Good rules can help students

There have been times in language teaching when it was normal for the teacher to give a “rule”, two or three examples, and the students went on to practise. At other times the process has been quite different — teachers have believed that stating rules confused students so that they have simply pre­ sented a larger group of examples, and then students have done practices. The sequence has been much discussed, as have the rules themselves. An understanding of the nature of language rules helps teachers and students. A few teachers still believe in prescriptive rules — rules which tell us what “should” and “should not” be possible in the language. This is a mistake. All linguists believe rules should be descriptive — they should say how the language is used, not how it should be used.

In a similar way all linguists are agreed that it is not sufficient to divide language into “right” and “wrong”; language is more complicated than that. Full, accurate descriptive rules will need to describe language as standard/ non-standard, appropriate/inappropriate, spoken/written, formal/informal, etc. For many students some of these distinctions are too complicated and too subde, but for language teachers, all are always important.

For the descriptive linguist the important feature of a rule is that it is an accurate description; the description may be long, complicated,and need technical terms. For the language teacher a compromise needs to be made between the accuracy of the rule, and its accessibility. In short, a rule which is perfecdy accurate but which students cannot understand is no help to them. Equally important, however, is that a rule which is inaccurate, even if the stu­

dents can understand it, will often at a later stage in learning lead to confu­ sion.

Very often language teachers are so anxious that the student will understand the ‘rule’ that they lean towards accessibility at the expense of accuracy. Many teachers, for example, teach the ‘rule’:

Some in positives

Any in negatives and questions

Such a rule is nonsense as the following examples show: I like some pop music.

I don’t like some pop music. I like any pop music.

I don’t like any pop music.

What justification can there be for introducing a ‘rule’ which is totally inac­ curate? The teacher who uses that rule is forced to select examples which fit it and ignore examples which do not. The teacher then also has to hope that no student in the class will introduce an Ah, yes, but it says here... example!

What is the clue to the use of good rules? It is first important to understand that the rule is not just a brief verbal description. The rule is a combination of a wide range of natural examples, verbal description, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the relationship between the verbalisation and the examples. This may make it sound complicated and, in one sense, it is. We have already observed that language is a system and that one element of language learning involves understanding the system; we have also noted that language learning is cyclical. Teachers must recognise this, and encou­ rage an understanding of it in their students.

Too often, course books and teachers adopt a catalogue approach — students learn “a particular use” of, for example, the present simple, then “another use”, and, in a similar way, several “uses” of the present continuous. At no point do they sit down to examine the fundamental difference between the two forms. That difference is one of the most important characteristics of English as a system and is a difficult problem for most foreign learners of English. It is not, however, an impossible problem, and, if approached sensibly, no more difficult than learning more and more apparently separate non-systematic “uses”.

Natural examples help students to see how the language is used; good ver­ bal descriptions help students to understand the significance of particular points of usage. The examples support the explanation, the explanation supports the examples. Understanding the rule is a process, in which understanding is deepened through re-cycling examples and explanation.

There are pitfalls which it is important for the teacher to avoid — the examples must not be chosen to fit the explanation; the explanation must not be “simplified” to the point that it is either meaningless, or hopelessly inaccurate. Some students will benefit particularly from examples, others will find descriptive explanation more useful. Both are needed if everybody is to be given the maximum possible help.

Teachers are sometimes heard to say I don’t give rules. They just confuse my students. This is cheating. If the teacher gives examples and expects the students to infer or deduce the rules themselves, that must be more difficult than having access to a well-formulated verbalisation of the explanation. It

Techniques — Structure may be true to say that giving students the rule highlights their misunder­ standing, but it does not create it. The principle is that good rules help students — where ‘good’ means a compromise between' accuracy and accessibility, and where ‘rule’ is a combination of cyclically presented well-chosen examples and verbal description.

(Several language points which are often mis-understood are discussed in Chapter 12).