Chapter 12

CW12.2 Explaining any and some

Here is how Murphy (1990: 140) clarifies the difference between any and some in questions. It also gives a good example of the kind of explanation favoured by many teachers nowadays. It is an explanation, but the ‘explaining’ element is quite short and is supported by examples.

In most questions (but not all) we use any:

• Is there any ice in the fridge?
• Did they make any mistakes?
• Are you doing anything this evening?
• I can’t find Ann. Has anybody seen her?

We normally use some (not any) when we offerthings (Would you like some … ?):

A: Would you like some coffee?
B: Yes, please.

A: Would you like something to eat?
B: No, thank you. I’m not hungry.

Or when we ask for things (Can I have some … ?/Can you lend me some … ?, etc.):

A: Can I have some soup, please?
B: Yes, of course. Help yourself.

A: Can you lend me some money?
B: I’m sorry, I can’t.

CW12.3 Teaching righteous indignation

Coulavin (1983, cited in Ur 1996) gives an example of how teachers can use an incident from their own life to help teach language. She says:

It can happen to anyone who commutes – a traffic jam, a last minute phone call, a car that won’t start – and you realise you are going to be late for a lesson … however, attack being the best form of defence, I recently found a way to turn my lateness to good account. A full ten minutes after the start of the lesson, I strode into the classroom and wrote on the board in huge letters YOU’RE LATE! Then I invited the students to yell at me with all the venom they could muster and we all laughed. So I wrote:

You’re late again!
and
You’re always late!

So we practised these forms. They seemed to get a real kick out of putting the stress in the right place … when we had savoured the pleasure of righteous indignation, I proposed that everyone should write down the accusations most commonly levelled at him (or her). A rich and varied selection poured out such as:

You always eat my sweets!
You’ve lost the keys!
You haven’t lost the keys again!

Perhaps you can think of your own examples where you (if you are a teacher), or someone who has taught you, has used personal information to help with language learning.

CW12.4 Induction versus deduction

We briefly touched on the induction/deduction distinction in section 9.2, where we saw that induction involves moving from particular to general (EGRUL), while deduction is RULEG. The issue also relates to the empiricist/rationalist controversy we looked at in section 3.2, and it has to do with the role given to conscious learning.

Rivers (1964) uses the terms analogy (learning by generalization from examples) and analysis (learning by understanding rules). She looks at the pros and cons of each. In favour of analogy, she cites the dictum associated with Aristotle: ‘there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’ (or ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu’ for those who speak Latin). She also cites Politzer’s 1961 statement (which we saw in CW9.1) that ‘rules ought to be summaries of behaviours’. Incidentally, another scholar whose name is associated with induction is the seventeenth-century Czech who is known by the Latin name of Comenius. His views on language teaching were highly influential.

Rivers notes that the danger with analogy is overgeneralization, where the learner mistakenly broadens the scope of the rule. A learner might, for example, be taught that the word there can replace a noun phrase starting with to. So I go to the university becomes I go there. Overgeneralization would occur if the learner were to change I speak to my friend into I speak there.

In favour of deduction, Rivers cites Wertheimer’s (1945: 199) statement that ‘to live in a fog … is for many people an unbearable state of affairs. There is a tendency [to desire] structural clearness, surveyability’. The danger of deduction is that (declarative) knowledge about will be mistaken for (procedural) knowledge how to. A problem that plagued language teaching for a very long time was the false assumption that if a learner understands a rule, they will be able to use it without problems. The eminent professor from overseas whom we met in Box 6.3 shows that this is not true.

There seems little point in heated debate about whether inductive is overall better than deductive or vice versa. It is rather like arguing how many angels can sit on the average pinhead. Perhaps it is a question of learning style; maybe some learners are naturally inductive and others naturally deductive. One might even be able to make statements about different learner groups. It seems likely that children, for example, are able to learn better inductively than deductively. One might also be tempted to think that more intelligent learners learn better with rules and less intelligent learners without rules. Recall in this respect the findings of Chastain (1969, mentioned in 7.2.1) linking success in cognitive-code learning with intelligence. But Rivers has a counterargument:

students of low intelligence are, of course, much happier just repeating what is given to them, and do not feel a strong compulsion to understand what they are doing, but the same low intelligence also makes it hard for them to see analogies.

And another point of view: perhaps rather than treating inductive/deductive as an either/or choice, we should think about ways in which we can combine the two.

Go back over the various ways of conveying language that we have illustrated in this section. Consider whether each is better described as inductive or deductive.

CW12.5 Felicity eats fish

Some meaning, Dakin (1973: 61) argues, can be injected by making the learner relate their responses to a context. In one of his examples, he shows a series of pictures of a girl named Felicity. The pictures are in pairs. In the first of each pair, Felicity is doing something – eating a fish, climbing a mountain, combing her hair. In the second, she has just completed the action. Learners look at the pictures and say sentences like Felicity is eating a fish or Felicity has just eaten the fish. Having to relate the sentences to a picture makes them more than total ‘tumtetum’. Or consider the following drill, from Cunningham and Moor (2005a: 77). It practises forming negative sentences:

Complete the sentences about your country 100 years ago with a suitable verb in the negative.

1. People didn’t play    computer games.
2. People ____________    pop music.
3. People ____________    cars.
4. People ____________    hamburgers.
5. People ____________    television.
6. People ____________    jeans.

In this exercise, total ‘tumtetum’ is avoided by requiring the learner to work out the suitable verb (they must know that you listen to pop music, drive cars, etc.). There is also a minimal attempt to make the exercise meaningful by relating it to the learner’s own country.

CW12.6 Spending money

The information gap exercise below is taken from Read and Matthews (1991). How exactly does this drill work? If you wish, you can write teachers’ notes for this exercise, specifying exactly what happens at each stage. (Clue: the pair of scissors in the middle of the page is very important.)  Then check your notes with the procedure given underneath.

The procedure

Students remove the page from their books and cut it in half (where the scissors indicate). Student A keeps the top half and Student B the bottom half. Student A knows about the prices in His ’n’ Hers but not those in Wow. For Student B it is the other way round. Both students ask questions like How much do socks cost in His ’n’ Hers/Wow?, and then they write down the prices in the spaces provided. At the end of this stage, both students have all prices, in both shops, marked. They can then see which shop is cheaper for which items and so plan their shopping. They can also work out how much they will spend.

CW12.7 Practice makes less perfect?

Ellis (1984) reports on a study done in London on 13 children aged between 11 and 15. He was interested in the development of wh- questions, those formed using words like who, what, where and when (they were mentioned in CW11.6). Ellis wanted to know what effect some formal teaching would have on that development. Three one-hour lessons were given to the children, teaching the different meanings of who, what, where and when and practising the formation of questions with these words. The learners were then given a ‘test’, which involved them in making up some wh-questions about a picture of a classroom scene. The improvement in wh- question formation was not dramatic for the group as a whole (perhaps to be expected after such a small amount of teaching). But some pupils did show much more improvement than others.

Ellis was interested to find out whether those who had improved had been the ones who had ‘practised’ most in the lessons. Amount of practice was measured by looking at the number of times the teacher had nominated a pupil to produce a question. Those who participated most were called ‘high interactors’; those who participated least, ‘low interactors’.

Was there any relationship between amount of interaction and improvement in the wh- form? The answer was yes. ‘It was’, Ellis says, ‘the low interactors, rather than high interactors, who progressed’ (p. 146).

To the extent that interaction means practice, the suggestion is that those who practised least did best.

CW12.8 Different ways of being wrong

Imagine that you stop a stranger in the street and ask them the time by saying Excuse me, do you have the time? You might say that the following seven replies are all ‘inaccurate’. Each inaccuracy may be seen to involve a different aspect of language use. Identify what this aspect is in each case.

1. It are five o’clock.
2. It’s five o’clock. [‘five’ is pronounced with an ‘f’ sound at the end, rather than a ‘v’ sound]
3. It’s five hours.
4. Yes, I do, thanks. [person walks away]
5. Yes, I would. It’s five o’clock.
6. Yes, darling. It’s five o’clock.
7. There are fairies living in the woods, and it may thunder in Siberia.

CW12.9 Battleships and zoos

The game below is taken from Now for English, the textbook for eight-year-old children mentioned in Box 11.1 and elsewhere. The game is closely based on a traditional one called Battleships.

The traditional game is for two players. Each has a collection of different battleships – e.g. three cruisers, two aircraft carriers, four destroyers, etc. Each player has a grid, like the ones shown below but larger. Players place their battleships on the grid, one in each square. Ships of the same type (e.g. all the cruisers) must be in adjacent squares. The aim of the game is for a player to find out where all their opponent’s ships are (and hence ‘destroy’ them). This they do by saying the number of a square. The opponent has to say whether the square has a ship in it. Players take it in turns to ask about squares. They keep a note of where their opponent’s ships are by using a second grid.

The language teaching version below does not use ships of war. First, decide how this version works. Then think what language items the game could be used to practise. It needs to be more than just saying numbers (as above), but should be quite simple because the learners are near-beginners. If you wish, you can try to write teachers’ notes explaining (with an eye for detail) how the game can be played in class. A version of the teachers’ notes is given below.

Finally, try to think of another situation (not involving warships or animals) where you could use this same idea to practise language. Think perhaps of older students – teenagers or adults.

Teachers’ notes
Students work in pairs. Each has a certain number of animals to ‘put in their zoo’, as indicated at the top of the page – five monkeys, two elephants and so on. They must put them in cages (the numbered boxes in the top diagram) by writing the first letter of the animal’s name. So an ‘M’ in box 1 and an ‘E’ in box 2 would mean that there is a monkey in cage 1 and an elephant in cage 2. The same animals must be in adjacent cages. So all the monkeys must be together – e.g. in cages 1, 7, 3, 8, 13. Each student must not let their partner see where they are putting the animals. The object of the game is to be first to find out where the partner has put their animals. Students take turns to ask questions like: Is there an animal in cage 1? The partner replies No, or Yes, it’s a monkey. The lower diagram is used to keep track of where the partner’s animals have been found. The language used in this exercise can be varied according to what the teacher wants to practise. For example, instead of Is there an animal in cage 1?, students could ask Do any animals live in cage 1?

CW12.10 From P to P to P

Here are some of the sequences embedded within PPP: 

• from understanding to doing;
• from reception to production;
• from controlled to free;
• from informant to conductor;
• from conductor to guide.

Identify exactly where these sequences are found. For example, you might want to say that presentation is ‘controlled’ but practice and production are ‘free’. These sequences are discussed in the paragraph below (where you will find that the example answer above is not really right at all!).

One sequence embedded in PPP is ‘from understanding to doing’. At the presentation stage, the learner’s effort is in grasping what is being taught; it is then practised at the second and third stages. The movement from Stage 1 to 2 and 3 also therefore implies a transition from reception to production – from listening or reading in the first P to speaking or writing in the second and third. Another embedded sequence is from controlled to free, particularly in the movement from second to third P. Byrne (1986) and others associate different teacher roles with each of the Ps. At the presentation stage, the teacher acts as an informant, providing learners with information they did not previously have. At the second stage the teacher is often a conductor (as in the musical sense), pointing at students as they want them to speak, in the same way that a conductor points at the instrumentalists in an orchestra. At the production stage the teacher is a guide, facilitating but not rigidly controlling what goes on – making sure the practice runs smoothly but not interfering too much.