Jeff, don’ get me wrong, I also provide explanations, and I am sure that some of them have some effect, or I hope so. I confess that I, as a learner, do not look at the explanations.
Jeff, re articles, the issue is not so much “a” versus “the” but why even have them at all, and since they do not exist in Japanese, or Russian, for example, it is just difficult to develop the habit of using them.
brick-and-mortal classrooms —> brick-and-mortar classrooms
I see all kinds of mistakes in the Swedish texts I correct (Livemocha/LingQ) - from people who speak a Germanic or Romance language (where concepts like articles, adjective endings, tenses and much more exist). That’s why I think that a simple correction without a comment would go unnoticed.
If somebody can explain something to me in a sentence or two instead of ten/twenty/fifty examples over the years, I prefer the comment (even if I don’t “master” it immediately). If I have a basic idea what to look for and to pay attention to (and to some extent - “why”), I’ll find it everywhere in texts I read or audio I listen to.
Maybe that’s just me.
Explanations work for you and not for me. I don’t read explanations. That’s just two people. The study presented here by dooo seems to indicate that corrections and explanations don’t work for most people. I find that corrections, over time, will help me improve, but that the explanations are quickly forgotten, lost, or were not really needed, because I knew the reason,but my mind could not produce the correct case ending or verb ending while I was speaking and writing.
Jeff,
What is getting lost here is:
a) people need training to explain grammar properly. It is not a god given talent to all native speakers of the target language.Quite the opposite. So when you say “explain something to me”, does it not matter to you if it is accurate or not?
b) that most such explanations, if correct, are valid in only a very circumscribed area. If someone says, you need an “a” before this word because … blah, blah, blah, you need to define the limits of where this explanation is valid. This definition is is usually longer than the rule itself and in the end you are burdening someone with a large amount of not very useful information.
I know many people “feel” differently, but that is the issue here. Otherwise rational people seem to cling to grammar in emotive terms… even when more or less objective and logical arguments are presented that contradict them. Grammar is the to some degree the Flying Spaghetti Monster of the polyglot set.
“If ESL/EFL writing teachers are really concerned with improving their student’s grammatical competency, they should, in lieu of offering grammar correction feedback, constantly stress in their classes the importance of outside reading.”(Ronald Gray)
He[Ronald Gray] contends that teachers should “constantly” stress in their classes the importance of outside reading. I wonder how many of their students follow their advice constantly.
(The above is a corrected version.)
Was it useful?
@Tora
If you crave an audience for them, I encourage you get a blog and put your corrections on that. I would say that these sorts of posts are exactly the kind I would categorize as empty and frivolous.
“The above link makes a very clear case about the relative usefulness if writing correction.”
I cannot understand what your sentence means. Could you rephrase the sentence?
You are very brave to click on unknown links. Aren’t you afraid of the spiders?
I’m not saying that I ask people to “explain this to me”, but if I’ve written something that can be easily explained (and remedied), I won’t ignore the comment.
Maybe it’s the “interim language” that causes all kinds of unexpected mistakes. Some examples off the top of my head:
If somebody writes “we have goes” “the book is wrote by”, “I will seeing” I’m pretty sure that you can say that “have” is followed by the third form (“gone”), so is “is” (“written”), and that “will” (and similar verbs like shall, should, would, can, must) is followed by the basic infinitive form (the dictionary form). Most languages I know work like this. Most learners that I’ve had contact with are speakers of German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, so after an explanation like this, the “tense patterns” should be a lot easier to grasp (in my imagination). Same principle, different words.
I’m definitely NOT a “grammar first!” type of learner. But I don’t avoid it like the plague either.
Jeff
I don’t avoid grammar like the plague, I avoid it like a time wasting addiction.
The examples you have cited amount to spelling errors. If grammar feedback were to be effective, it would require genuine mistakes to occur in those very common patterns AND for the writer to have prior knowledge of parts of speech, including modals, “dictionary form” and how to identify them.
In my experience, these coincidental events are not usual. People who know the metalanguage have been exposed to many correct sentences in their grammar books.
People who have relied on input alone have also. The second learning process is much more efficient in terms of actually functioning in the language
When mistakes do occur in those patterns, they are tantamount to errors ( the learner, knows the correct pattern very well and they were careless). Or, if they are real mistakes, the learner is at a beginner stage and does not have the background knowledge to understand the grammatical nature of the error anyway. In both cases form focused feedback is a waste of time.
This is leaving aside the assertion that form focused feedback in writing, (I would argue in speaking also) is inherently inferior to meaning or discoursal focused feed back ( how to macro organise texts) as asserted in the linked paper. This paper is not a collection of anecdotes. It is an meta-study involving a very large number of students.
BTW, if you are arguing that Indo European learners should be able to effortlessly map their native language parts of speech onto a target Indo European language even at the beginner stages (which I doubt, but anyway) then why bother pointing out the parts of speech in a correction? Just provide a corrected text.
“Semke (1984) has demonstrated that students who received comments from teachers only on content did much better and spent more time working on their essays than those who received criticism only on grammar.”(Ronald Gray)
This explanation is too psychological, focusing on the teacher-student relationships. I can understand the feelings of the students; Many of us don’t like “strict teachers,” home works, and so on. But if students are not motivated enough, “stress[ing] in their[writing teachers’] classes the importance of outside reading” is also ineffective.
Is it the psychology of classroom learning?
“This explanation is too psychological,”
It is a finding, not an explanation. There also nothing particularly (sic)psychological about it.
What’s this discussion all about actually? - I don’t mean to be rude, but this discussion only shows that there are different kinds of learners in different learning situations. Maybe I’m just a bit sensitive to this issue because I’m a teacher, one who would love to skip grammar explanations and probably I do skip more than I used to. However, I do have to provide some explanations for beginners and lower intermediate students at least.
The LingQ writing correction system allows NOTES to be added to the corrections, but also the TYPE of the mistake or error - is this helpful? Tutors may feel obliged to provide explanations. New students have not expressed their interest in them, so why not provide a few notes even if they are ignored. LingQ students are free to ignore tutors’ comments, classroom students are not. It’s an entirely different situation.
Types are sometimes not precise enough, so a few notes can make them clearer. How can Choice of Words be enough if I can see where the error came from (e.g. Einsparung should have been Ersparnisse / Note: the writer meant savings, not economies).Spelling usually doesn’t need an explanation. Prepositions sometimes do (e.g. dative or accusative cases after the same prepositions in German depending on the object being static or moving). Tenses can be learned by noticing the patterns, but sometimes a rule may make things clearer. It’s entirely up to the learner whether they care about explanations or not.
Fully agreed Reinhard, it is up to each learner, and we have heard from learners who really appreciated corrections and remembered them. Nor do I always believe this kind of research.
Nevertheless, given the overwhelming focus on error correction in language teaching, it is useful to see these bits of research that seem to go against certain conventional wisdom.
That’s true and I have read the paper together with Krashen’s article with great interest.
Although many , usually less happy and successful, teachers are loathe to admit it, in the end, THE most important aspect of the teacher role (as opposed to teaching itself) is customer service. You have to tend to your relationships and the emotional aspect of the job. You are not there to push your ideology, whether political or learning.
As a result, I have spent countless hours tending to students’ desire for grammar explanations. From a PR point of view, it was time well spent. But I am certain that from a teaching/learning point of view, it was wasted time. This is based on evidence from corpus linguistics, great work by Costas Gabrielatos, and Michael Lewis, and studies such as the one linked to above. I would no more doubt the findings if such studies than I would believe in applied Multiple Intelligences or homeopathy. There is no evidence that “each learner is different” from the point of view of efficiency.
Each learner thinks they are different. This is important to take into consideration. But I have found that as students, many learners are much more similar than different.