Scott Thornbury
Teaching Grammar ‘at
The Point of Need’
Compare and contrast these two
approaches:
Teacher 1: ‘Today is Tuesday so
we’re going to do the present
perfect continuous.’
Teacher 2: ‘Tell me something I
don’t know, and I’ll help you to say
it better.’
OK. I’m exaggerating, but these
two approaches capture,
respectively, the difference
between ‘pre-emptive teaching’
and ‘reactive teaching’. In the
former, the teacher assumes that
there is something that the
learners don’t know, and the
teaching intervention is designed
to fill the gap. In the latter, the
teacher assumes that there is
something that the learners need
to say, and the teaching
intervention is designed to enable
them to do it. It is consistent with
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the view that, as Dave Willis
(1990: 128) puts it, ‘The creation of
meaning is the first stage of
learning. Refining the language
used is a later stage.’
A marvellous account of reactive
teaching applied to the teaching of
writing is At the Point of Need:
Teaching Basic and ESL Writers,
by Marie Wilson Nelson (1991).
This book deserves to be a
classic, not least because it’s
about more than simply the
teaching of writing. It makes a
convincing case for a pedagogy
that, rather than trying to secondguess and thereby pre-empt the
learners’ learning trajectory, is
entirely responsive to it: that is, a
pedagogy which is wholly driven
by the learners’ needs, as and
when they emerge. As Nancy
Martin writes, in the Foreword
(ibid.: ix):
The concept of teaching only at
the students’ perceived points of
need, and as they arise, presents
a different view of learning from
that of planned and sequenced
series of lessons. The former view
depends on recognition of the
power of the person’s intention as
the operating dynamic in writing –
and in learning.
The book describes a five-year
experiment at a college in the US,
where writing workshops were
offered to small groups of mixed
native-speaker and non-nativespeaker undergraduates, each
with a tutor, and where there was
no formal writing – or grammar, or
vocabulary – instruction. Instead,
the students (all of whom had
scored below a cut-off point on a
test of standard written English)
were – in the words of the program
publicity – invited to:
1. Choose topics that interest you and your group
2. Freewrite without worrying about correctness on the first
draft
3. Revise your freewrites. Your group will help you [...]
4. Learn to copy-edit your writing for publication.
Instead of pre-teaching or modelling the skills of writing, ‘this writing program was set up on a dynamic of
retrospective planning’ (ibid.: viii) whereby ‘the tutors found that the most acceptable and effective teaching
was to give the help the students asked for when they asked for it – that is, as the students perceived the
need’ (ibid.: ix).
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