Grammar through massive input (exposure)

[Cainntear]

If you put entire sentences or paragraphs in Anki then you are basically putting in examples of grammar rules.

Exactly -- rules. Like I said, if you're using a single example, you're basically just writing a coded version of the rule. In itself, this isn't a bad thing -- if you're a beginner and all the technical jargon is new to you, then it's easier to memorise an example that illustrates the rule than the explicit rule. Either way, though, that's only declarative knowledge, and constantly revising declarative knowledge won't get you closer to automatic procedural knowledge.

The way I use it is to set up decks by grammar themes that I find difficult or tricky. For example, I have a deck devoted to the imperfect of the subjunctive verb form. I have around 40 entries there, and I might add more if I see something really interesting. I have a deck for hypothetical statements. I have one for prepositions that go with certain verbs. Etc. And I've just started one with some really tricky pronoun usage that I would like to master. It's great to be able to leaf through a set of examples that focus on a certain theme.

This doesn't really sound much like SRS though. If your deck is that small, you're presumably ignoring the algorithm and doing things whenever you feel like it, much like if you opened up a grammar practice book, but with the added advantage of the questions coming in a random order. I'm guessing you often just tell Anki to revise ahead of schedule, as otherwise the set of questions will be really small.

That's OK, and fair enough, Anki just happens to be the tool you have to hand, but it could just as well be an Excel spreadsheet.

But it's still not really "massive", and it stays predictable, so there's still a risk of memorising specific examples rather than generalising the rules.

[klvik]

Recently, I have been thinking about something very similar. As I have been working my way through Gramática del uso del Español B1-B2, I have tried looking for examples of the various grammatical structures as I am reading. This works great for the most common grammatical structures but is not very effective for ones that are rarely used in the type of books that I am currently reading. In my opinion, it would be most effective if I could see many examples of each grammatical structure in the week following my review of them.

My dream resource would be a searchable database of sentences with audio files. If I am reviewing, for example, the use of the present subjunctive I could search on that term and pull up a list of sentences that use that tense. Anki could be used to do this. Make a deck of sentences; add tags for the structures that you wish to study. Generate a filtered deck and review. You don’t need to take advantage of the spaced repetition feature.

[Cavesa]

Well, the "ratio" of explicit study / observation is certainly worthy of discussion.

As you, reineke, know too many people who fail to progress despite studying the grammar books (which necessarily make the grammar look a bit too neat and ordered, especially at the lower levels), I know far too many who fail due to the opposite. They are full of the "just speak and speak" nonsense, and repeat the same mistakes over and over and over, just because of their laziness. And perhaps because of the bad PR grammar books have been getting during the last decade or so.

On one hand, publishers are releasing more and more grammar books and workbooks of all kinds (including awesome ones). On the other, many language schools, teachers, and coursebooks by the same publishers pretend that explicit and systematic grammar learning is evil. They try to teach mostly by exposure, but necessarily fail at doing so (exposure based learning can't ever be fitted in three hours per week).

I would as well go as far as blame the CEFR based teaching system of not taking care about some practical aspects of language learning, and promoting less practical grammar approach than ideal. Yes, majority of the ideas included is good. But: in all those definitions and social skills, some of the needs of learners get unattended, especially when it comes to grammar. Most courses are ordered by social function and usually try to use more the observation based approach than the explanation based approach. You must learn how to present yourself and have some usual smalltalk first at all costs, so vast majority of French learners begins their studies with memorising a wild sample of stuff, including conjugation of pronominal verbs, several prepositions, two or three kinds of pronouns, etc., all that during the first unit. The usual impression "French is illogical, just about memorisation, and impossible to learn". Learning systematically, with various difficulty of each grammar point on mind, is different.

Or another example: Duolingo users, who often believe their superficial knowledge from their "golden tree" is totally sufficient keep recommending each other that there is no need to do boring stuff, "just speak and speak an use native stuff". Nope. Or most people are looking for language learning Apps all the time, instead of simply going to the nearest bookshop, and buying a serious learning resource. True grammar learning has simply become totally unpopular, despite the fact that people learning mostly without it don't reach good results.

That is one of the main reasons why I, unlike Reineke, totally don't believe explicit grammar study is being elevated too much. Not at all. It is being underestimated. Especially at the higher levels of studying. A high quality advanced grammar resource doesn't make it look so tame and predictable, and is an awesome companion to massive exposure.

[Speakeasy]

... True grammar learning has simply become totally unpopular, despite the fact that people learning mostly without it don't reach good results ...

I support all of Cavesa's comments. As a rather sad example, just recently, the Government of Québec published yet another damning report revealing the abysmal results of the public education system. Are you ready for this? Twenty-seven percent (27%) of native francophone speakers who have graduated from Québec universities, diplomas in hand, are judged to be "functionally illiterate." No, the teaching of grammar has not become unpopular ... it has become politically incorrect!

[reineke]

... True grammar learning has simply become totally unpopular, despite the fact that people learning mostly without it don't reach good results ...

I support all of Cavesa's comments. As a rather sad example, just recently, the Government of Québec published yet another damning report revealing the abysmal results of the public education system. Are you ready for this? Twenty-seven percent (27%) of native francophone speakers who have graduated from Québec universities, diplomas in hand, are judged to be "functionally illiterate." No, the teaching of grammar has not become unpopular ... it has become politically incorrect!

Eh... we're not talking about avid readers here. Also, not being able to recognize a noun in your mother tongue is a different problem from my mention of explicit grammar instruction being the sacred cow of a certain approach to foreign language study.

«On parle de gens qui sont allés à l’école, parfois assez longtemps, mais qui ont perdu de leurs compétences parce qu’ils n’ont pas pratiqué. La lecture, c’est un peu comme l’espagnol. Si tu suis un cours, mais que tu ne pratiques pas pendant des années, tu ne te rappelleras plus grand-chose.»
http://www.journaldequebec.com/2016/10/04/27-des-diplomes-universitaires-sont-analphabetes-fonctionnels

A country's educational problems could be very specific but they surely run deeper than the issue of grammar instruction approaches in FL teaching.

Grammar (explicit vs implicit) etc. There's also a balanced approach but let's leave that for more balanced discussions.

"Based on my 15 years of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching experience, the statement “grammar teaching should be implicit, not explicit” could be argued both for and against."
http://www.eslbase.com/teaching/grammar-teaching-implicit-explicit

O Canada...

"Just say ‘non’: The problem with French immersion"

"Canada’s French immersion system was once a model for the world, but it now lags behind countries in Europe where the European Union’s “mother tongue plus two” benchmark—hatched during a 2002 summit—set an ambitious goal for students to learn their native tongue plus two foreign languages."
http://www.macleans.ca/education/just-say-non-the-problem-with-french-immersion/

The lost boys of Quebec
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-lost-boys-of-quebec/article4326148/?page=all

[s_allard]

Really, we once again have a display of this constant and tiresome bashing of modern language teaching. I especially take exception to these broad statements about the state of language teaching from someone who does not work in the field of teaching and who seems particularly ignorant of current trends and developments.

Grammar and vocabulary have always and still are the pillars of language teaching. How could it be otherwise? Is there is language textbook today that doesn't attempt to teach grammar?

What has changed is the strategies of teaching. It is quite evident that using an arcane terminology and spending a lot of time parsing and analyzing does not produce effective users, especially with young learners. Since a dominant idea in language teaching today is how to produce actual speakers, much current thinking and strategizing involves teaching grammar by embedding it in communicative activities.

There is no dearth of grammar textbooks and workbooks for the widely studied languages like English, French or Spanish. They all have pretty much the same goal and the same content. And these haven't really changed much in the last 100 years, or maybe more like 50.

[s_allard]

... True grammar learning has simply become totally unpopular, despite the fact that people learning mostly without it don't reach good results ...

I support all of Cavesa's comments. As a rather sad example, just recently, the Government of Québec published yet another damning report revealing the abysmal results of the public education system. Are you ready for this? Twenty-seven percent (27%) of native francophone speakers who have graduated from Québec universities, diplomas in hand, are judged to be "functionally illiterate." No, the teaching of grammar has not become unpopular ... it has become politically incorrect!

Really, this is a particularly egregious example of taking something out of context and distorting the facts. The article did not say that on the day of graduation 27% of university graduates are functionally illiterate. What the article in fact points out is that university graduates who do not read (and write, I assume) regularly will gradually lose their literacy skills. In other words, of those 100% literate university graduates, by the age of 45 (a figure mentioned in the article) and higher, a significant percentage will have become functionally illiterate because they do not practice the formal written language.

I would think the statistics are probably quite similar in most languages for exactly the same reason. This has absolutely nothing to do with the teaching of grammar.

[MrPenguin]

According to Krashen, while massive reading and listening can be of tremendous help in developing native/foreign language ability, not everything gets picked up this way. To take a native speaker example, even someone who reads craploads may still struggle with distinctions like its/it's. Reading a billion words won't help unless you actually pay attention to and notice the grammatical details you're trying to learn.

[Iversen]

And that's exactly why grammar studies is a good idea - you are more likely to notice and remember features which you have know about from your grammar book - which is very different from asking you to learn a grammar book by heart. But precisely Krashen has written so much against explicit grammar studies that it is hard suddenly to see him as a champion of such studies.

[Cainntear]

Really, we once again have a display of this constant and tiresome bashing of modern language teaching. I especially take exception to these broad statements about the state of language teaching from someone who does not work in the field of teaching and who seems particularly ignorant of current trends and developments.

It would be useful if you quoted the specific statements you were objecting to here. I'm assuming you're responding to Cavesa, but you really seem to be overstating what he actually said. If you are, it's important to keep in mind that Cavesa specifically mentioned the CEFR, which puts the focus on the European teaching world, and as a North American language teacher, that is a field you don't work in.

Grammar and vocabulary have always and still are the pillars of language teaching. How could it be otherwise?

The Lexical Approach? Functional syllabuses? That second one's pertinent here, because the CEFR was drafted when CLT and functional syllabuses (can do statements etc) were the order of the day here in Europe These approaches don't do away with grammar entirely, but they certainly don't emphasise it -- Cavesa's word was "underemphasise", and you're free to argue that this is not the case, and that they put just the right amount of emphasis on it, but you can't go about building strawmen. (Not that you'll find many teachers who adhere to the LA or strong CLT, though.)

What has changed is the strategies of teaching. It is quite evident that using an arcane terminology and spending a lot of time parsing and analyzing does not produce effective users, especially with young learners. Since a dominant idea in language teaching today is how to produce actual speakers, much current thinking and strategizing involves teaching grammar by embedding it in communicative activities.

CLT is not current thinking as much as yesterday's thinking. CLT was only ever one interpretation of the notion that language should be taught in activities that supported meaning. The claim of CLT was that communicative tasks created a communicative "need" that naturally gave meaning to language, but in practice, most communicative tasks are contrived and unnatural, and don't create any genuine "communicative need" more sophisticated than wanting to please the teacher. CLT has proved particularly limited in classrooms where students have a shared native language, as any time you do manage to create a genuine communicative need, you end up presenting the target language as a barrier to communication, rather than a means of it... because everyone in the room could complete the task easier in their own language than the TL.

There is no dearth of grammar textbooks and workbooks for the widely studied languages like English, French or Spanish. They all have pretty much the same goal and the same content. And these haven't really changed much in the last 100 years, or maybe more like 50.

Because CLT hasn't really worked.