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.

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 4: The Cat and the fish

[This is Part 4. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first]

In part 3, I explained how articles communicate vital information to enable the listener (or reader) to know whether to process some information as ‘new’ or ‘known’.

An obvious problem with this idea is that not all languages have articles. If articles are so vital, how come so many of the world’s languages manage perfectly well without them?

Well, I’d say that it’s the signalling function of articles that’s vital, not the actual articles themselves. I believe other languages signal the same distinction (between ‘new’ and ‘known’) using different tools.

Look at these sentences. Use your instinct to choose the best article for each gap.

[For simplicity, let’s ignore the possibility of Ø. Your options are a and the.]

• __ cat ate __ fish.
• __ fish was eaten by __ cat.

Image by joanna8555

Now, of course, you may protest that both a and the are possible in all four spaces. There’s no right and wrong answer, especially as I’ve provided no context whatsoever.

And yet … do you get the feeling that the first sentence feels a bit more natural as The cat ate a fish, and the second sentence feels better as The fish was eaten by a cat. In the first, it’s probably our pet cat that ate an anonymous fish. In the second, it’s more likely to have been our unfortunate pet fish that was eaten by an anonymous cat.

Why is that?

The reason is that there’s a universal tendency to put known information first and introduce new information later. I’m not just talking about languages here. Think about your favourite TV programme – a soap opera, say, or a chat show. When the programme starts, we hear the familiar music, see the usual presenter or the main characters, and perhaps there’s a reminder of what happened last time. Only then do they introduce the guests or new characters, or we learn something new. Known stuff first; new stuff later.

Or look back at what I did in my first paragraph above: I started this article by repeating something from part 3 first (known), before introducing the new topic of part 4 (new).

Language is the same. Almost every sentence we write or say starts with something known and then introduces the interesting news later in the sentence. Much of the grammatical juggling we do, from passive (The fish was eaten by a cat) to cleft sentences (What the cat ate was a fish / It was a fish that the cat ate), serves the purpose of moving interesting news away from the beginning of a sentence.

Now, I don’t speak every language, but I’m going to make an educated guess now. I think that same tendency exists in most, if not all, other languages. In other words, that vital distinction between new and known is primarily about word order.

In Polish, for example, which doesn’t have articles, it’s possible simply to switch the order of the subject and the object without the need for passive:

• Kot zjadł rybę. [cat ate fish]
• Rybę zjadł kot. [fish ate cat]

I’ve given a word-for-word translation in brackets, but in spite of these translations, both sentences have the same meaning. In both versions, it was the cat that did the eating. If you really wanted to say the The fish ate a cat, you’d have to say: 

• Ryba zjadła kota. (Or: Kota zjadła ryba)

An obvious problem with flipping word order like this is: how can you tell which is the subject and which is the object? That’s why my word-for-word translations didn’t really work. But if you look carefully at the Polish sentences above, you’ll see that the nouns change their form depending on whether they are the subject (kot, ryba) or object (kota, rybę). In Polish, even the verb sometimes changes, from zjadł to zjadła, to match the subject.

Now, as any learner of Polish can tell you (and I’ve been learning it since 1996), all these changes make it an incredibly difficult language to master. You could spend years studying all the different ways each word changes depending on the role it’s playing in the sentence (= its case).

The obvious question is: wouldn’t it be easier just to skip all the case endings and have a fixed word order instead? It would certainly make Polish much easier for poor non-natives like me to learn, but unfortunately, it would also mean that Polish lost a whole level of expressiveness. More specifically, it would be much more difficult to highlight whether information is new or known by moving things around in a sentence. And, as I’ve argued, that’s important.

I think this is actually a rather nice parallel. For Polish learners of English like Dorota, articles may seem pointless. For English learners of Polish like me, case endings may seem pointless. And yet both grammatical constructions serve a very similar function: to enable speakers to highlight new and known information, without losing the ability to distinguish between subjects and objects. English does it directly with new/known markers; Polish does it indirectly, with flexible word order as a middle step.

And actually, many of the world’s languages can be divided into those that have articles and (fairly) fixed word order, like English, French and Spanish, and those that have case endings and (fairly) free word order, like Polish and Russian. (I’m afraid I don’t know enough about other languages, especially non-European languages, to show how they fit in with this picture, but I’m guessing there are also parallels). German is unusual in that it has both articles and flexible word order, which seems a bit excessive, but at least it marks cases on the articles (der, den and dem, etc.) and not by changing the nouns themselves (at least, not much).

Now, of course English word order is not completely fixed. In fact, I demonstrated this earlier with my use of passive, and I also mentioned clefting as a way of moving things around. So articles are just one of several tools available to us to mark new/known, and usually we use two or more tools at the same time just to make sure (as in my cat/fish sentences above). And that’s what gives native English speakers the uncanny ability to spot mistakes with articles in non-natives’ writing: we notice clashes between word-order techniques and articles.

I suppose you could argue that these word-order techniques are enough by themselves, and that we don’t really need articles. Well, possibly. But there’s a limit to what you can do with word order, and it also gets very messy if you overuse passive and the like. What could be neater and more efficient than a couple of tiny words that explicitly mark new and known?

As you’ll have guessed by now, it all gets much more complicated than that. But I hope at last I’ve answered Dorota’s question. In the next parts, I’ll turn my attention to the way articles are traditionally taught in English classrooms … and I’ve got a lot of complaints!

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 3: The Brain is like a Computer

[This is Part 3. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1 and Part 2 first]

In part 2, I suggested that articles are signalling devices, a bit like indicators on a car. But what exactly are they signalling?

To explain, I’ll use a different image: a computer.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time working with MS Word. So whenever I start work in the morning, I have two fundamental options: I can either Open an existing document, in order to make some changes or add new text, or I can create a New document in order to start from scratch. Two options: Open and New.

1 and /.

Now, let’s think of your brain as something a little like a computer. As we go through life, we are constantly adding knowledge and experiences to our own memory banks. I have no idea how the brain works, but wouldn’t it be logical if it used the same two-way choice: open an existing file in memory in order to change it, or create a new memory file.

Image by nico.cavallotto

So let’s say you’ve got one file in your memory for every person you’ve ever met. You create a new file every time you meet someone for the first time, and open that file every time you meet that person again or learn some new information about them.

Of course, sometimes we get it wrong, and lose track of who we’ve met before. Some of the most embarrassing situations involve forgetting somebody that we should remember:

A: Oh, hello, my name’s Jeremy. Nice to meet you. 

B: Er … I sat next to you in yesterday’s meeting. Don’t you remember?

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone wore a badge, saying either ‘You know me’ or ‘I’m new’?

To come back to computers, in my job as an editor, I receive dozens of MS Word files via email from writers. For example, the author of one of the books I’m editing has sent me the first draft of unit 5. Another author has re-drafted a unit, based on my criticisms and recommendations of their first draft.

But because I receive so many files, I often lose track of what’s a first draft and what’s a later draft. For this reason, I ask authors to include markers in their file names: D1 for a first draft, D2 for a second draft, and so on. So I know immediately what to do with each document when it arrives.

Where is all this going? Well, one of the key functions of language – any language, not just English – is to pass information from one person’s brain to another person’s brain. During a conversation, that other person receives thousands of pieces of information, all of which needs to be processed in her brain-computer. Some of the information requires her to create a new file; some requires her to open an existing file and make changes to it.

And, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, this is where articles come in. The basic meaning of ‘the’ is ‘Open an existing file in your memory’. The basic meaning of a/an and Ø is ‘Create a new file’ or ‘Add new information’.

A / an / Ø =/.

The = 1.

Articles are the badges that say ‘You know me’ and ‘I’m new’. They’re the markers in file names equivalent to my D1 and D2 markers. They are what allows us to process huge amounts of information quickly so we know what to do with it. They are important!

Of course it all gets much more complicated when you look into the details, but that’s not a good place to start … and to finish part 3.

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 2: Articles and indicators

[This is Part 2. It'll make more sense if you read Part 1 first]

So … what’s the point of articles? The best way to think of them is like the indicator lights on your car. You use these to communicate three things: that you’re about to turn left, that you’re about to turn right, or that you’re planning to go straight on (signalled by not using the lights). 

	Image by JSFauxtaugraphy

There are three ways that this is a useful analogy. Firstly, think back to when you were learning to drive. Indicators were the easiest thing to forget. It was easy enough to use the steering wheel, and the pedals and gears were complicated but learnable. But when you’re concentrating on all those things, who has time to think about indicators?

Do they allow you to go faster? No. Do they make your life as a driver easier in any way? No. So what’s the point? If you think back to Dorota’s question in part 1, these were basically the same questions that she asked about articles. 

The answer to both questions, of course, is that indicators and articles aren’t there to help you, the driver / speaker. They’re there for the other drivers / listeners who have to work out your intentions and avoid crashes. I’ll explain this in much more detail as the series progresses.

Secondly, as I’ve just mentioned, non-use of indicator lights communicates an important message. In the same way, non-use of articles often communicates something very specific. That’s why we talk about three articles in English: a/an, the and Ø, where Ø is the zero article, i.e. the absence of an article. 

Thirdly, when we’re learning to drive, it doesn’t really matter if we forget to use indicators from time to time. We’re driving slowly enough, and there’s a big letter L on top of the car telling other drivers to expect us to make mistakes, and to take care around us. Learner English speakers don’t have L- plates, but they do tend to speak slowly and have quite strong accents, so it doesn’t really matter if they don’t use articles.

But think back to Dorota – she was extremely fluent and natural-sounding in English, so her non-use of articles was much more of a problem – like driving at 100 km/h with no indicators.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Here’s a summary of the main message communicated by each article and each indicator:

• left indicator / a/an: Watch out – I’m going to change direction.
• right indicator / Ø: Watch out – I’m going to change direction.
• no indicator / the: Don’t worry – I’m continuing in the same direction.

As you can see, skipping articles isn’t exactly like not using indicators. It’s like signalling right all the time. So Dorota was driving at 100 km/h with her right indicator flashing all the time. An accident waiting to happen. 

OK, so that’s the theory. I’ll bring this much more down to earth in part 3.

To be continued ...

The Grrrammar Guide to Articles Part 1: Dorota’s question

Many years ago, one of my colleagues came down to the factory in southern Poland where I was based, in order to teach an intensive English course with a manager called Dorota. Her level of English was incredible: she was extremely fluent and accurate, and didn’t seem to need an English course at all. By the end of day 1, my colleague was feeling bad: he felt that he hadn’t been able to teach her anything new during the whole day.

When I spoke to him at the end of day 2, however, he was feeling much better. He had identified Dorota’s main weakness in English. She never used articles (a/the). Dorota was Polish, and Polish people are well-known for having problems with articles; after all, there are no articles in Polish. But Dorota didn’t have a problem with articles – she simply didn’t use them at all.

So my colleague spent that evening photocopying whatever worksheets he could find that would help him teach Dorota about articles. There was a list of rules, there was a worksheet on articles and geographical names (e.g. __ Himalayas, __ Mount Everest) and a text with all the articles removed (e.g. My uncle is __ postman. He lives in __ small village in __ England). Armed with all these materials, how could he fail to teach her about articles and improve her English?

After day 3, I asked him how it had gone. “It was a disaster”, he said. She had refused to look at the rules, and hadn’t touched the worksheets. 

“As you said yourself, I speak very fluently and accurately”, she had explained to my colleague. “Everyone understands me. Why do I need articles? If I start worrying about which articles to use, it’ll slow me right down. It’ll make my English worse, not better. What purpose do they serve? How do they help me? If you can’t answer my question, I’m not going to learn your stupid, complicated rules”.

And that was the problem. My colleague couldn’t explain how articles would help her, and why she should even consider becoming less fluent in order to worry about these meaningless little words. That evening, he asked me for my advice, and I was also unable to answer Dorota’s question. 

But that wasn’t the end for me. I then worried about Dorota’s question for several years, and searched everywhere for an answer. Over the years, I’ve had quite a few insights into the purpose of articles and how they work – perhaps still not enough to satisfy Dorota, but I’d certainly be able to give her a sensible answer now. 

So that’s the purpose of this series of blog posts. Articles are one of the most misunderstood parts of English grammar. One day I hope to write a whole book about them. So be warned: this series could be quite long.

The Alps by coyote-agile

Isn't there more to articles than learning about names of mountain ranges?

To be continued ...

Welcome to Grrrammar

Welcome to my new blog, Grrrammar.

(I'm sure I'll regret the name when people can neither spell nor pronounce it, but ... I kind of like it).

As it says at the top, this is aimed at EFL teachers and learners who love grammar (or perhaps even those who hate it and want to soak up some of my enthusiasm).

I'll be honest - I love grammar. Thinking about it, reading about it, talking about it, writing about it. I've done quite a few conference presentations over the years on very simple topics like "What are articles for?", "My top ten grammar structures", and "Timelines and the English tense system". I tend to avoid methodology issues and just stick to the language issues. What always surprises me is how many teachers come to my presentations. I guess they like thinking about grammar too. Or perhaps they come looking for answers.

I don't claim to have all the answers. In fact, very often there are no definitive answers in the world of grammar; sometimes there are only strongly-held opinions.

What I do claim to have, on the other hand, is lots of questions. I'm the sort of person who, when the book says "in this example you can choose between past simple and past perfect - both are correct", wants to know "but why are they both correct? What's the difference? Help me choose."

So that's what I'll do for this blog - I'll raise lots of questions. I'll offer my own answers, on the understanding that my answers aren't necessarily any more valid than yours. I might be wrong, in which case please tell me.

I'm hoping you'll also have lots of questions. Many years ago, I ran a service at the British Council called the Language Doctor, where users from all over the world submitted grammar and learning questions, which I tried to answer. It was exhausting work (and unpaid), but the worst thing was that I'd spend an hour writing an answer that only one person ever saw. With this blog, I'd love to do something similar, but allow the whole world to see (and comment on) my answers.

I'm going to try to be disciplined and publish posts several times a week. I'll do that by keeping my posts very very short. My plan is to split every article into around three bite-sized posts. Hopefully I'll be able to feed any comments from parts 1 and 2 into part 3. That's the idea at least ...