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.