Second language learning: Fluency in complex sentences?
March 5, 2021 11:10 AM Subscribe
I volunteer as a tutor of conversational English (I'm not a trained ESL teacher). The learner I work with has very good English skills and she has a job requiring her to use English. She's expressed that her chief challenge is constructing complex sentences on the fly. What activities are good for building fluency in complex sentences (e.g. conditional, indirect speech)
I totally get the problem, since I'm an advanced intermediate learner of another language and past conditionals, etc. are a time that I totally have to stop and work out the verb tenses. ("I wish that I... had known or I have, no, would have... told you.") It's a real barrier to fluency.
She says that she has studied a lot of grammar but needs help applying it. I think her theoretical grammar's a bit weaker than she thinks and I've found modeling sentences useful, but the goal of the lessons isn't to do grammar worksheets.
I've done a lot of asking questions about hypotheticals, both past and present. I find that the asking questions and answering them thing tends to lead to her saying one sentence in the conditional, and then a longer chat in the present. I want to think of activities that motivate her to use the complex sentence structures she needs to at work, e.g. reporting on what people tell her to a third party, bouncing back and forth in time.
Role play? I hate it with a fiery passion myself, because it changes the dynamic from wanting to communicate to having to find something to say, but I can imagine it being useful for someone who doesn't have the same terror of performing that I do.
Other ideas? I'd also appreciate any professional terminology I can use to find ideas online. When I search by grammatical concept, I get... grammar worksheets.
I totally get the problem, since I'm an advanced intermediate learner of another language and past conditionals, etc. are a time that I totally have to stop and work out the verb tenses. ("I wish that I... had known or I have, no, would have... told you.") It's a real barrier to fluency.
She says that she has studied a lot of grammar but needs help applying it. I think her theoretical grammar's a bit weaker than she thinks and I've found modeling sentences useful, but the goal of the lessons isn't to do grammar worksheets.
I've done a lot of asking questions about hypotheticals, both past and present. I find that the asking questions and answering them thing tends to lead to her saying one sentence in the conditional, and then a longer chat in the present. I want to think of activities that motivate her to use the complex sentence structures she needs to at work, e.g. reporting on what people tell her to a third party, bouncing back and forth in time.
Role play? I hate it with a fiery passion myself, because it changes the dynamic from wanting to communicate to having to find something to say, but I can imagine it being useful for someone who doesn't have the same terror of performing that I do.
Other ideas? I'd also appreciate any professional terminology I can use to find ideas online. When I search by grammatical concept, I get... grammar worksheets.
I feel that free-form exercises can often overtax the brain by making it try to process vocabulary, verb tenses, and syntax all at once.
So: select a scenario and nail down the vocabulary, then do theme and variation conversations about it. Familiar scenarios in a dialogue activates the emotions which help in learning.
For example, a train station. First, have a list of all the vocab needed: ticket, conductor, train, arrival, etc.
Then have a conversation about decisions: I only have Euros, should I exchange it for Swiss francs or use the credit card? If I use a credit card, might there not be fees? This train leaves in the morning, but it is the slow train. If we take the later train, we can eat first. I'm waiting for my friend to call. If she calls in the next 10 minutes, maybe it would be better to wait for her. If she brings her friend, would we be able to sit together?
posted by dum spiro spero at 12:45 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
So: select a scenario and nail down the vocabulary, then do theme and variation conversations about it. Familiar scenarios in a dialogue activates the emotions which help in learning.
For example, a train station. First, have a list of all the vocab needed: ticket, conductor, train, arrival, etc.
Then have a conversation about decisions: I only have Euros, should I exchange it for Swiss francs or use the credit card? If I use a credit card, might there not be fees? This train leaves in the morning, but it is the slow train. If we take the later train, we can eat first. I'm waiting for my friend to call. If she calls in the next 10 minutes, maybe it would be better to wait for her. If she brings her friend, would we be able to sit together?
posted by dum spiro spero at 12:45 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is something I like about "The Michel Thomas Method ". They start with simple sentences and then they piece them together. So you would learn "I wish" and "I had known" in various conjugations, and "I would have" combined with phrases you already know and then combine them in various ways.
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:20 PM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:20 PM on March 5, 2021 [2 favorites]
A lot of complex sentences are a few simple sentences (or sentence chunks) slotted into a frame. The frame can be simple or complicated: "If I could X, I would Y." "If only A had happened, B wouldn't have." "Now that P, rather than Q or R, what if S?" I'm a linguist, not a language teacher, but I wonder if practicing lots of different ways to fill the same frame might help.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:21 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:21 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
In other words, what nebulawindphone posted.
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:22 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:22 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
I got a degree in a language that is not my native language. Granted I was half the age I am now, one of the longest lasting and helpful strategies I experienced while living abroad involved watching movies. I'd be assigned a movie to watch, and 3-5 key scenes of varying length to transcribe. Good, solidly acted movies that don't pull punches with theater enunciation are impeccable training kits for very specifically tuned dialects, references, ages, contexts, and on and on. It's also a great place to see how constructions like, "well then what would you've had me do" arise in a dialogue. Watching and rewatching and listening for cues to help with the transcription is a sandbox for complex thoughts that are clearly connected to information presented before and expectations about what comes after. And then, in person, you as the instructor initiates a conversation that is different than but patterned on the movie scene that's been transcribed.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:55 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 1:55 PM on March 5, 2021 [1 favorite]
As a polyglot who started young (I moved to a different continent before I was a teen) my thought on fluency is you need to be able to THINK in the target language. If your goal is to be fluent in English, then you need to be able to THINK in English. There really is no time for you to think in your native language, then translate it into English. People who try that ended up in a hurry and form short simple 3 word sentences spoken by toddlers, or end up with those Spanglish or Chinglish sentences because the translated sentence is never quite as smooth as the one composed natively. ;)
So while your student may be fluent in English expressions and vocabulary, my GUESS is she is still thinking in her native language most of the time, and thus, she's still translating in her head, rather than thinking in English.
As I am NOT a teacher, I have no idea how to get your students to start THINKING in English.
posted by kschang at 6:06 PM on March 5, 2021
So while your student may be fluent in English expressions and vocabulary, my GUESS is she is still thinking in her native language most of the time, and thus, she's still translating in her head, rather than thinking in English.
As I am NOT a teacher, I have no idea how to get your students to start THINKING in English.
posted by kschang at 6:06 PM on March 5, 2021
Best answer: application of grammar is good but probably the technicality of it all may make it feel more challenging than it is. maybe because i'm not too neurotypical myself, but i find a lot of value of thinking about how to speak like a fluent speaker by using strategies neurodivergents have, which explicitly lay them out as 'scripts'. the target for fluency here, i also agree, is a sense of comfort in the language.
i feel this is the phase where more roleplaying is valuable, with a set of phrases that you'd like her to use and tailor with her own specifics. this would go a long way in getting a hang on using certain phrases in certain situations. by getting used to these scripts, it would definitely free up her brainpower to populate them with the details she actually wanted to deliver. eventually her fluency will reach a level where she can reverse engineer grammatically why these constructions are used the way they are. this is much like how kids learn languages, i find.
posted by cendawanita at 12:08 AM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
i feel this is the phase where more roleplaying is valuable, with a set of phrases that you'd like her to use and tailor with her own specifics. this would go a long way in getting a hang on using certain phrases in certain situations. by getting used to these scripts, it would definitely free up her brainpower to populate them with the details she actually wanted to deliver. eventually her fluency will reach a level where she can reverse engineer grammatically why these constructions are used the way they are. this is much like how kids learn languages, i find.
posted by cendawanita at 12:08 AM on March 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
Your student could be me, as I'm learning Spanish.
One exercise I've done with some success is practicing a whole lot of simple-ish examples in a specific structure with a prompt to make it memorable.
For example practicing the imperfect - conditional structure I went through prompts similar to the below:
If I was an elephant...
If I was president...
If I was invisible...
If I had $1,000,000...
I can then recall the structure if I think "If I was an elephant...".
It's not perfect, but it helps.
posted by Braeburn at 5:57 AM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
One exercise I've done with some success is practicing a whole lot of simple-ish examples in a specific structure with a prompt to make it memorable.
For example practicing the imperfect - conditional structure I went through prompts similar to the below:
If I was an elephant...
If I was president...
If I was invisible...
If I had $1,000,000...
I can then recall the structure if I think "If I was an elephant...".
It's not perfect, but it helps.
posted by Braeburn at 5:57 AM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]
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Also, as the tutor, feel free to interrupt her when she is taking the simpler way out to remind her that the goal is not just to communicate (which she is doing fine) but to practice the complex structures.
posted by metahawk at 12:12 PM on March 5, 2021