I’ve chosen Headway Pre-Intermediate (2nd 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.
(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 ...)
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