What I liked best about the Azar books was the clarity of their 
explanations, the exercises which comprised one coherent text and those 
which called on the students to use the current grammar point to talk 
about their own lives. Even now, in my college classes for native 
speakers, I use an Azar-type exercise when teaching about modal verbs: 
I ask the students to write 15 sentences about their real lives using 
modal verbs, then to explain which modal meaning is active in the 
sentence. For instance, one might write "I can't party this weekend, 
because I have to write a paper." "Can't" here has to do with 
permission and obligation rather than ability.

There were a lot of exercises in Azar involving less context and no 
application to the students' own experiences -- usually more of these 
than of the type I liked. So I would emphasize the type I liked.

Rote exercises are of much more use to people learning a new language 
(how about ENL -- "English as a new language"!). Such learners usually 
have more tolerance for them, as well, because they know they need 
practice to make their usage automatic. I lived in Germany for two 
years, and perfected my noun-phrase agreement by rehearsing noun 
phrases in my head while riding the bus to and fro on my daily commute.

Teaching grammar to native speakers is a quite different matter. This 
is a fraught scenario, because native speakers already speak (a variety 
of) English. As researchers in foreign-language learning have found 
out, "affect", or emotional factors in learning, is crucial in 
motivation to learn. Unfortunately, the prescriptive mindset found in 
today's K-12 teaching materials is in complete discord with these 
findings.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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