Читать книгу Task-based grammar teaching of English - Susanne Niemeier - Страница 31

Current grammar teaching practice largely focuses on decontextualised language. Frequently, isolated sentences are used in exercises and the learners have to either transform these sentences or to fill some gaps in them. In the majority of cases, the correct grammatical form is asked for and the semantic and/or pragmatic meaning stays backgrounded. This is what learners know and expect in grammar lessons and what they feel more or less comfortable with. Teaching along cognitive-grammatical lines may therefore confuse some learners, as they will see themselves confronted with an unfamiliar way of dealing with language. Some learners will still demand rules (and exceptions to these rules) and may not be interested in understanding why something is constructed the way it is. Others will react differently, of course. However, if a cognitive-grammatical approach is used in a classroom, many learners will face the challenge of having to unlearn what they have already internalised and having to relearn a new way of looking at grammar. Quite understandably, it is to be expected that not every learner will like this situation1. For beginners of English, the situation is somewhat different, as they have not yet made any experiences with grammar learning and can start learning from scratch with the new approach.

One of the positive assets of cognitive grammar is certainly that it prioritises meaning and does not, like most of traditional grammar instruction, only focus on various aspects of form. As mentioned previously, in traditional approaches syntax is on the one hand highlighted and on the other hand seen as completely separated from the lexical, semantic and pragmatic aspects of language. In contrast, and as also mentioned a couple of times before, cognitive grammar prioritises meaning as the most important aspect of language and consequently also of syntax. It sees meaning as explainable and offers a reasonably unified, comprehensive and systematic approach for such explanations, thus presenting a solid theoretical linguistic background, which has been lacking so far in the area of foreign language teaching. What is more, from a traditional (and popular) point of view, grammar teaching means that learners have to follow rules, whereas from a cognitive grammar point of view, grammar teaching means that learners become co-creators of meaning.

According to ACHARD (2008: 432), a focus on the meaning of grammatical structures “provides opportunities to teach grammar in a way similar to that of lexical items”. ACHARD furthermore points out that

… because the grammar of a language is strictly composed of a structured inventory of symbolic units, there is no a priori distinction between the teaching of grammar and that of lexical elements. This is particularly welcome because it provides a way of teaching grammar in ways compatible with the principles of most communicative models of instruction. (ACHARD 2008: 451)

Just as the meaning of a lexical item is involved when learning its form, the semantics of grammar structures provides learners with an insight into why these are formed the way they are – it is then the teacher’s task to guide the learners towards noticing the intricate connection between the grammatical form and its meaning. Accordingly, grammar is treated as a contextually dependent rather than as a contextually independent phenomenon, which ties in well with the focus on communication in certain teaching approaches, such as task-based language teaching.

By showing learners that they have a choice of construal – dependent on what exactly they want to express – they are transformed into more agentive beings, who are thus enabled, in an ideal case at least, to see grammar as a tool and not as a straitjacket. The overall aim should be that by understanding the meaning of grammatical constructions, learners start to dominate grammar and not vice versa, i.e., that they feel dominated by grammar. Learners should be enabled to pick and choose the linguistic means that are demanded by the context, the speech situation and the communicative purpose and they should furthermore be enabled to see that the available language choices can be motivated and coherent instead of random and idiosyncratic. This view stands in stark contrast to what traditional grammar teaching consisted of, namely to see grammar as a system that needed to be imparted to the learners instead of empowering the learners with the knowledge that they can make linguistic choices. Of course, some linguistic choices are easier to make than others, as some basic constructions are more conventionalised and therefore more stable than more complex constructions, such as, for example, the relatively obvious difference between count nouns and mass nouns. Such stability can later on be used as a basis for teaching less conventionalised items to more advanced learners, for example the use of the progressive vs. the non-progressive aspect2.

The importance of empowering learners to become active and creative language users is also highlighted by ACHARD, when he claims that

… focusing on the speaker rather than on the system involves the shift from teaching set patterns of lexical associations to teaching the conventionalized way of matching certain expressions to certain situations, as well as the flexibility of using the available alternatives to express specific semantic nuances. (ACHARD 2008: 441)

In traditional grammar teaching, the instructors’ starting point was usually the language system, which they wanted to impart to the learners. In contrast, in a cognitive-grammatical paradigm, the learner/speaker and his/her communicative needs are focused upon. Adopting such a view of foreign language instruction would of course also entail that quite a number of foreign language teachers need to change their own traditional paradigms of grammar teaching.

Whereas traditional explanations quite frequently present linguistic phenomena as arbitrary and recommend that learners learn certain rules (as well as the exceptions to these rules) by heart, the conceptual tools and explanations rooted in cognitive grammar aim at helping learners to discover and understand how the foreign language works. Furthermore, rules presented in textbooks are quite frequently too general and thus flawed, often leading learners to form incorrect generalizations.

For example, nearly all textbooks state that the progressive form cannot be used with verbs of involuntary sensory perception (“I see a bird fly by”, but not *“I am seeing a bird fly by”). This is true for the prototypical usages of such verbs, as an involuntary sensory perception happens too quickly to allow for the notion of ‘ongoingness’ – however, it is not correct that these verbs cannot use the progressive aspect, as it is certainly possible to say “I am seeing Tom tonight”, an utterance in which the verb of involuntary sensory perception is used non-prototypically, namely metonymically. This non-prototypical usage is easy to explain because the speaker’s perspective has widened and ‘seeing’ is only one part of the whole scenario of ‘meeting’ (part-for-whole metonymy), a process which is long enough to allow for the notion of ‘ongoingness’. Therefore, it becomes possible to use the progressive aspect3. In traditional instruction, this meaning shift would have to be learnt by heart, whereas the explanatory power of cognitive grammar allows instructors to offer understandable explanations to their learners.

A further positive aspect of cognitive grammatical explanations is that they lend themselves well to visualisations4, which traditional grammar teaching approaches rather do not. This ties in with PAIVIO’s ‘double coding’ hypothesis (see, for example, CLARK/PAIVIO 1991), claiming that learning works better when not only one but two (or even more) modes of sensory input are offered. If a word is pronounced (acoustic input) and at the same time a picture is shown (visual input), the chances that learners remember the word are bigger. The two representations are then stored together or at least connected by mental pathways. Frequently, one input can then trigger the other input. For example, the visual input can help learners to think of a targeted word, if they cannot remember it off-hand, or vice versa.

The same is true for motion. Especially in primary school, new vocabulary is often accompanied by movements. For example, when the word “roof” is introduced, the learners form a roof above their heads with their arms and hands. In this case, the movement alone is frequently enough to make the learners think of the word.

It is also possible for the more abstract area of grammar to achieve the effect of double coding. This can be done, for instance, by visualizing a narrow-perspective view for the progressive aspect (for example, in the form of a keyhole or a magnifying glass) and a wide-perspective view for the non-progressive aspect5. To give another example: showing up the related meanings of polysemous terms, such as prepositions or particles of phrasal verbs, can be done through a drawing of a radial network, with the prototypical meaning in the middle and the extended meanings reaching out towards the periphery, but still – visually as well as conceptually – connected to the basic, prototypical meanings.

Meaning extensions are generally motivated by either metaphor or metonymy. Such non-literal uses of language are largely neglected by traditional teaching approaches, whereas cognitive grammar sees them as important facets of human cognitive processing and as pervading all aspects of language. Metaphor and metonymy rely on either conventionalised or novel mental images that a speaker makes use of, not only lexically but also grammatically, and they can especially help to explain non-prototypical usages6.

ACHARD (2004: 168) adequately sums up the suitability of cognitive grammar for pedagogic purposes by stating that cognitive grammar can contribute to language teaching “by integrating cognitive descriptive insights into compatible well-established models of L2 pedagogy” – such as, for example, task-based teaching. Such a combination of cognitive grammar and the task-based approach, which is dealt with more exhaustively in the following sub-chapter and especially in the second part of this book, seems promising. If cognitive-linguistic insights can be made accessible for learners through well-selected tasks, the learners should be able to get a more comprehensive understanding of the target structure(s) and their expressivity can be enhanced. When a learner encounters a communicative situation in which a native speaker is likely to make a specific linguistic choice, the learner can then make a similar choice of construal and thus advance on their way towards a native-like command of the foreign language. It is up to the teachers to present tasks to their learners in which such choices of construal become possible and are as transparent as possible for them.