Rules, Patterns and Words by Dave Willis

Readability

How did everyone find this book?

I found the beginning really interesting, and the end really interesting, but I found the middle a hard slog.  

I really liked the beginning.  I thought the tone was personal, and even a bit humorous in places.  I liked the personal anecdotes.  I liked the comment about how the exam writers always tested question tags “for reasons best known only to themselves”.  And I found his comments about how elementary mistakes persist even into advanced levels to be not only interesting, but also very true.

I also really liked the end.  I had never really thought about the grammar of  speech before, and I thought it was very interesting to think about.  How interesting that most of our grammar rules come from written English, and not spoken English, even though speech is so much more common than writing.

I found the middle interesting in the abstract--his point about how lexis determines the grammar of the sentence was something I had never really thought about before.  But in the details I found it hard to stay focused.  My eyes glazed over a lot when I was reading the middle sections, and I really had to struggle to stay focused.

Your thoughts?

The Main Point of the Book

        I think I’ve got a bit of a “can’t see the forest for the trees” problem with this book.  I understood each section well enough when I was reading it, but I’m struggling a little bit to tie the whole book together into one theme.  

        After finishing the book, I’ve identified 3 things that have stayed in my mind.  (Not necessarily the main points, but just the 3 things that have struck me.)

1). Students can’t be expected to spontaneously produce language upon their first exposure to it.  So this is problematic for PPP style lessons, Instead of the PPP model, Willis is advocating an alternative model of Improvisation, recognition, rehearsal, system building, exploration, consolidation, and then finally spontaneous use.  (Spread out over several lessons).

2) The lexis of the sentence determines the grammar, so we should concentrate on teaching word patterns instead of only teaching verb tenses.

3) Most of the grammar rules we teach apply only to written English, not spoken English.  Students who only learn the grammar rules of written English may have trouble comprehending authentic spoken language, so we  need to expose our students to authentic spoken language more.

        How these all tie together I’m not exactly sure.  Do they all tie together?  Did I miss anything?  Your thoughts?

Other Thoughts

(In no particular order, here are some other thoughts, questions, and concerns I have about this book.)

• It seems like this book is aimed more at textbook writers and curriculum designers than day to day teachers.  How much control do we as teachers have over what the syllabus focuses on?
• Related to the above point.  I think it is possible to supplement our textbooks with some of the activities Dave Willis suggests if we prepare supplementary materials ourselves.  But how realistic is this to do?

                In my own experience, I have a bad habit of being captivated by whatever book I’ve read last.  After reading The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis, I tried to supplement my classes with a lot of lexical and vocab work.  But it was a lot of work trying to design everything, and increased my preparation time by about 30-40 minutes for each class. This added up over the course of a week, and I burned out on it after a few months.  

                Unfortunately teaching can be a very high burnout profession, and I think the key to surviving is always trying to find ways to minimize your workload, not increase it.  The easiest thing to do is just to follow the curriculum the way the textbook writers have designed it.  If you spend a lot of time trying to fight the textbook, you’re going to make your job a lot harder.  

                In that respect, even though I think there are a lot of good ideas in here, I’m not sure it’s practical for us to implement them.  Your thoughts?

• Although all that being said, I did actually design one worksheet recently that was kind of inspired by the ideas in this book.  Link here.  I’m not sure if Dave Willis would have approved exactly, but I tried to follow Dave Willis advice of using authentic material, and of trying to have some sort of sorting activity to draw students attention to which words can be followed by the “to infinitive”.

• I get the impression Dave Willis is writing only about adult students.  I’m not sure there’s anything we can take away from here to use in our children’s classes.  Or am I missing something.  Your thoughts?

• Another practical problem: in my own experience I find it almost impossible to get students to do homework outside of class.  Even with adult students--Especially with adult students.

                I get the impression that much Dave Willis approach is based on the assumption that students are doing a lot of studying outside of the classroom.

                For example, one component of his approach is that “ample exposure to spoken and written texts to provide opportunities for learners to explore language for themselves.” (p.215)  But how can we provide ample exposure to the this during only 4 hours a week?  We can encourage students to read outside of class, but in my experience most of them don’t.

                Willis also seems to believe that the key to learning is the acquisition of lexis (and recognition of the sentence patterns associated with it).  But I’ve struggled with this in my classes.  It’s easy enough to present students with lexis, but it’s very hard to get it into their long-term memory.  Again, mainly because they just don’t do their homework.  Vocabulary journals are where words go to die, and none of the students do the quizlet practices I make for them.

• More thoughts on P-P-P.  It seems that Willis’s approach is in contradiction to the PPP approach, because he believes it’s unrealistic to expect students to use a grammar point in spontaneous production in the same lesson they are first exposed to it.

Although one thing I’ve picked up at company workshops (which wasn’t made clear in my CELTA) is that students should not be forced to use the target language during their free production--it should just be a fluency practice in which they can use the target language if they want to, and not use it if they don’t want to.

                Have I got that right?  And if so, are most teachers aware of this?  (I’ve talked to at least a couple teachers who felt that their lesson failed because the students couldn’t use the target language correctly in the fluency practice.)