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This study grew out of the suspicion that contemporary students remain attached to the “traditional” methods of teaching and learning against which current trends in pedagogy are working. That is, as counterintuitive as it may seem in the context of increasingly pluralist pedagogy (which is to say, in a context where practical exigencies mandate that preponderant trends are methodologically opposed to historically dominant methods), it is nonetheless the case that the Atlas Complex continues powerfully to inform modes of learning. Although an analysis of this situation requires reference to the broad cultural-political socius within which learning takes place, it seems crucial for students of pedagogy to assess the tendentious play between the methods they deploy and the ingrained frameworks that those methods seek to dismantle. In short, pedagogy may be faced with the contradictory proposition that though our students are increasingly exposed to innovative modes of learning, these students might nevertheless resist such non-traditional modes, even when the students score well on tests within the new paradigms. This is a big proposition, beyond the scope of this study, and to be sure, much recent work in pedagogy is committed to at least registering this paradox, if not overcoming it, in its methods. This study supports such a project, and takes as its first step the identification of this central contradiction in the field of Second Language Acquisition. It asks, then, whether the Atlas Complex indeed continues to reign as a dominant horizon of student expectation. To answer this question, the instructors of level one German at UCLA have conducted an experiment in the fall of 2001. The experiment investigates (1) student opinion: do students prefer traditional or communicative methods? and (2) effectiveness of each respective method: do students achieve higher quiz scores after having learned grammar traditionally or communicatively? In all four German 1 classes, and in the same way in each class, one grammar lesson was taught using a traditional approach, followed by a quiz on the material that day. A few days later, another presentation of grammar was presented, this time using communicative methods, and was, as before, followed by a quiz. Meanwhile, students answered a questionnaire about their own learning preferences. This paper presents data that both demonstrate the effectiveness of the communicative method versus the traditional, and that take into consideration the standpoint of the students. In finding the contradiction between how students believe they learn most enjoyably and effectively and how they actually perform within different paradigms of learning, this study raised an important question about the role of the target language in grammar learning. But first, let us explain the experiment.
In order to get a sense of students’ own perceptions of how they believe they learn best, we devised a questionnaire asking students to characterize their views of how they like to be taught German grammar. The same survey was given to the [number of students?] in the four sections of fall quarter 2001 German 1 at UCLA. On the questionnaire, students indicated according to the categories of “greatly,” “fairly well,” “somewhat,” “very little,” and “not at all” whether they liked (1) lectures to be in English, (2) lectures to be in German, (3) partner activities, (4) group activities, and (5) drilling exercises; then, students indicated according to the same categories how important they think learning grammar is to (1) understanding written German, (2) understanding spoken German, (3) producing written German, and (4) producing spoken German. First, however, we asked students what they thought about grammar itself. Approximately 85% of the students answered “no” to whether they considered grammar “fun,” with about 62% claiming that it is “intriguing.” At the same time, however, over 80% said that grammar was “useful,” and about 85% considered it “necessary.” Almost 70% find the learning of grammar rules “definitely” crucial, and about 25% on top of that find grammar “fairly” crucial, for understanding written German. Similarly, 90% find learning grammar rules “definitely” crucial for producing written German. But even for understanding and producing spoken German, about 3/4 of students consider learning grammar rules “definitely” or “fairly” crucial. In short, students generally perceive grammar as a necessary and useful, though not fun, component of language learning.
The next step was to determine what students perceive to be the most effective and enjoyable modes of acquisition of grammar in the classroom. Students seemed to enjoy equally partner activities, group activities, and drilling exercises. But we find the starkest contrast in perceived enjoyment and effectiveness when asking students about the language of instruction. Over 80% of the students said they enjoyed when the instructor presented grammar in English, in contrast to the just over 35% who either greatly or fairly well enjoyed when the instructor presented grammar in German. Most of the students believed that the grammar lessons, moreover, were most effective when presented in English. Thus, according to this data, it seems that students believe that they enjoy learning and learn most effectively when presented grammar lessons in English.
Do students actually perform as well under the conditions that they perceive as the most enjoyable and effective? To find out, each TA presented two different grammar lessons—one according to a traditional grammar based approach, the other according to a communicative approach. After each lesson, the students took quizzes covering that day’s lesson. Though students may think they learn better when taught grammar traditionally (that is, when presented grammar in English, by an instructor standing in front of the class, explaining the forms, and then when drilled by that instructor), in fact their performance demonstrates otherwise. Whereas the mean quiz score on the first quiz (the traditional grammar lesson) was 69.7%, the mean on the second quiz (the communicative grammar lesson) was 81.3%.
The first lesson presented dependent word order in a “traditional” way. That is, the instructors spoke in English, telling the students how to form dependent clauses, providing some examples along the way. At the end of the lesson, students were asked to produce the newly presented forms on the spot. It was an instructor-centered lesson, to say the least. In order to evaluate how well students acquired the forms, they were given quizzes over the materials.
The second lesson, on the other hand, modeled upon the so-called communicative approach, presented the perfect tense. The instructors conducted this lesson in German. Class began with a brief description of what the instructor did over Thanksgiving break. Next, the instructors elicited yes/no responses from the students to questions about what the students did during the break. After this introduction to the perfect tense, the instructors imitated walking, running, jumping, sitting, and standing in the present and perfect tenses (“ich gehe,” “ich bin gegangen”), commanding afterwards with Total Physical Response to the glass to enact those movements and then having them say what they just did. The last activity of the class consisted of group work on an exercise in the textbook. At the end, as before, the students took a quiz over that lesson—scoring higher than on the first quiz.
In showing that students see their Second Language Acquisition interests best served by teacher-centered, rule-based grammar approaches taught in the first language, though they in fact score higher when learning via communicative methods—a seemingly central paradox within foreign language learning—we found that the antagonism between grammar based versus communicative approaches might actually be a red herring. To be sure, this experiment has demonstrated the effectiveness of communicative language learning, its superiority to traditional approaches to teaching grammar. But one of the most pressing issues today, nevertheless, might in fact concern the role of grammar within the communicative approach. Our study has shown that students perform rather well when grammar is taught communicatively and in the target language. Second Language Acquisition pedagogy should seek to develop methodologies that work to integrate the teaching of grammar in target languages into communicative approaches.
