You will know from other posts, that my favourite metaphor for learning languages is the snowball. And that I have adopted Scott Thornbury's omelette metaphor as a critique of the synthetic grammar syllabus. In this post I will use the example of teaching er verbs in the present tense to show how they might approach a specific topic differently. And I have a sneaking suspicion that at some point I will also hint that they may not be so different. As long as you don't throw omelettes or eat snowballs...
The omelette metaphor is a biased one. It is a cruel metaphor for something that is supposed not to work. To show the error of an approach and even to ridicule it. I can partly pass the blame for that onto Scott Thornbury but also it does have a more positive side which I haven't seen him put forward, but which is implied in his metaphor. It is the idea that a synthetic grammar syllabus is created by taking the complete linguistic grammar system and chopping it up into little bits for the learner. It's as if you were teaching someone to make an omelette by taking a cold dead omelette, chopping it up, and asking the learner to reassemble it into an omelette. That's not how you make an omelette. And here is the implied counter metaphor: You make an omelette by cooking raw ingredients. With the attention on what is happening in the pan, not on a recipe. And certainly not out of cold omelette pieces.
The snowball metaphor is my favourite, so I am clearly biased. It's the idea that an even covering of snow will have melted by the next day. The learner has to actively grab hold of language that sticks together, make it their own, have some fun with it. This will not only stop it melting, but more and more language will stick to the snowball, making it bigger and bigger.
Let's look at how this might affect your thinking if you are teaching the present tense of er verbs in French.
A synthetic grammar approach is one which selects and sequences the language in order to conceptualise and practise the components of the linguistic system. So if you were teaching er verbs, your primary concern would be for pupils to know the endings. It would be important to you that your pupils as putative linguists would understand the paradigm of the persons of the verb and the importance of correctly inflecting the verb to match the subject pronoun. You might start by giving a table of the verb endings. You would have to emphasise which ones are silent and which ones are pronounced. You could then give exercises to make sure that pupils have to make decisions as to which ending to use, practising getting it right.
There are several pitfalls you will have to negotiate. Firstly with an emphasis on correct endings, you may find that the difference between the written and spoken forms of tu manges and ils mangent becomes an issue. You might blame the nature of the French language for this rather than your approach. And that might be a mistake. You may find that pupils can do an exercise correctly but don't incorporate the knowledge into the language they can deploy for themselves to create meaning. And you may decide that that doesn't matter because pupils at this novice stage shouldn't be required to express themselves. And that also may be a mistake. You may find that you come back a month later and find like the snow that the knowledge has melted away. And you may decide to mix your metaphors and that what is required is to force-feed them some more cold omelette.
How would the snowball approach be different? Time to mix metaphors again, I'm afraid. The snowball approach would be concerned not with chopping up the linguistic system of the grammar omelette. It would be concerned with cooking the raw ingredients. Growing the pupils' snowball. Above all it would be taking care that new knowledge sticks to the existing snowball, that the ingredients are coming together to make something edible and tasty.
So maybe teaching the present tense of er verbs would look something like this... Pupils are already good at saying what foods they like and don't like. The sort of thing they might do next is to ask other people what they like to eat. And to report back on who likes what. In spoken French, there are no endings to learn for I like, do you like, he likes, she likes, they like. It is just the pronoun or the person's name and aime. You can even do we like if you use on. Pupils can get good at using this in spoken French, using their language to ask, answer and report on food likes and dislikes. Once that knowledge starts to stick to the snowball, once the mixture starts to cook, then you can decide to bring in the written form of the endings. And if pupils are writing nice paragraphs comparing what different people like and don't like to eat, and some of their written endings get missed, then that's not a disaster. Because it's not your primary concern. Because you know they have cooked something pretty tasty for now, and they can cook something more fancy as their skills develop. Oh. And once they've mastered using the verb aimer, they can branch out into manger, saying who eats/doesn't eat what. Whereas the chopped up grammar approach would avoid the verb manger because it's "irregular" in the nous form. (Actually it's not irregular. The whole point of the silent e is to preserve the perfectly regular pattern.)
Another thing would be to ask why the pupils are learning the endings of er verbs. If the answer is because it's obvious they need to, then that is the chopped up omelette talking. If you look at it from the pupils' snowball point of view, what makes a sticky useful snowball isn't quite as obvious.
Our KS3 curriculum works on pupils being able to develop answers more and more spontaneously and coherently along the lines of I like to live in my town because I can see my friends and go to the park to play football, but if I want to see a film I have to go to Dereham because there isn't a cinema in my village... If we are going to add third person to that, we need to think carefully about how it is going to fit. In another post I introduce another metaphor - language learning as football - to make this happen. To summarise, we make it a rule that if you mention someone else ("my friends" in the example above) then you deploy a he/she/they/we with a conjugated verb. I like to live in my town because I can see my friends. We play football in the park but... This is also a key ingredient in the way we move to more complex narration, setting up a conflict of opinion; for example in the aquarium story. The focus is on what pupils can do with their language, not on what they know.
You may be thinking that the snowball approach is being as prescriptive as the omelette approach in getting pupils to use certain language points rather than to express themselves. For example in giving pupils routines to follow in order to deploy their language to tell stories. I think the answer to this is that pupils' focus is always on saying things, not on the form of the language. In the world of cold omelettes, this is a problem because pupils get things wrong. In the world of a big snowball, it's all part of pupils hoovering up more and more language and making it their own and having fun with it.
From the pupils' point of view, language isn't a neatly ordered complete system. It's messy and unknown. They are more interested in meaning and saying things than on the links, rules and patterns. Language links to the real world of meaning, as well as the internal links of grammar. We don't want pupils who have nothing to say and don't want to try to say things. It's our job to show them how grammar and patterns mean they can say more and more things. And they will always push the limitations of their language, because they cannot know the ways in which French will be different from their own language.
I do think though, that the approaches have things in common. The return to fashion of a synthetic grammar approach is a reaction to the kind of functional syllabus we saw in the 1990s, where pupils were taught to say things. A collection of things they could say. With supposedly little conceptualisation or explicit teaching of grammar. Both the snowball and the omelette approach want to avoid this. They want pupils to accumulate grammar step by step and in small pieces. The difference is that one approach focuses on the language and chops it up and gives it to the pupils because they ought to be learning it. The other focuses on what the learners know and can do with the language, and seeks to develop it.
