Is grammatical knowledge the best way to create output, or is it the other way around?

[rdearman]

I've been reading an interesting article "The Role Of Grammar In Improving Student's Writing", by Beverly Ann Chin who is Professor Of English at the University of Montana.

This article is basically about how English native students can improve their English writing, but I was looking at the article through the lens of my "Output Challenge" and as a language learner. It got me wondering about the "chicken and egg" study of grammar for a language learner. Should you learn the grammar first, or should you learn the grammar through output. In the case of people writting in their own language, it would seem they learn gramatical rules better by doing. Now obviously an American, or British person taking writing classes already has a good command of English grammar. They know what sounds right or wrong, and 90% of the time their grammatical instinct is very good. I pulled out some points I thought were interesting and wanted to get the opinions of others here.

Research strongly suggests the most beneficial way of helping students improve their command of grammar in writing is to use students' writing as the basis for discussing grammatical concepts. Researchers agree that it is more effective to teach punctuation, sentence variety, and usage in the context of writing than to approach the topic by teaching isolated skills (Calkins, 1980; DiStefano and Killion, 1984; Harris, 1962).

For a self-study student this is hard to pull off in my opinion. You don't have the benefit of a native speaker to discuss grammatical concepts with for the most part unless you are paying for a tutor. The corrections on Lang-8 by natives will give you the correct answer, but don't necessarily provide you with a discussion of the why's and wherefores of the correction. So how can a self-study student apply this research without the benefit of a discussion? How could I use this to help improve my French or Italian?

Research conducted since the early 1960s shows that grammar instruction that is separate from writing instruction does not improve students' writing competence (Braddock and others, 1963; Hillocks, 1986).

This is telling me, the study of grammar books by themselves, or the memorisation of the rules aren't really going to help me. Output and correction would be much more useful, as is normally the case when a native speaker corrects you during a tutoring session, or when a parent corrects a child. I realise that the study of grammar is useful, but not as useful as if I'm using the grammar book in some "active way". This of course got me thinking of Iversen's Green sheets because in his description of how he is creating these "green sheets" from grammar books then he is actively exploring native content and looking to find these grammatical rules. (An oversimplified and mostly incorrect description of what he is doing.)

Sentence combining is the strategy of joining short sentences into longer, more complex sentences. As students engage in sentence-combining activities, they learn how to vary sentence structure in order to change meaning and style. Numerous studies (Mellon, 1969; O'Hare, 1973; Cooper, 1975; Shaughnessy, 1977; Hillocks, 1986; Strong, 1986) show that the use of sentence combining is an effective method for improving students' writing. The value of sentence combining is most evident as students recognize the effect of sentence variety (beginnings, lengths, complexities) in their own writing.

This quote was something of a gold nugget which I've been looking for with regards to output. It occurred to me that perhaps as a solo student I could use this type of technique to improve my output and my grammatical knowledge at the same time. It has come up before on HTLAL & recently mentioned again by Iversen about connectors. Where you use some connector phrases to keep your output going. Things like "anyway, another point is that", etc. But here I think the professor is talking about a more sentence extension than conversational connectors. I was thinking it might be more useful to do exercises like:

My spoken French is very poor.
I've been learning for a long time.
My vocabulary is very small.

Becomes: Although I have been learning French for a long time, I've frustrated because my vocabulary is very small which makes my spoken French very poor to a native.
This would teach me a lot I think about grammar because to do this in French I need to look at the tenses for all parts of the long sentence, get corrections on punctuation, etc.

Hillocks and Smith (1991) show that systematic practice in sentence combining can increase students' knowledge of syntactic structures as well as improve the quality of their sentences, particularly when stylistic effects are discussed as well. Sentence-combining exercises can be either written or oral, structured or unstructured. Structured sentence-combining exercises give students more guidance in ways to create the new sentences; unstructured sentence-combining exercises allow for more variation, but they still require students to create logical, meaningful sentences. Hillocks (1986) reports that in many studies, sentence-combining exercises produce significant increases in students' sentence-writing maturity.

After a little searching I discovered most of the exercises related to sentence combining are:

1. Combine each set of short sentences and fragments into one sentence. Such as the example above.
2. Sentence building using the coordinating conjunctions: and, but, or, so, yet, nor
3. Sentence building using subordinating conjunctions: unless, because, even though, while, although, though
4. Sentence Building using Adjectives and Adverbs
5. Sentence Building using Prepositional Phrases
6. Sentence Building using Adjective Clauses
7. Sentence Building using Appositives
8. Sentence Building using Adverb Clauses
9. Sentence Building using Participial Phrases
10. Sentence Building using Absolutes
11. Sentence Building using Noun Phrases and Noun Clauses

There is a whole realm of information available about this which I've only just begun to explore, but it looks very interesting.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/ ... skills.htm
http://jonsenglishsite.info/Sentenccombnew.htm
https://teal.ed.gov/tealGuide/combinesentence
http://www.eslwriting.org/lesson-4-para ... ntences-1/
http://jjc.jjay.cuny.edu/erc/grammar/co ... bining.php

I'm sure that I can find a way of modifying these English orientated exercises into my target languages. Thoughts?

[MorkTheFiddle]

I've been reading an interesting article "The Role Of Grammar In Improving Student's Writing", by Beverly Ann Chin who is Professor Of English at the University of Montana.


http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/ ... skills.htm
http://jonsenglishsite.info/Sentenccombnew.htm
https://teal.ed.gov/tealGuide/combinesentence
http://www.eslwriting.org/lesson-4-para ... ntences-1/
http://jjc.jjay.cuny.edu/erc/grammar/co ... bining.php

I'm sure that I can find a way of modifying these English orientated exercises into my target languages. Thoughts?

I am sure you can, too. Are there any available books about style that have been written in your L2(s)? Whether yes or no, I would avoid trying to create examples of them ab ovo in my L2, and instead, after listing the various stylistic methods--the "absolute phrase," for example--look for instances of them, one by one, in your L2 and making a copy of them (by hand or keyboard). Then, after amassing a dozen or so samples, try writing one of your own to get the feel of how it words before trying one in your own writing.

After the first, move on to the next method, find examples, and so on.

I picked up La révolution française by Albert Soboul to see what modifying phrases, for example, that I could find. Rather thin on the ground, apparently, yet a couple show up. Here is one: "Encouragé par l'opposition de la noblesse, et sous l'influence des princes, Louis XVI se décida à la résistance" (p 148). Another: "D'une part, pour moderniser le pays et rendre l'Etat plus efficace et plus puissant, le gouvernement royal devait développer l 'économie marchande, donc favoriser, sur le plan économique et social, l'ascencion de la bourgeoisie" (p 131).

Then adopting the mix-and-match technique advocated in the Wikia
Alternatives to traditional grammar study, write this:

"Inspiré par la résistance des jeunes, et sous l'influence du hit-parade, Lady Gaga etc. " (Ouf! I hope that makes sense and is half-way correct)

Looks like fun. Good luck and keep us posted.

[reineke]

Output is the best way to create output. Foreign language output may not be the best way to create grammatical output. All of the above may work great if you can find someone knowledgeable and willing to correct your output.

[rdearman]

Output is the best way to create output. Foreign language output may not be the best way to create grammatical output.

Yes, but what is the best way to learn to output grammatical correct foreign language output?

[reineke]

Output is the best way to create output. Foreign language output may not be the best way to create grammatical output.

Yes, but what is the best way to learn to output grammatical correct foreign language output?

I was just editing my response. I think it would be a lot of input following by slow, laborious output.

[iguanamon]

Output is the best way to create output. Foreign language output may not be the best way to create grammatical output.

Yes, but what is the best way to learn to output grammatical correct foreign language output?

Get corrected- lang 8; private tutor and/or conversation partner. I made some classic "Portunhol" mistakes (after speaking a lot of Spanish last night) today in Portuguese - carretera instead of estrada and debaixo instead of abaixo. That one was a Ladino word. I shouldn't read Ladino right before speaking Portuguese.

It's a hard slog. I think your premise is good, but... When we were in English class at school, we did "output" but we turned in papers.The papers came back with some red ink added by the teacher. We gave spoken book reviews. I would get corrected. Multiply this by a nine month school year over several years and... that's a lot of correction. Yes, we were taught grammar in school. Yes, we could get a lot of it right by virtue of being native-speakers who read, watched TV, listened to radio, etc. Still, we tend to gloss over all those essays and writing we did for correction in English class back in our school days. As second language learners, unless we live with a native-speaker or are in-country, we usually don't get that kind of exposure or correction, so we have to seek it out. I know correction is not part of the output challenge, but, I believe there's a missing element to getting better with output- lang 8; private tutor and/or conversation partner.

[Iversen]

redarman has already mentioned my green sheets. Basically you write down the essentials of the morphology in a compact form, which you may transfer to coloured paper when you think the layout and content is as you want it to be. You shouldn't try to memorize the morphology while you make the sheets, but use them as a quick guide when you read something and (not least) when you write something yourself. If you can't reduce the things you see in a grammar to a dead simple system, then it is a waste of time to try to learn it in its original form.

But there is more to be said about grammar study than just "green sheets". I have said a lot in my guide - maybe too much - but for me it is essential to train your ability to think in grammatical terms. And for with morphology I decide how I want the system, and then I don't except other setups. For instance I want my accusative to stand between the nominative and the genitive in all my languages, and then I don't make an exception just because most German grammars tend to put it as case no. 4. And I use the same (mostly Latin, sometimes French) grammatical terms across all my languages insofar it is possible, not only to be able to switch easily among them, but also because I tend to to think in visual structures with standardized markers, and then it is confusing suddenly to have to deal with other terminologies or move the elements around in my head.

Thinking in grammatical terms makes it possible for you not only to notice interesting patterns in your input, but also to specify why they are relevant. For sentence building I use a system of sticks and boxes and bullets, combined with field systems where each type of content has a slot. Maybe you can't get everything to fit in those systems, but they help you to visualize grammar instead of just learning rules. And if you are are wordoriented learner who prefer rules, then you should at least try to sort out what the grammarians actually say, and which parts of it you need to learn here and now. One of the most irritating things is grammar with exceptions to exceptions to exceptions.. Maybe you can rewrite such passages as one rule with a number of cases, where the exceptions to the exceptions are put aside as special cases. If you can't immediately see the logic in a passage then it is badly written. Grammars are not holy books which must be kept in their original form and learnt by heart. They are tools put at your disposal, and you can use them as you want.