I just need to do some more grammar exercises …

Who doesn’t know them? Textbook exercises for practicing your grammar where you have to find the missing word, chose the right answer or but scrambled words together into a legitimate sentence.

From my experience, many students have become hooked to completing such exercises. Many smartphone apps just offer a better platform to do countless of such exercises than a traditional textbook.

So, what is the problem?

First, we need to remind ourselves that the learning process is more successful, the more it reflects the reality somebody trains for. Pilot trainees that have access to a simulator are expected to have superior results than (hypothetically) those that would complete exercises on paper alone. Analogously, imagine someone wanting to become a word-class soccer player or pianist, and not playing on an actual field or practicing on a real piano, but working on a desk with a soccer or piano textbook. Those situations seem outrageously exaggerated and absurd. Nobody would expect outstanding results from that.

However, much of the language learning industry and actual practice at home is still in that mode. What are you training for? In reality, professional and private life, we use language mostly in audio form (speaking and listening), and our output are sentences crafted by ourselves spontaneously, fitting a specific situation.

Students practicing with grammar exercises mostly do this visually, they rarely use their own voice while completing them, and they almost never construct their own sentences.

The outcome of this is students spending hours over textbooks and apps, delegating actual speech production to a minor role in their practice.

Why is this so?

·        Exercises on paper or on a smartphone screen create the impression of doing something “serious” and “legitimate” – compared to just generating your own sentences;

·        It is much easier to check your answers in those exercises, than controlling grammar in “free” speech;

·        Because millions of other language students engage in them, you may feel that you are not alone: millions of other human beings cannot possibly be wrong (... especially if we are oblivious to history);

·        The publishing house or app company gives them an aura of authority: “developed by leading language experts from the X Institute for Y language”;

·        It offers a feeling of closure. You actually “finish” a concrete task, experience the pleasure of completing 10 out of 10 exercises. In our day to day speech, there rarely is this feeling that we said 10 out of 10 necessary sentences in a conversation. Even in our native language, we most often leave a conversation with the feeling we could have said so much more, or things so much differently;

·        Especially apps offer reinforcement: “Great. Everything was correct.” Or: “You now move to level XYZ”. As in lab experiments with small animals where they repeat behaviors desired buy the experimenter after being rewarded for pushing a lever in their cage, we sit there mesmerized longing for more and more reinforcement by the app. 

The same mechanisms are at work here, that make other smartphone apps and social media sites so addictive. Their goal is to keep you glued to the screen as long as possible, while you keep losing precious time to actually practicing your own speech spontaneously.

I do not want to say that those exercises are entirely without merits, that, as a byproduct, you do not learn a number of useful words and phrases. The greatest fault is losing time to do more meaningful exercises, and to have your learning process being directed by someone else, of studying reactively instead of proactively.

If you like the attitude of these articles, please check out my online courses : at the moment, German for Russian- and Romanian-speakers, as well as on goal-setting.

If you are interested in improving your English in the area of business presentations, I know of no better address than Tom Antion. Please check him out following this link.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

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About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

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