ELT in Brazil

Carl Hendrick wrote on his Substack blog about “Comfortable Fictions” in education to criticize the long-debunked and discredited theory of multiple intelligences and learning styles. Hendrick mentions how, at times, unproven or even discredited theories and approaches to education seem to endure despite being flawed and potentially harmful to our learners. Following the same rationale, grammar-syllabus-based English Language Teaching (ELT), which is delivered to students through a myriad of variations of the Present-Practice-Production framework (engage→study→activate, presentation→controlled practice→freer practice, test→teach→test, the list goes on), seems to sit neatly among multiple intelligences and learning styles as members of the comfortable fictions in the realm of ELT.

They are comfortable due to a couple of reasons, which should not be overlooked, of course. The grammar syllabus, mostly unchanged since its first appearance back in the 70s (60s?) with the first-born coursebooks, offers teachers a clear-cut route for language teaching. We teach the personal pronouns first, then the verb be, then nationalities, then personal information questions, then possessive adjectives and pronouns, then the present simple with adverbs of frequency… Sound familiar? The Present-Practice-Production (PPP) framework and approach to teaching is also incredibly comfortable for teachers – especially novice ones, who can quickly and intuitively grasp the concept. The challenge with relinquishing the PPP is that it makes sense. It is rational, logical even. However, its simplicity should not be mistaken for efficacy. As my favorite songwriter, Tim Minchin, once wrote, “I don’t believe just ’cause ideas are tenacious / It means that they’re worthy”.

The grammar syllabus and the PPP approach to language delivery and digestion have been thoroughly criticized by many researchers in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Our current understanding of how languages are learned simply does not comport with the atomistic, explicit focus on forms, practice-based automatization, and zero-to-hero perspective of language learning, which are the base principles behind the PPP and the grammar syllabus.

For instance, it has been documented that learners of English in naturalistic contexts (i.e., a learner who moves to England), instructed contexts (i.e., our Brazilian learners learning English in classrooms in Brazil), and mixed (i.e., a learner who moves to England and decides to take English classes) roughly follow the same order of acquisition. This is strong evidence that, whatever grammar is presented in a syllabus and in whatever order it appears there, it has no impact whatsoever on the routes that learners take when learning the language. This shows that the grammar syllabus has no evident impact on learners’ process of language acquisition. This ‘natural order of acquisition hypothesis’ – now documented – was brought forth by Stephen Krashen back in 1982.

What’s more, not only is the order of acquisition strikingly similar for learners in all three contexts, but they also follow predictable (and again) documented developmental sequences that are largely fixed and irrespective of the learner’s first language (Jordan and Long, 2023; Meisel, Clahsen, and Pienemann, 1981). The findings in developmental sequences have described how learners progress from one stage of development to the next, without ever skipping stages, and backsliding quite often – meaning that development is not always towards the Target Language, but sometimes away from it. This means that interlanguage development can be experienced as an increase in mistakes, not the other way around. For example, learners who want to talk about past actions in English begin their journeys using the present simple or bare infinitive to describe these. Then, learners progress to using some very high-frequency irregular verbs as lexical items, not as grammaticized items, such as went, took, got. The next stage has learners overgeneralizing the rule of “-ed for the past” and we will see learners who used to say went, took, got say goed*, taked*, and geted*. This backsliding, also referred to as U-shape behaviour, is an inevitable process for language acquisition – one that no controlled practice can avoid or skip.

Pienemann’s Processability theory resonates with developmental sequences. His theory states that what learners can process is what they are able to learn, which is what we can teach. In a study carried out in 1984, Pienemann identified a group of learners who were at the same developmental stage in the process of acquiring relative clauses. When instruction was pitched at the subsequent developmental stage (learners who were at stage 2 received instruction on stage 3 structures, for example), it was highly effective and helped all learners progress to the next stage in the developmental sequence. However, and not surprisingly, learners who received instruction at two stages above their current stage did not progress, and some of them began making mistakes that were not part of their developmental stages. This means that, as Lightbown and Spada (2013) also conclude, instruction that is pitched beyond the learner’s current developmental stage can be a waste of time and even potentially harmful for their development, adding extra stages that should not be there to be overcome.

In light of these (not so) recent findings in SLA, grammar-syllabus-based, PPP-delivered ELT fits neatly into Hendrick’s description of comfortable fictions in education. If the order of acquisition does not mirror the grammar syllabus, it is a clear indication of its ineffectiveness in guiding the learning process. If controlled-practice moments cannot foster the immediate, long-lasting accuracy it was meant to behaviouristically foster because learners often exhibit a U-shaped pattern of language development, it is a pointless, time-wasting, fictitious technique based on ‘common-sense’. If instruction is untimely, it wastes everybody’s time and can even be harmful to learners’ language learning, then the order in the grammar syllabus should be ignored, and the learner’s internal syllabus taken into account. To summarize, as Jordan and Long did (2023), “Learners rule, ok?”

References

Jordan, G. and Long, M. (2023). English Language Teaching, Now and How It Could Be. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon Press.

Meisel, J. M., Clahsen, H., & Pienemann, M. (1981). On Determining Developmental Stages in Natural Second Language Acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 3, 109-135.

Lightbown, P.M. and Spada, N. (2013). How Languages Are Learned. Oxford.