Quick tangential update: This semester I am teaching some composition courses to American students. The experience has been very neat (and also challenging, but in a good way). I have taught American students over the years when subbing for colleagues, doing a lesson on allophones here or there or finishing a linguistics class while a professor went on medical leave, but I haven't taught an entire semester of Americans since 2011. Mini-pity party: I can't easily use any of my grammatical frameworks! When I teach composition to international students, I can say things like, "since this preposition begins the sentence, you must put a comma before the beginning of the full clause" and they would likely know what I meant (or I could quickly illustrate the difference between a clause and a phrase and they would know). My American students make far fewer grammar errors, but I didn't realize how much I used to use grammar jargon to explain mundane things like where to put a comma or what a fragment is (last night I so badly wanted to say "this gerund phrase cannot be its own sentence" but I restrained myself). My first few weeks of teaching, I felt like I just lost my arm, and I kept habitually asking, "do you know what that word means?" after every remotely infrequent word.

As they finish up their literacy autobiographies (the last essay of the semester!), I really wanted them to see a practical example of an essay that uses dialogue to illustrate a point, so on a whim, I ditched the comma lesson planned for today and wanted to have them focus on some elements of good memoir writing, so I told them to get our their McGraw Hill Guide and read over Tanya Barrientos' "Se Habla Español" essay. The one weak link in this plan is we typically don't do a lot with this book, so only two students brought it to class (cue really super sad bwa-bwa-bwaa music). My backup plan was to read the essay aloud and then discuss it together.

I don't know if it's simply because they had to look at the screen and/or listen to my reading of it in order to keep up (since they didn't have books) or if Barrientos' writing is just really good (I happen to think so), but they all seemed very engaged. I heard some students speak up about the essay during class who usually don't, and they were making clear, specific connections to the reading. It was one of those times when you see a really old school method like "read and talk" really work.

Anyway, here's hoping Barrientos' style inspires them to include some vivid dialogue in their essays!

-Bill

I was helping a student review for a proficiency test and a sentence like this came up on a sample test:
"You haven't heard of Mark Twain? He is ______________ one of the most important American writers."
a. being
b. be
c. saying the
d. said to be

I have yet to see a student run into this construction and nail it. Usually they gravitate toward the distractor, which is anything that yields "is VERB-ing," but what they don't realize is that this is a participial adjective construction like the following:

• This medicine is taken for diabetes.
  
• The flowers weren't intended for you.
  
• The poem wasn't written about WWII.
  

I don't know whether to give the test-designers kudos or to curse them for their devious grammatical trickery. At times I see constructions on these tests that seem so exceptionally rare that I question whether there is value in teaching them. In case you're curious, if you search the COCA for

[vb*] [v?n*] to *

you will generate the following list:

So I suppose the construction is not incredibly rare after all (there are even more results if you omit the last wild card). But why does this feel so uncommon?

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the corpus really is just a sampling (albeit a very BIG sampling) of American English usage. For example, I was talking to my brother about our Thanksgiving plans, and he was thinking of sharing a ride with my sisters:

"When are they leaving?"

"They said 4:30."

"Oh. I'll have already been working two hours by then." (i.e. he starts work at 2:30)

"Oh shoot. Well maybe we can work something else out."

My brother is not an English major, yet what he is saying is very linguistically complex, and there was nothing strange or unusual about the context. However, when I searched the corpus for this construction, no results came back. In other words, the corpus may not catch constructions that are still used in everyday situations. I remember talking to my old professor about grammar forms that were not easily classified. He said there are some grammatical theories that contend there are thousands of clause types (a fact which is "terrifying" for students, as he put it), and some of these myriad constructions are restricted to extremely specific contexts (considering the conversation I had with my brother--when else would you use the future present perfect continuous?).

I always feel like this is a cop out answer, but in addition to focused study, I really think it's important to read a lot AND talk to a lot of people AND watch a lot of movies/television AND listen to the radio in the second language on a daily basis, and hopefully, as a result, these things will come in through osmosis.

At least that's the hope.

-Bill

Occasionally I run into teaching situations where I question my hypotheses about language learning. For example, you might have a student working on writing sentences, and they might produce a grammatical error like a sentence without a verb (which is not technically a sentence). But what do you do if they don't know things like part of speech or a basic understanding of verb phrases, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases? I'm sure some Krashenites would say that students don't need to know all of those terms. All you need is comprehensible input! Input, input, input! Students don't progress? They need better, more comprehensible input!

I'm all about language teaching being communicative and functional, but I feel like sometimes, you have to give them grammar terminology. Ideally, it would be nice to have purely communicative lessons unhindered by curricular constraints that expose students to input they may or may not be developmentally ready to acquire, but when I picture it playing out, I think a lot of students would be frustrated by an endless relay of inductive lessons where they would be required to rely on their wits and reasoning ability to construct real, acquired linguistic knowledge... actually, wait a minute--that sounds really exciting! Okay, but not all students are interested in being interested in uncovering the mysteries of spoken and written language. Many of them have big important concerns looming overhead: What score will they get on the TOEFL/IELTS/TOEIC/[insert language proficiency test here]? What school will they apply to/gain acceptance from? How will they survive the occasional, unpredictable and yet somehow inevitable gastronomic disturbances from unfamiliar local cuisine? No. We need to be systematic and efficient because time is of the essence. With curriculum objectives and outcomes, teachers don't have time for wild grammar goose chases and I-spy-something-that's-a-fragment in the hopes that something clicks and they "get" it!

But then I stop and think about the utilitarian garble that just came out of my head and feel a sudden uneasiness, like I just felt some empathy by crossing into the orbit of another pedagogical philosophy--the intersection of form-focused and pure communicative approaches:

Could we be so focused on efficiency that we don't take the time to reevaluate how we're approaching classroom instruction? Could it be that our curriculum is actually not that confining and alternative and better ways but that we are too sold on how we think language instruction ought to work to consider something new? Do we fear change?

I always come back to this passage from Nassaji and Fotos (2004):

It's still important that it be practical and based on what students need to communicate, but teaching more form-focused lessons is not a waste of time.

Okay, I can go to bed now, but why can't I shake the feeling that Stephen Krashen is hiding under my bed (metaphorically-speaking, of course)?

-Bill