Optimal complexity of the explanations

When providing learners with grammar explanations, every teacher has to make a number of decisions concerning their quality and quantity. To what extent should the explanations be simplified? How to satisfy learners’ curiosity and provide a digestible amount of information at the same time? How much metalanguage should be used?

How to contrast L2 with L1 without risking an increased occurrence of negative language transfer?

All those question must be answered in order to provide an optimal solution.

When it comes to the simplification level of the explanations it is not easy to find balance. Practically, the teachers have two options. They can either simplify the rule by generalizing it and later provide more and more details or tell the learners that they only present one of many aspects of a given structure’s use. The former option has

one great shortcoming – by using eat the teacher constantly presents his students with white lies, and every time that he expands the information, he must admit that the truth is not like he said and it is actually much more complex. The latter option, on the other hand, does not force teacher to lie. Instead of constant updating of rules governing the use of a given syntactic structure, it simply adds more and more chunks to them, finally arriving at the complete set of rules.

Nevertheless, presenting the information in chunks has a certain deficiency.

Namely, it may make it more difficult for the learners to communicate in L2. When provided with a simplified rule, the students might use it in improper contexts, but even if they lack accuracy, they can still be understood by their interlocutor. If they are conscious that they were only presented with one aspect of the structure’s use, they might be reluctant to use it in different contexts.

The efficiency of those two methods differs according to the age of the learners.

While the adults and adolescents have little problem accepting that they are taught grammar in chunks and seem to prefer it to being provided with simplified generalizations, the young learners seems to feel more comfortable with the latter option, which is probably due to the fact that they are still more able of acquiring the language rather than just learning it and their language undergoes similar processes as those encountered during L1 acquisition, with simplification and overgeneralization being the recurring phenomena. Thus I believe it is optimal to use the chunk-method with the more analytical, older learners while simplifying the rules for young learners.

However, no matter if we are providing grammar explanations in chunks or by updating them, we might encounter learners’ questions that will require us to present a bigger chunk or less simplified rules than we initially planned. In such situations the teacher must be aware and provide sensibly extended explanations, avoiding too many digressions and providing only some general information while assuring the learner that their questions will be answered in more detail during the subsequent lessons. Again, I consider this an optimal solution, since on the one hand it is discouraging to ignore such questions and provide no clarifying information at all, and on the other the teacher cannot try to explain everything in detail and including every aspect, because that would lead to an almost infinite chain of explanatory digressions, which learners would simply be not able to remember.

Teachers must be also very careful when using additional materials during the lessons, since they may sometimes include syntactic structures that the learners are still

not ready to be introduced to, and their presence would surely increase the number of appearing questions, that having the teacher faced with the dilemma described in the paragraph above.

Concerning the optimal use of metalanguage, the teachers have to be careful to adjust its complexity to the metalinguistic knowledge of learners and if they consider this knowledge not sufficient, they should expand it gradually during the lessons. The group which is usually most accustomed to the use of the metalanguage are adolescents, since they were being taught L1 grammar at school and they are learning other languages there as well. The situation is different with adults, unless they are students who learned some language recently or they are freshly after studies. Otherwise it is quite common that their knowledge of metalanguage is quite limited, due to the gap in time between the present and the time they were learning it, which causes them to forget many details. Finally, the young learners are often before the stage when they are taught the metalanguage and it might be left to the teacher to introduce its very basics, if anything at all. Thus it is advisable to use and extend the knowledge of metalanguage among the adolescents and adults, especially the more abstract thinking ones, while using only basic or no metalinguistic terms when dealing with young learners, who should be taught using a lot of visual aids and simple notions that they can easily understand.

Finally, the last question deals with the contrasting of L1 and L2 (and even other languages, if applicable) in order to help the learners understand the particular grammar issues. I found this a very useful tool, which makes many new syntactic structures easier to understand for the learners and often provides an interesting material for the more curious among them. On the other hand we must be careful not to make an impression on the learners that L1 is not really different to L2 (although there might be cases when it is true, it is certainly not in case of Polish and English), which might lead them to present an increased level of negative language transfer. Differences should be stressed as much as the similarities, encouraging learners to treat only the particular phenomena as similar or different, not the whole languages.