Can Learning Grammar Be a Shortcut to Fluency?

After my article about Spanish immersion, I got some interesting replies. Here are some worth reading:

When I tell people that I went to Spain for 8 weeks and became fluent in Spanish, I have to clarify that in reality I became fluent in a single weekend. That weekend, I experienced such incredibly intensive immersion that it literally made me a Spanish speaker.

ONE weekend? You must be more bad-ass than Daniel Tammet! Still, he’s [the writer of the reply] not promoting an immersion environment but only learning grammar:

Well, at its best grammar is a shortcut that teaches you thousands of new “vocabulary items” at once. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, because your goal is to absorb the underlying patterns as quickly as possible so that even unfamiliar words can be employed correctly in a snap – or at least, spoken correctly after frantically planning what you’re about to say next in a demanding social setting.

If you thought that I promote the practice of learning every possible form of every possible verb, you’re simply wrong. All I want to achieve is that people stop worrying about grammar, and should see the different forms of ways to say different things. These different things can be persons, times, conditionals, etc. All these forms can be learned through massive input and SRS (read: induction). The problem with Spanish grammar is that it isn’t regular, far from that. For every “rule” you learn, you have to learn countless exceptions, destroying the argument that learning grammar can be a shortcut to fluency. But hey, I know that some people won’t fall for this so I’ll continue reasoning a bit.

First, we need to realize that there’s a difference between language learning and language acquisition. What I’m talking about at this blog is nothing more than language acquisition. In general, I reject most forms of language learning for beginners. The reason I reject it are countless and thus pretty much impossible to discuss on a blog like this, but if you want to know more about it there are many great books around to go wild (both about language learning and language acquisition, and also works that compare the two concepts).

You know Stephen D. Krashen? No?! Well, you should. He has been doing some great research to language acquisition. He has also written several books and articles, which are freely available at his website. But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I want to cite some interesting points from his paper (it’s actually a collection of earlier published papers) called Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning (1981):

There are several important constraints on the use of the Monitor. The first condition is that in order to successfully monitor, the performer must have time. In normal conversation, both is speaking and in listening, performers do not generally have time to think about and apply conscious grammatical rules, and, as we shall see later, we see little or no effect on the Monitor in these situations.

The Monitor is the effect of conscious language learning, mostly involving learning grammar and single vocabulary items. But like Krashen says, the problem with this Monitor is time. Sure, learning grammar as a shortcut in order to become fluent sounds great, but it’s simply a theory (that didn’t work out over time, as we can see in the poor skills of most language students who attended language classes) (another interesting point Krashen makes further on in the same paper is the fact learning grammar is only a temporary advantage; …its [that of the first language and the Monitor] use may give the adult a temporary head-start over children, who presumably rely on acquisition alone for the most part). If we look at real situations we see that you mostly don’t have time to worry about rules as time is pressing.

A second problem is that, even if he/she has time to think, the student isn’t focused on form (the grammar), but rather on the message he/she wants to transmit. This pretty much blocks the ability to think about form. And then the third reason Krashen reminds us of: the student needs to know the rule. The problem, like I already stated earlier in this post, is the fact that most languages are very irregular and that only a part of any language is documented in grammar.

Does that mean that I completely reject the learning of grammar? Not at all, but you should be aware how much you use it and in which stage of your language learner. A paper published by Ritchie in 1978 contains an interesting observation; there are -generally speaking- three types of users: “overusers”, “underusers” and “optimal users”. “Overusers” use their monitor extensively, mostly limiting them in speaking correctly (although they focus on grammar). “Underusers” are people who trust their feeling for the language. This can result is a less correct language usage at times (although not always), but these “underusers” use the language fluenty and also use complex structures like natives speakers do. For many learners this point is ideal (although most of them focus on form instead, or try to focus on form). The third group are the so-called “optimal users”; people who mostly use their ‘feeling’ for the language, but do use their monitor when appropriate. Now, to me most native speakers are “optimal users” as they have some understanding of the grammatical rules (if they went to high school a country where their native is being spoken), but mostly trust their ‘feeling’ (although I know several natives who use their native language perfectly without knowing a single rule in a conscious way, thus officially being “underusers”).

Now, if we want to be “optimal users” of Spanish we actually need to concentrate ourselves a bit on grammar. But when should this happen? The fact is that most beginners of Spanish don’t have the ability to learn the grammar. It’s not because they’re stupid but simply because they have to learn so much, that they reject everything in the end. That means that the best way to learn a second language is through acquisition (more or less the way children learn). Now, to become an “optimal user” you should learn some grammar at a point, but when? To me this is after you gained a ‘feeling’ for the language (in our case Spanish). Only then it’s time to read about grammar (but you shouldn’t try to memorize anything at this point), if you want to. You can be an “underuser” of grammar (like many natives) and live a happy life, speaking Spanish with fluency. However, an optimal user does look up things when in doubt (for example when writing something) and thus becoming a true optimal user. But still, pretty much every optimal user “edits” his language in one part of language production: writing. Only then he/she has the time to think and to apply. Generally, editing language doesn’t occur when speaking or listening (although “overusers” may also edit in these fields, limiting their fluency greatly).

To recap shortly. Is learning grammar a shortcut to fluency? NO. Can it help you later on if you want to become an “optimal user”? YES, but only if you really want to, and only after you gained a ‘feeling’ for what’s correct and what’s not.

Tagged as: Grammar, krashen, language acquisition, stephen d. krashen