Adapting and Writing Language Lessons/Chapter 5

by Earl W. Stevick

CHAPTER 5

LEARNER'S SYNOPSES

The mythological antagonist of 'modern' systems of language teaching was the 'grammar and translation method.' By this method, students were given words to memorize, and rules to operate. Having done so, they at once demonstrated and developed their knowledge of the language by translating lists of sentences, and finally by translating authors. The crucial element, however, was mastery of grammar. It was not for nothing that grammar schools were called 'grammar schools.' The crowning achievement in language study by this method was to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest an entire reference grammar.

It is not surprising that in reacting against the grammar and translation method, many language teachers became impatient either with translation, or with instruction in grammar, or with both. Rules, they said, if presented at all, should be ad hoc, derived inductively by the students from their own recent experiences with the language. This approach produced large numbers of courses with individual 'grammar notes' scattered throughout their contents. Sometimes the notes were of minimal quality, and sometimes they were brilliantly written, but they were never easy for the student to relate to one another. More recently, as we noted in Chapter 1, there has been a revival of willingness to appeal directly to the full range of the student's intellectual powers. Teachers who are of this persuasion believe that they may properly explain structure on any scale or any level of abstractness.that suits their purposes, and that they may do so before, during, or after the student's direct experience with examples, and that they may expect the student to make some deductive application of the rules.

The fifth assumption that underlies the modular approach is 'pluralism': 'If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing in at least two ways.' In fact, it seems to be the case that if a word or a sound or a grammatical relationship is to be retained at all, it must be met with and studied from at least two points of of view. The coherent picture of structure afforded by a reference grammar, and the immediate linkage of individual qrammar points with individual instances in meaningful discourse, both should be available. The problem is how to combine them.

One solution to this problem may lie in a 'learner's synopsis' of the language. Like a reference grammar, a learner's synopsis presents an organized view of the total grammar of the target language. It differs from a reference grammar in that it is shorter and less detailed. A student requires so much time to go through an ordinary reference grammar that he cannot form a general view ('syn-opsis') of the whole. The proposed format is therefore limited to perhaps 3000 running words (exclusive of examples), and covers only enough of the details to account for perhaps 95% of the problems (by text frequency) that the student will meet.

A good reference grammar aims at 99% coverage, but the extra 4% may quadruple the length and difficulty of the treatment, and the 'reference' grammar may be too cumbersome for ordinary students to refer to.

Gage (1970, p.3) recognizes that fa compact overview can serve as…a sort of road map to orient the more sophisticated learner to what to expect in his studies,' and goes on to suggest (p.5) that 'the development of students' structural synopses is perhaps the most rewarding direction for efforts to supply aid to students of neglected languages in the near future…Considerable benefit for the learnerscan be expected from a project of rather manageable scope…In spite of the great need for dictionaries, it is at least questionable that the benefit to students per man-year invested in one is as great as that obtainable from structural synopses.'

Another advantage of the synopsis format is that it lends itself to pseudo-self-instructional treatment. It need not stop with presenting examples for each point, as a reference grammar does. It can provide opportunities, within a very limited vocabulary, for the student to test his understanding of what he has read, and it can do this at the end of every paragraph. It may do so by matching each set of examples with one or more self-testing frames. In the Swahili synopsis (Appendix N, PP.272-283) the self-testing frames are on the right-hand pages, opposite the corresponding sections of the synopsis on the left-hand pages. In the Kirundi synopsis (Appendix O, pp. 284-309), they are enclosed in boxes.

A suggested procedure for constructing a learner's synopsis is the following:

1. Write a connected essay on the structure of the language, with no examples. There are two reasons for omitting examples this step: (a) It is easier to be sure of the continuity of the exposition, and (b) the exposition will be less dependent on specific examples.
3. Break this essay up at every point where examples ought to be inserted. Assign a number to each such section. These section numbers will be available for cross-referencing from lesson materials of various kinds. (A Swahili synopsis that has been brought to this stage is found in Appendix N, pp. 261-271.)
4. Choose some one field of interest from which to draw a small amount of content vocabulary. One might in fact choose two or more such fields, and produce two or more parallel versions of the same synopsis, each within its own small vocabulary. (In the Swahili example on p.389, the principal topic is 'meetings, as reported in the press.')
5. Prepare a full set of examples for each field chosen in step 3.
6. Insert the examples into the essay at the points marked in step 2, and type the result onto what are to be the left-hand pages of the finished synopsis. (The Thai example [Appendix M , pp. 235-256] has been carried to this point.
7. For each section, prepare self-test1ng frames of approximately the same length in column-inches as the section itself. Put these on the right-hand pages. (The Swahili example on pp. 272-283 illustrates this format.
8. Add any interpretive material that seems desirable.(An example is the opening paragraphs,of the Thai synopsis [Appendix M, pp. 235-237].)