Occasionally, language students come to us with a specific request: to study grammar intensively. At The Ways 2 Teach, our company, we don’t teach grammar. And Thomas, our certified foreign language teacher of almost 15 years, has never emphasized grammar in his classes. This hasn’t stopped his students from achieving excellent results. If there’s one piece of advice to remember, it’s this: you don’t need to study grammar to learn a new language.
The myth about mastering grammar
The widely-held idea that you need to know or understand all the rules of grammar to be fluent in a language is false. Many are those who do not know the grammar rules of their own language. The most important thing is to be able to communicate effectively.
When you’re trying to learn or improve your French/English, you may be tempted to pick up any grammar book or method sold on the net and study them. In fact, you’ve probably already studied French/English grammar at school for many years, but your skills in this other language are virtually non-existent. Does studying grammar really improve your language learning? Should you study grammar when you’re trying to learn a new language? My answer is: no.
Your own experience, and that of thousands of foreign language learners, highlights a whole host of brilliantly failed language teaching methodologies and misconceptions about how we acquire a language. Remember, it’s not by studying the grammar of your own language that you have become a fluent speaker. Long before the age of six, you were already fluent in your mother tongue. You knew how to use verbs in different tenses before you even knew what a verb was, even more so if your parents read you good stories. Toddlers begin to use complex phrases and vocabulary on their own, without ever having received explicit instruction or memorized grammar rules.
Language acquisition: a natural process
In France, we begin to study more complex grammar in junior high school, which means we’ve already spent 12 years practicing our language every day. But do we actually retain and understand all the grammar rules we learned at school? Absolutely not, and unless you’re an academic who likes to dissect texts in a technical way, grammar is far from being part of our daily lives. In France, many adults still don’t know how to agree the past participle with avoir or être, or haven’t mastered certain grammatical rules, despite having studied them at length during their studies. Yes, grammar has its importance, particularly in the mastery of a beautifully written language, but in my opinion, if it’s not put into practice straight away, it’s useless in itself.
I recognize that learning a new language as an adult comes with a certain handicap, brought on by years of directed school learning, but if we agree to de-condition ourselves and consider the way we learned our first language in childhood without effort, the learning journey will be all the more enjoyable and efficient. To give you an idea, we can divide the language acquisition process into five stages:
- Pre-production: also known as the silent period, this first stage is characterized by learners having a receptive vocabulary of up to 500 words, but not yet speaking the language. It’s worth noting that not all learners go through a silent period; some start speaking immediately, although their output may consist of imitation rather than creative use of the language. For learners who do go through a period of silence, this can last from three to six months.
- Early production: at this second stage, learners can express themselves in short sentences of one or two words. They can also memorize fragments of the language, even if they make mistakes when using them. Learners generally have an active, receptive vocabulary of around 1,000 words. This stage normally lasts about six months.
- Speech emergence: at this stage, learners’ vocabularies increase to around 3,000 words, and they can communicate using simple questions and sentences. They can often make grammatical errors.
- Intermediate fluency: The fourth stage is intermediate fluency. At this stage, learners have a vocabulary of around 6,000 words and can use more complex sentence structures. They are also able to share their thoughts and opinions, although they may make frequent mistakes with more complicated sentence structures.
- Advanced proficiency: this final stage is advanced proficiency, generally achieved between five and ten years of language learning. At this stage, learners can function at a level close to that of native speakers. In the case of our three children, who began immersion at birth, our two eldest reached this last stage around the age of nine or ten, when they began long novels to read independently both in English and French.
These milestones shouldn’t discourage you; on the contrary, they should encourage you to focus on the process rather than the goal.
Reading vs. grammar
As we’ve just seen, children learn grammar by listening to and gradually repeating the sounds they hear, starting with isolated words and gradually moving on to small sentences. Of course, there are plenty of mistakes along the way, but without mistakes, there’s no learning possible. They simply repeat what they hear and, over time, through constant exposure, they correct themselves. If you’ve learned your language and its grammar this way, why not do it again for another language?
Believe me, one of the main reasons why many educational systems around the world fail to produce students capable of speaking a foreign language correctly is the emphasis placed on learning grammar as the basis for oral expression.
Take my children, for example. Until now, they’ve never really studied French or English grammar, two languages they read and speak fluently, with a rich and complex vocabulary, without ever having taken a single course. For them, there are no tables of verbs, conjugation or syntax. Nor have they memorized vocabulary lists. And yet, they write with few mistakes or syntax errors and make steady progress.
What has enabled me and my children to develop the gift of speech and writing in two languages is the importance given to listening and reading and all the arts that go with it. This began with the stories we were told as children, and continued with independent reading. I started reading at the age of five and soon became an assiduous independent reader, lucky enough to have access to a wide variety of quality literature, rich in vocabulary, poetry, style, humor and wordplay. Later, I studied theater and developed a true love for words.
Writing doesn’t require a degree, just passion and practice.
As an author, I write daily in French and English with few or no mistakes, using complex structures, figures of speech and a wide range of vocabulary. Yet as a child, I hated grammar lessons and can’t remember ever getting a good mark in the subject; what I preferred was writing. I never liked memorizing concepts I couldn’t yet apply.
For me, grammar is a tool for those who already know how to handle their language very well. The requirements of written language are very different from those of spoken language, and it’s essential to understand this. In written language, different genres require different approaches – legal texts are not written like poems or novels.
Fluency vs. grammatical mastery
At university, my classmates may have had a better grasp of English grammar than I did, but they studied great texts without ever grasping the spirit of them, barely expressing themselves in the target language and struggling to grasp its subtleties. Before joining the university, I had already lived and studied in the United States for five years, which had given me something they didn’t have, a real knowledge of the language and its culture.
I strongly recommend that you start by listening to a language, then gradually build up the confidence to speak it, first by making mistakes, then by getting better and better. The difficulties you encounter will encourage you to ask the right questions and seek the right answers. Once you’ve mastered the language, move on to reading – starting with small texts, but always focusing on the beautiful, the rich and the complex. Then delve into the great works of literature. Only then can you begin to write more elegant and profound texts, using grammar as a tool that you pull out when you need it.
Grammar has its place in language acquisition, but you don’t have to learn or know all the rules. It can even be counterproductive, making learning a new language much harder than it needs to be. Concentrate on learning the grammar you need, when you need it. That way you’ll learn something concrete, practical and unforgettable.
The pitfall of overemphasizing grammar
Last but not least, there’s the urgent need to know everything. Our curiosity drives us to want to know all the details right away. Sometimes, language students insist on the grammatical characteristics of their target language, thinking that this will improve their command of it. What’s the reason for this verb being conjugated this way, that tense being used that way? It doesn’t matter, and sometimes I don’t even know the answer and have to look it up. Accept that you don’t know everything right away. Move on. Knowing this information won’t make you a better speaker. All you’re doing is hindering your progress towards fluency by focusing on details that you’ll learn automatically over time. Focus on the meaning and function of what you’re saying. As you learn, you’ll come to understand the meaning of what you’re saying. Just like when you read a novel, you come across unfamiliar words, but you don’t look them up in a dictionary – it’s the context that helps you understand those words.
Things to remember
Approach learning a new language through the things you love, the things that interest you, and remember that you didn’t start learning your first language by studying grammar. You learned by listening to the people around you talk. Once you’ve reached a certain level of fluency, you can concentrate on studying grammar. It’s hard to perfect a language you don’t yet fully understand and use. Being bilingual isn’t just about saying hello or talking about the weather, it’s also about knowing cultural references, slang and all the dimensions of a language. So focus on the pleasure of discovering and learning, and be consistent. Keeping a positive attitude and appreciating the slow pace of the process is the best way to succeed, and if you persevere, you’ll be having conversations in your chosen language before you know it.
At The Ways 2 Teach, we believe that the key to language acquisition lies in engaging and meaningful practice rather than rote memorization of grammar rules. When they focus on listening and speaking, with consistency and perseverance, all our students, without exception, gain confidence and fluency, enabling them to use the language naturally and effectively. If you’d like to find out more about our approach, or if you have any questions about raising multilingual children, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We offer personalized courses tailored to your needs, and are always on hand to offer advice and assistance.