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
Scott Thornbury teaches on the MA TESOL program, both online
and on site, for The New School, New York, and is the author of a
number of prize-winning books on language and methodology. He
is a regular guest at ELTABB events. He is currently blogging The
(De-)Fossilization Diaries at www.scottthornburyblog.com
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 yo ԁ