The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 6: The Kites and Strings Trap

Let’s have a look at how a well-known coursebook teaches articles.

I’ve chosen Headway Pre-Intermediate (2^nd Edition) for two simple reasons. Firstly, it’s a great book. A lot of teachers make fun of Headway these days, but there’s no doubt that as a series it led the way for all other coursebooks that followed, and, to my mind, Pre-Int was the best in the series. I started using the first edition on my teacher training course back in 1996 (I remember it well: it was the unit on present perfect – an interview with a rock musician) and continued using it, intermittently, throughout my teaching career (I stopped teaching in 2010).

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s one of the only General English coursebooks that I have in my bookcase at home.

Because Headway was so influential, its treatment of grammar items has become something like a standard model that all later coursebooks have resembled. So although I’m going to quote from Headway now, the same criticisms could equally apply to many other coursebooks (including one or two that have my own name on the cover).

So let’s have a look at rules 1 and 2 from the grammar section at the back of Headway Pre-Int:

1. The indefinite article a or an is used with singular, countable nouns to refer to a thing or an idea for the first time.

2. The definite article the is used with singular and plural, countable and uncountable nouns when both the speaker and the listener know the thing or idea already.

After a couple more rules, we come to the first mention of the zero article (Ø) (which I’ll call rule 3 for simplicity):

3. There is no article before plural and uncountable nouns when talking about things in general.

There are a few more rules later, but it’s really these three that I want to focus on here.

Now, the thing that strikes me here is that these three rules make everything sound really complicated and confusing.

Look again at rule 2, for example, and just think about how much information is squashed into a single sentence. As experienced teachers or learners of English, we know that a noun can’t be both singular and plural, just as it can’t be both countable and uncountable (at least not at the same time), so technically, the rule should read ‘singular or plural, countable or uncountable nouns’. We also know that the concept of countability is connected to, but distinct from, the issue of plurality, and that these two concepts are independent of the distinction between new and known. But what is a poor pre-intermediate learner to make of all of these technical terms mixed up together?

The learner might ask, for example: Do we always use the with singular nouns, or only when we know the thing already? From rule 3, do we never use an article before plural and uncountable nouns (sorry, that should be plural or uncountable), or only when we talk about things in general?
Again, as teachers and advanced learners, we know the answers and they seem obvious. Our learners can even work out the answers by a process of elimination by carefully combining and comparing rules 1, 2 and 3. But I’d say the answers are far from obvious to someone seeing these rules for the first time.

We’ve actually got six separate dichotomies all tangled up together here: 

singular ←―――→ plural

countable ←―――→ uncountable

new ←―――→ known

general ←―――→ specific

things and ideas ←―――→ nouns

speakers ←―――→ listeners

That’s what I meant by calling this The Kites and Strings Trap: each of these dichotomies is like a kite string, with a kite on one end and a surfer at the other (at least in the picture). If you manage to keep the six strings separate, the kites will fly and it looks and feels great. But if you get the strings all tangled up with each other … well, everyone gets frustrated and wet.

Image by Mark J P

(I tried to find a picture of tangled kite strings, but for some reason people only tend to post photos of those rare moments when kites are untangled. So you’ll just have to imagine this scene as it will look ten seconds later, when the surfers get their strings tied up with each other.)

So let’s have a go at untangling the six strings in Headway.

The first one is fairly easy: speakers and listeners. Rule 2 above seems to suggest that both the speaker and listener need to know something already in order to allow the label ‘the’ to be applied. But that raises a tricky question: do they both need to know? What happens if only the speaker, or only the listener, knows the thing or idea?

But in fact, if you think about it, how often does a speaker talk about something without knowing what he/she is talking about? I’m not talking about people expressing uninformed opinions about world politics here, but simply things like whether something exists or not. If I say “I’ve got a kite”, this is news to the listener, not to me. My only reason for flipping from ‘a kite’ to ‘the kite’ is that I believe you, the listener, are aware of my kite. In other words, the speaker’s knowledge or lack of knowledge is irrelevant. As I discussed in part 2, it’s all about the listener.

To be more precise, it’s all about the speaker’s belief of the listener’s knowledge, because the speaker can’t actually see inside the listener’s head to check what he/she knows. But perhaps that’s a bit too subtle for pre-intermediate.

(To be fair to Headway, the roles are reversed in some questions. If I ask “Have you got a kite?”, it’s my lack of knowledge of your kite (or non-ownership of a kite) as a speaker that causes me to use ‘a’. But I think subtleties like this are better explained in terms of new and known information than in terms of speakers and listeners, which is why I’ve decided to cut away this string.)

The next string is also fairly easy to untangle. Headway talks about things (e.g. a cat) and ideas (e.g. a problem). There’s no grammatical reason to make this distinction: the same rules apply for both things and ideas. But unfortunately, there’s not really a better word to cover both things and ideas. A more precise term would be referent, but that sounds a bit too technical.

An obvious term to cover things and ideas would be noun, but in this case Headway is actually being very careful, because there really is a very important distinction between things and ideas (= referents) on the one hand and nouns on the other.

If I say “I’ve got a kite and you’ve got a kite”, it’s the same noun but a different referent: the two uses of the word kite refer to different things in the world. Issues of a/the come into play when we repeat referents (e.g. “I had a kite but she lost the kite”), not nouns. I’ll talk much more about referents, hopefully with better examples, in a later post.

The third string, general / specific, is so tangled up with the new/known string that most teachers and learners don’t seem to notice that they are actually very different things. Anyway, I’m going to treat them as a single string for now (called new  /known for simplicity), and try to untangle them in Part 7.

The next two strings, singular / plural and countable / uncountable, come apart quite easily: all nouns can be divided into countable and uncountable nouns, and each countable noun has two forms, singular and plural. (Of course there are complications here too, not least the nouns that can be either countable or uncountable. But that needn’t concern us in this post).

So we’re left with a three-way split on the one hand (singular / plural / uncountable), and a two-way split (new / known) on the other, with the proviso that we still need to untangle this from the general/specific string.

To me, the obvious thing to do with such an arrangement is to draw a table to show how these two splits interact:

Let’s see how that relates to our three rules from Headway:

1. The indefinite article a or an is used with singular, countable nouns to refer to a thing or an idea for the first time.

This is all covered by the yellow box.

2. The definite article the is used with singular and plural, countable and uncountable nouns when both the speaker and the listener know the thing or idea already.

This is all covered by the green boxes.

3. There is no article before plural and uncountable nouns when talking about things in general.

I’d love to say this is covered by the blue boxes, but … there’s still a bit more untangling ahead of us, which I’m saving for Part 7.

But I hope you’ll agree with me that:

a simple table is much, much easier for learners to understand than a series of tangled sentences.

(to be continued ...)

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles part 5: The How-and-Why Trap

Over the next six posts, I’ll focus on six traps that teachers of English and coursebook writers often fall into when we teach articles.
To give you a taster of what’s to come, here are the six traps:

1. The How-and-Why Trap
2. The Kites-and-Strings Trap
3. The Specific-and-General Trap
4. The French-and-English Trap
5. The Newspapers-and-Magazines Trap
6. The Fill-in-the-Blanks Trap

The first of these is easy – it’s basically the same point I’ve been making over the previous four posts, namely that:

We spend too much time worrying about how to use articles, and not enough time explaining why to use them.

Take a look at any coursebook section on articles. You’ll almost certainly see lots of sentences beginning with the phrases “We use a/an with …” or “We use the when …”. But you’re unlikely to see many sentences starting “We use articles in order to …” or “… because …”.

Hopefully I’ve covered the why-question in enough detail over the previous posts, so instead I’d like to focus here on why the How-and-Why Trap is so important.

Historically, perhaps it was reasonable to expect that learners of English wanted to learn to speak it like native speakers. In the old days, the why-question was easy to answer: you have to master articles because native speakers use them. End of discussion.

But these days, it’s less and less obvious that people are learning English in order to sound like native speakers. Many, perhaps most, learners of English simply need English to engage with the global community, in order to work or travel internationally – whether that means going to other countries or simply being connected to the world through the internet. Therefore the ‘because-native-speakers-use-them’ argument is much less convincing.

  Image by Ben Beiske

English no longer belongs to its native speakers; it is a global resource, like the internet, and native speakers like me can no longer dictate how other nationalities should use it. Clear, efficient communication may be a much more valid goal than the desire to sound like a native speaker – especially as native English speakers are often the least able to express themselves successfully in international communication.

(A common complaint in international organisations is that it’s easy to understand non-natives speaking English – the problem is trying to understand native speakers. Whose problem is this? The non-natives, who can communicate, or the natives, who can’t? Who is it that needs to adapt?)

Some years ago, I read an excellent book called “The Phonology ofEnglish as an International Language”. The book argued very persuasively that we need to reconsider what aspects of pronunciation we should teach and why. For example*, there is a tendency in native-speaker English for a consonant at the end of a word to link with the initial vowel of the next word, so a phrase like “Keep our eyes open” sounds more like “key pow rye zopen”. So, traditionally, teachers have drilled their learners to say things like “key pow rye zopen”, in an effort to help learners sound more native-like.

But surely it’s much more sensible to teach them to say “keep our eyes open”, clearly and distinctly, in order to maximise comprehensibility. Who cares how natives pronounce it?

Another thing teachers spend a lot of time teaching is /ð/ and /Ɵ/ – and learners around the world have struggled to make a sensible sound with their tongue sticking out over their teeth.

And yet … most speakers of Irish English, for whom English is often the first language, manage perfectly well without these sounds. In Irish English, ‘three’ is pronounced more or less the same as ‘tree’, for example, which is fine.

So if native speakers like these can manage without /ð/ and /Ɵ/, why force non-natives to use these sounds? I could go on: there are half a dozen tricky sounds in English that learners could easily do without.

As a grammar lover, the obvious question for me is: are there any grammar points that are equally redundant, things that we spend hours trying to hammer into our learners’ heads but which serve no useful purpose?

A very strong candidate for such a role is third person ‘s’ (3PS), which is basically just a relic from the days when English verbs had lots of endings. Teachers do indeed seem to spend a lot of time worrying about this, and yet learners continue making mistakes with it even at advanced level. There’s no danger of miscommunication if somebody says ‘he work’ instead of ‘he works’. So why not just let it go?

In fact, we’re probably not far away from a time when the majority of the world’s speakers of English say ‘he work’ instead of ‘he works’ – or at least a time when learners tell their teachers to stop correcting this meaningless mistake. (Actually, there’s a lot more I could say on this point – personally I’d be reluctant to give up on 3PS – but I’ll save that for another book!)

And then, … well, of course, there’s articles. We spend hours teaching them and yet they seem to serve no useful purpose, and learners never seem to master them. So why not let them go too? Again, this is a decision that many millions of speakers of English as an International Language have already taken.

Well, the problem, of course, is that I don’t think it’s true that articles serve no useful purpose. I think they’re incredibly important and useful, and English would be much worse off without them.

The reason they seem to serve no useful purpose is very much because of the How-and-Why Trap – if teachers and coursebook writers don’t bother to explain the purpose of articles, they are very likely to end up on the scrap-heap of useless native-speaker quirks, rejected by learners who are only interested in efficient international communication, along with ‘key pow rye zopen’, /ð/ and /Ɵ/, and third person ‘s’. And I think that would be a bad thing.

Unless we can persuade learners of English that articles are useful, they will simply stop using them or caring about them. Some people would welcome such a development. Others would argue that it’s inevitable – there’s no point fighting it. But perhaps there are a few others like me who believe that articles are actually worth trying to save.

The picture, by the way, shows a sign in China. I chose it for four reasons:

1. I wanted something that showed English in use as an international language. As an Englishman, I still find it mind-blowing that my own language is the one that appears on signs like this all over the world. (OK, so it’s not my language any more, but you know what I mean.)
2. I think it’s a beautiful view.
3. The sign contains mistakes, which made me smile. Of course, it’s not very fair for me to laugh at others trying to use my language, so perhaps instead of laughing at such things I should instead be humbled by the fact that someone in China has made the effort to try to communicate in my language. And in fact, the communication is very effective – no-one is likely to misunderstand the message of the sign, which is more than can be said for some signs made by native English speakers.
4. The mistake on the sign involves articles. At first it seems amusing that the sign writer made a mistake as basic as not knowing that usually articles go with nouns, not adjectives. And yet … do we ever bother to teach that articles go with nouns, not adjectives? If you look at a coursebook, you’ll find all sorts of advice about trivial details, but not much by way of big rules like that.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the balance between big rules and trivia in the next few posts. I’ll also come back to specific rules for articles with adjectives later.

*The examples are my own, based on my interpretation and memories of the book.