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Do rules help you learn a language?

I was a on a bus and I overheard three Spanish-speaking schoolgirls discussing their English
homework, coursebooks open on their laps. The conversation went something like this:

A: ¿El ‘present simple’, qué es el ‘present simple’? (The present simple – what’s the present
simple?)
B: Es para las cosas que siempre vas a hacer. (It’s for the things that you’re always going to
do.)
A: Pues, el ‘present continuous’ – ¿de qué se trata? (Well, the present continuous – what’s that
all about?)
C: Es para las cosas que tu haces una sola vez. Por ejemplo, ‘Yesterday I going shopping.’ (It’s
for the things you do only once. For example, ‘Yesterday I going shopping.’)
B: Y ¿’will’? (And ‘will’?)
A: Es para hablar del futuro, como ‘yo voy a ayudar a mis amigos.’ (It’s to talk about the future,
as in [in Spanish] ‘I’m going to help my friends.’)

These girls were in their mid-teens, I guessed, and had probably been doing three or four years
of English already – three or four years learning, and attempting to apply (but with such
conspicuous lack of success) some of the most basic rules of English grammar. Which led me
to wonder, what earthly good had these rules done them? And, more radically, what earthly
good are rules at all?

I’m not, of course, disputing the fact that language consists of certain patterns and regularities.
I’m simply sceptical of the value of teaching these regularities in the form of explicit rules.
Especially when the rules have so little obvious utility. As Chris Brumfit (2001: 29) wrote, ‘It is
common to believe that teaching the descriptive rules is to teach the means of generating the
behaviour itself.’ Clearly, this was not happening to the girls on the bus.

And it’s not just schoolgirls who find grammar rules hard to get their heads around. Some of the
best minds in the business are ‘grammatically challenged’. Take, for instance, the eminent
linguist Dick Schmidt, who recorded this classroom experience when learning Portuguese in
Brazil (Schmidt and Frota 1986: 258):

The class started off with a discussion of the imperfect vs perfect, with C [the teacher] eliciting
rules from the class. She ended up with more than a dozen rules on the board — which I am never
going to remember when I need them. I’m just going to think of it as background and foreground
and hope that I can get a feel for the rest of it.

Which he did – by heading out into the street and trying it on with the locals. The fact that some
learners, at least, dispense with rules entirely should give us pause. After all, if we take the
view that, as Nick Ellis (2007: 23) puts it, ‘language is not a collection of rules and target forms
to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes’, then surely
communication is the name of the game.

But what about accuracy? The argument that without knowledge of rules accuracy will be
compromised doesn’t hold much water either. As J. Hulstijn (1995: 383) remarks, ‘It is perfectly
well possible to focus learners’ attention on grammatical correctness without explicitly teaching
grammar.’ That is, after all, the function of feedback and correction.

And yet part of me can’t entirely dismiss the value of rules – or of some rules, at least – if for
no other reason than for their mnemonic value, like the mantra-like spelling rules we learn as
children and still invoke as adults: ‘i before e, except after c’. In support of this view, cognitive
scientists have studied the role that such memorized rules play in ‘self-scaffolding’ learned
routines, the frequent practice of which ‘enables the agent to develop genuine expertise and to
dispense with the rehearsal of the helpful mantra’ (Clark 2011: 48).

Moreover, taking a sociocultural perspective, might not grammar rules serve as a kind of
symbolic tool, providing learners with the means to regulate their own performance – a form of
‘private speech’, as it were? Isn’t Schmidt’s ‘rule of thumb’ (‘I’m just going to think of it as
background and foreground …’) an artefact that mediates his use – and ultimately his
acquisition – of Portuguese in the world?

Indeed, Lantolf and Thorne (2006: 291), acknowledging the importance that Vygotsky himself
credited ‘to well-articulated explicit knowledge as the object of instruction and learning’,
describe a number of studies of second language learners for whom self-verbalization of quite
sophisticated grammatical concepts seemed to assist in their subsequent internalization.

If this is the case, it may be that my three schoolgirl companions on the bus, immersed in the
process of jointly constructing knowledge out of explicit rules of grammar, were on the right
track, even if still a long way from their desired destination.

Questions for discussion

1. Has the conscious learning of rules helped you learn an additional language?

2. Are rules of form (e.g. ‘Add -er to an adjective to make a comparative’) easier and/or more
useful than rules of use (e.g. ‘Use the present perfect to talk about situations that happened in
the past but which have present relevance’)?

3. Is the problem not so much with rules, but with rules that are inaccurate or opaque, or that
involve unfamiliar terminology?

4. Are rules the problem, or is the problem one of rules in the absence of opportunities – or
incentives – to apply them?

5. Is the ability to learn and apply rules age-related? If so, from what age do rules start
becoming useful?

6. Are rules that learners have worked out themselves better than rules that they have been
given? Why?

7. Should we teach ‘rules of thumb’, even if we know that they are incomplete or even
inaccurate?

8. Is the problem with the word ‘rule’ itself and its associations with order, obedience,
regulations, and so on?

References
Brumfit, C. (2001) Individual Freedom in Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2011) Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Ellis, N. (2007) ‘Dynamic systems and SLA: The wood and the trees’, Bilingualism: Language
and Cognition, 10, 1.

Hulstijn, J. (1995) ‘Not all grammar rules are equal: Giving grammar instruction its proper place
in foreign language teaching’, in Schmidt, R. (ed.) Attention and Awareness in Foreign
Language Learning, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Lantolf, J. and Thorne, S. (2006) Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language
Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmidt R. and Frota, S. (1986) ‘Developing basic conversational ability in a second language:
A case study of an adult learner’, in Day, R. (ed.) Talking to learn: Conversation in a second
language, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/r-is-for-rules/