Grammar Observations 1 Grammar Teaching Practices in Academic English and French Classes Anne Sheriff Colorado State University
Grammar Observations 2 In order to see a variety of grammar teaching practices, I observed three English classes of different levels at INTO-CSU and three French classes in the Colorado State University (CSU) foreign language department. Intermediate low English Grammar When I observed an intermediate low grammar class at the Academic English Program at INTO-CSU, the topic for the day was temporal adverbials, time clauses and the past progressive. This class is the first class available to students at INTO-CSU whose sole focus is English grammar. While I was observing this class, there were four Portuguese speakers, four Arabic speakers, and one Japanese speaker. The instructor started with the simple past, asking questions, such as What did you do last night? and What did you do last summer? While sharing some of their sentences, a student wrote I didn t play soccer on the board. The instructor reminded students that the do support in negatives takes the past tense by pointing to the didn t and saying The past is here. As a transition from reviewing simple past to talking about time adverbials, the instructor asked a student What did you do last night? and then continued asking follow-up questions to get a her to talk about a series of events. The instructor took two of these sentences and wrote them on the board. Then after getting students to define a sentence as having a subject and a verb, the students worked to combine these sentences with and and then. When the instructor showed students the structure of sentences using before or after to show time relationships, he used different colored markers to represent each part of the clause, one for the subject, one for the verb and one for the subordinating conjunction. This visual was used to show that before or after plus a subject and a verb is a time adverbial that can be sentence-initial or sentence-final but cannot function without a main clause.
Grammar Observations 3 This class ended with a discussion on the past progressive. To get students thinking about the relationship between the simple past and the past progressive, the instructor drew a time line. He used an X to show the simple past and a wavy line for the progressive. Because of the level of the students and because it was the first time they talked about the past progressive, this class only talked about one instance when the past progressive is used, talking about ongoing actions at a specific time, such as in the question Were you driving at 10:30 last night? In a brief discussion about the structure, the instructor pointed out that it s the verb with the ing morpheme that makes a sentence progressive and the BE in the past tense that makes the sentence in the past tense. Intermediate high English grammar When I observed a intermediate high grammar class at the Academic English program at INTO-CSU, the topic was the future progressive. The day that I observed this class there were thirteen students: ten Arabic speakers, two Chinese speakers and one Portuguese speaker. As part of a brief review of the simple future, the instructor asked for information about adverbials with when, looking for how tenses pattern together in a time adverbial and a main clause. The students told him that when a main clause is in the past tense, the temporal adverbial is also in the past tense, that a main clause in the present tense pairs with a present tense temporal adverbial and a future tense main clause also goes with a present tense temporal adverbial. To get students thinking about the future progressive, the instructor asked a few questions, such as What will you be doing five years from now? A student responded, I will have three children. Even though the instructor had been focusing on responding with the same tense the question, here, he applauded the students response and explained that if the student had said, I will be having children he would be giving birth to these children in five years.
Grammar Observations 4 The instructor s explanation of the future progressive started with a formal definition Modal will + be+ present particle of verb. The instructor asked the students What does this mean? The students responded, I will be eating, as an example. After the students read some example sentences, the instructor had students write questions that would elicit these responses, verifying that students only invert the subject and the first modal. Then, lots of different uses of the future progressive were provided with a couple example sentences for each use, such as actions in progress in the future and plans connected with travel. Then students did a book exercise where they needed to identify if a sentence was talking about a future, present or habitual action. During this brief activity, the instructor asked for grammatical justification of their answers. All of the habitual actions were in the simple present, the future actions used one of the forms of the future (to be going to or will), and all of the present action used the present progressive. To put this tense into use, the class ended with an activity using schedules. Students asked and answered questions about what their partner would be doing at a certain time in the future to complete their schedule. Advanced low English grammar When I observed an advanced low grammar class at INTO-CSU, the topic was relative clauses, called adjective clauses by their textbook. The day that I observed this class, there were five Arabic-speaking students present. This class had already started talking about relative clauses in previous classes, so the instructor started with an activity where students were asked to combine two sentences using relative pronouns. For example, students took the two sentences The woman is a police officer. She lives next door and combined them into The woman who lives next door is a police officer. While they were doing this activity, the instructor asked the students where this kind of clause goes. By posing leading questions, the instructor led them to the answer; they go after the noun you are describing. Throughout this lesson, the instructor always
Grammar Observations 5 looked for very specific answers from her students and rarely mentioned or considered correct ways of combining sentences that seemed acceptable and grammatical to me. I believe this was because she was trying to ensure that the students really understood the placement of relative clauses. It keeps what the students were supposed to be learning very clear before complicating things with exceptions. One example that really stood out to me was when they combined the sentences A café is a small restaurant. People can get a light meal there as A café where people can get a light meal is a small restaurant. My first instinct was to say, A café is a small restaurant where people can get a light meal. The instructor was trying to insist on the fact the adjectival clause always goes after the noun phrase that it is modifying, and that the sentence People can get a light meal there is referring to a café, which means it should go after the noun phrase a café. The instructor encouraged students to use this grammatical form in their own writing to make your sentence more clear and detailed. While the instructor was talking about using these sorts of clauses in writing, she connected it to when these students will be in regular university classes and that their professors will expect them to use complex sentences in their writing. Beginning French grammar I also observed a French 105 class. This class is a first-semester French class at CSU, so the students should not have any experience with French before starting this class; however these classes usually have some false beginners. On the day that I observed this class, there were sixteen American students present, three of who are also learning Spanish. The topic for this fifty-minute class was regular and stem-changing er verbs. As subjectverb agreement and morphology is more complicated in French than it is in English, French learners often need help learning these conjugations. In order to give students strategies for learning these morphemes, the instructor played several songs that could serve as memory
Grammar Observations 6 aids. Another way the students drilled these conjugations was by playing verb battleship. In this game, each box on the grid is named by a subject and a verb. To attack a certain square, players must pronounce and spell the correct form of the verb. For example, when a student wanted to guess the second-person plural of the verb to play, they spelled vous jouez to their partner. The second half of the class involved the stem-changing er verbs. These verbs use the same morphemes as the first group of verbs (-e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent), but for all of the singular subject and the third-person plural, the verb-stem changes, for example envoyer changes to j envoie in the first-person singular, but nous envoyons in the first-person plural. The instructor used visual cues to give students a way of grouping these changes, as shown below: J envoie Nous envoyons Tu envoies Vous envoyez Il envoie Ils envoient Stem-Changing Verb patterns Finally, to practice the pronunciation of these stem-changing verbs, the students listened to an explanation in their L1 (English) and then repeated these forms after a recording. Intermediate French grammar I also observed a French 201 class. This class is the fourth semester French class offered at CSU, so the students in this class are at the intermediate-mid/intermediate-high level. The day I observed this class there were nineteen students in class, all of whom speak English as their native language. The topic of this class was the negative particles in French. The instructor started this class by eliciting the negative phrases that students already know, all of which start with ne and also contain a negative particle, before giving them a list of the new negative phrases presented in their book. This list was composed of opposites, which used words they know already to explain what the negative phrases meant in English
Grammar Observations 7 and what sorts of phrases they could replace in French. The worksheet that they worked on then asked them to write negative answers for questions using these opposites, as if the answers were coming from an unhappy friend. For example, if the question was Est-ce que tout le monde a fêté ton anniversaire? (Did everyone celebrate you birthday?) they would write the answer, Personne n a fêté mon anniversaire. (No one celebrated my birthday.) The discussion also included the placement of these negative particles, especially in the past tense. Usually in the past tense, the negative particle comes after the auxiliary verb; however with the negative particles personne (no one), aucun (none), and que (only), they go after the past participle. Personne also adds another level of difficulty for French learners, because it can appear as a subject or an object. All of these challenging aspects of negation came up in the discussion of the answers for the unhappy friend activity. The next activity asked students to transform positive sentences into negative sentences to describe a bad birthday. During this activity, issues with double negatives in French were mentioned. Unlike in English, where double negatives are prescriptively considered grammatically incorrect, in French, speakers often use more than one negative particle. The instructor explained that when there is more than one negative particle in a sentence, only one ne is needed, directly before the verb and the negative particles go in their normal places, such as in the sentence Personne ne vient jamais à ma fête d anniversaire (No one ever comes to my birthday party). Advanced low French grammar The last French class that I observed was a 300 level class for intermediate-high and advanced-low students. Its official course title is Reading and Writing for French Communication. It is the first 300-level class offered to students at CSU, and is also the prerequisite for all other advanced French classes available. While I was observing, there
Grammar Observations 8 were 22 students in class, three of whom were native Spanish speakers and the other all native English speakers. The main topic of this class was relative pronouns. However, the class started with a review of the genders of body parts where the instructor pointed to a body part and the students needed to provide the correct article for that body part s gender. As English nouns do not have grammatical genders, it is usually quite difficult for students to learn these bits of grammatical information when they are learning new words. When the class moved on to the relative pronouns, the instructor asked about grammatical information these words that forced the students to connect form and usage in sentence. Two of her questions were What s the relative pronoun that replaces a person that s a subject in a sentence? and And a thing that s a subject? English uses two different pronouns for these functions, who and that or which respectively, but in French, it s the same relative pronoun qui. As they went over the homework, the instructor asked questions about the uses of the relative pronouns in sentences, such as asking why you use que in the sentence La fille que je connais a les cheveux blonds (The girl who I know has blond hair). It is replacing the direct object of the sentence Je connais la fille (I know the girl). The instructor also drew arrows and used gestures to show students where to place certain phrases when combining two sentences with a relative pronoun and what information a relative pronoun replaces in these new sentences. All of the new sentences created in this activity replaced the noun phrase le professeur (the teacher), but each sentence used a different relative pronoun because le professeur had a different grammatical function in the sentences.