input, but “practice” in say a high school class is pointless.
Hi, Chris,
Thanks for the comment. You’re right that VanPatten’s article raises the question of practice. It also offers an answer, which is reported in the video and which is basically the one you’ve offered: “practice” doesn’t apply to the building of mental representation, and applies to developing competence in comprehension, expression, and negotiation only if you want to call things like reading stories and hanging out with people in the target language “practice.”
Justin