When I first read The English Verb by Michael Lewis, I thought a whole new world of grammar opened to me. I recall where I was, in Bali sitting on a beach or next to the pool with a book. I could not put it down, and to be honest, it was a pretty easy read. Suddenly I felt so much better equipped to teach grammar. Except, it didn’t work. I could explain in great lengths the difference between present simple and present continuous, with great examples, and different uses of the present continuous, with excellent concept checking questions, but it just didn’t stick. Now, the book is brilliant, and I do strongly advise anyone who hasn’t read it, to try to get a copy. Unfortunately, it is out of print.

And then, one evening I was chatting to a friend, and he used the word morphosyntax. I asked what it meant, and he said, ‘Grammar.’ After a bit of back and forth, I realised he wasn’t joking. Morphosyntax is a fancy word for grammar, because grammar is in essence morphology (how words are formed) and syntax (how we put those words together to convey meaning). It took a few months to really come to grips with what this newfound knowledge meant for my grammar teaching, and I will admit before delving deeper into the main points of this blog, that it was also heavily influenced by my disappointment of not becoming a great grammar teacher and therefore leaning more towards Task Based learning.

 

 

 

What is easiest to teach?

 

The funny thing is that this answer is ‘the one which seems to be the most difficult is the easiest to teach!’ Syntax is far easier to teach because our brains are wired to process and notice meaning. For a learner of English, happiness and happy means the same thing, and in reality, they do. For a learner of English, like and likes means the same thing, and they do. But ‘The tree is on the car’ as opposed to ‘The car is on the tree’ is almost immediately perceived as two different things. Syntax is also one of the things that is easy to transfer (if it is similar in your L1) or contrast (if it is different in your language). But, just by listening to lots of comprehensible input, your brain will almost automatically work out the syntactical rules of the language. And a little bit of explanation or highlighting of finer points is more than enough to get enough syntactical control to start using the language with some level of confidence.

 

What is easier to assess and do error correction on?

 

Which of these two questions is most likely to appear on an exam for low level learners, especially in an environment where you have to mark 400 exams like in a public school?

On Mondays, the children usually _____ to the park.

A: gone

B: are going

C: go

D: goes

 

Arrange these words to make a sentence:

Mondays/On/go/the/to/children/park/the

 

The simplicity of marking means the first question is a lot more likely to appear, and often, morphology is easier to notice and assess. Think about how many times as a teacher, the first mistake you notice is a tense mistake, or forgetting to add ‘ed’ or ‘ing’ or ‘s’ to a verb. The verb is in the correct position, but the morphology is wrong, and more often than not, that is what gets corrected. Note that in the sub-heading, I specifically chose the phrase ‘do error correction on’ because it isn’t as easy to correct as syntax. It is also not that easy to assess it if you have hundreds of written papers to mark, especially as multiple choice or jumbled sentence activities don’t actually show you the level of syntactical control a student has, but rather their awareness of syntax.

 

 

 

Syntax and chunking

So back to how it impacted my teaching. The biggest difference to my own teaching came from the realisation that you can teach chunking by keeping syntax in mind. If we use the example above, ‘On Mondays’ can be replaced by a range of other chunks. ‘On their birthdays’ or ‘Before school’ for example. The children can be replaced by a range of noun phrases, and the forming of noun phrases involves almost exclusively syntax and very little morphology. Then it is quite easy to get lots of repetition through stories. But most importantly, once experimentation starts happening through student production, and I hear something I want to highlight that involves morphology, it is much easier to do so if the syntax is already there. Here is an example:

On their birthday, the children go to the park.

On their birthdays, the children go to the park.

What’s the difference in meaning between the two?

In the first, they have the same birthday. In the second, they don’t. And suddenly, morphology has taken on meaning.

 

Why it matters

If a person has very little syntactical control, but they have memorised lots of morphological rules and verb tables, they cannot really use English. I would much rather have a student who says ‘You will like the people in my city because they are very kindly’ than a student who can tell me ‘kindly’ should be ‘kind’ because you need an adjective, but they are unable to produce that sentence. Syntactical control allows us to put words together to make meaning, and if we can do that, only then should we start worrying about whether the right word is happy or happiness, as long as the choice isn’t unhappy. When teaching is meaning driven, like it is in story-based or task-based approaches, students have a much bigger chance of acquiring the language, and what they are acquiring more often than not, is a subconscious awareness and control of syntax.

 

 

Looking forward

A simple question I want answered if students are struggling to communicate is whether they lack the syntax or the vocabulary. And if it is vocabulary, is it an individual word, or the chunks they need to communicate. Once we can figure that out, it becomes a lot easier to teach them, assess their progress, and move towards success. The only problem with that? In very large classes, it is extremely difficult to assess. Perhaps time for a change in how languages are tested in schools? But that will have to wait for another blog.