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Chapter 10 : The Second Rule: Grammar Study Kills Your English Speaking

The second rule of the method is the most shocking for most learners. After years of studying English in schools, most people believe that grammar study is the key to English speaking. In fact, many learners simply cannot imagine learning English without studying grammar rules. They have strong beliefs deeply programmed by the hidden curriculum.

That is why the second rule is such a huge change. The second rule of the Effortless English method is: Do NOT study grammar! Now I know this might be a tough idea for you to accept. Let’s face it: for as long as you’ve been studying English, you have been told that you must learn grammar rules – in middle school, in high school, in university, in language schools, everywhere in the world it’s grammar, grammar, grammar, grammar.

So my first question is: How did this strategy work for you? Was it successful? If you are reading this book, you’ve likely studied English for years and you focused a lot on grammar rules. But can you speak English easily, quickly and automatically right now? Did all of this grammar study produce the result you want?

If the answer is no, you are normal. Because despite what you learned in school, the truth is that grammar study actually hurts your English speaking. The problem with studying grammar is that instead of speaking English you focus on analyzing it. You become like the soccer player who is studying physics in order to improve. You learn a lot of information but your skill never seems to get much better.

In other words, you think about English instead of doing it. You think about the past tense, the present tense, the future, the present perfect, the past perfect. Now for writing English, that’s not as bad. When you write English, you have time. You can think about things slowly and take your time. You can erase your mistakes. It’s less of a problem. You don’t need to write fast.

But when it comes to speaking, there’s no time. You don’t have time to think about the rules for the present perfect tense in English when you are talking to people. If someone asks you a question, you have to answer it immediately. You don’t have time to think about prepositions. You don’t have time to think about verb tenses, possessives, phrasal verbs – all the other linguistic terms you’ve learned. There’s no time.

A student of mine in Barcelona named Oscar once struggled with this very issue. He wanted to improve his conversational skills, however, all he could think of was grammar. Should I be using present perfect or another tense? That kind of thing. He said he felt like he was chained up and the words just wouldn’t come. So he stopped studying grammar. Over the next few months, his speaking dramatically improved. “It just started flowing out instead of me consciously thinking about it.”

Research supports this, which is why linguists like Stephen Krashen recommend a more natural approach. Learning a language, Krashen notes, “doesn’t require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules and does not require tedious drill.”

In a meta-analysis of grammar instruction, researchers found that studies over the last century have failed to find a significant effect for the teaching of grammar directly. The research is clear: Learning grammar rules does not improve your spoken grammar. You have seen this with your own speaking. How many times have you made a grammar mistake when speaking, even though you “knew” the correct rule?

For example, many students who do well on grammar tests have terrible spoken grammar. They can tell you that the past tense version of “teach” is “taught.” Yet, when speaking, they will say “last year he teach me.” They know the rule intellectually, but this does not help their speaking.

Another common problem is slow and hesitant speech. While speaking, a student will constantly be thinking of verb conjugations. All this analyzing slows their speech, making it painful and unnatural for the listener. Even when they manage to speak correctly, they kill natural communication by being so slow and hesitant.

What Real English Sounds Like

Real English conversation is tricky. Real conversation isn’t like what you learned in school. In fact, it often feels totally different.

One key difference is the fact that real speech very rarely uses full or “grammatically correct” sentences. Of course, in school, those are the only kinds of sentences you learned. You learned about Subject-Verb-Object. You learned to avoid sentence fragments.

Then you hear a real English conversation with real native speakers and you discover that they MOSTLY use sentence fragments!

This is something I immediately noticed when I read the transcripts for some of our Effortless

English lessons. I knew that most of us tend to use a lot of fragments in normal speech, but even I was surprised at just how often we do this.

In fact, we constantly speak in partial sentences. We constantly use “run on” sentences. We constantly interrupt our own sentences and change our thoughts in the middle of speaking. A transcript of a real conversation – that is, a totally spontaneous and natural conversation – is completely different than anything you will find in a textbook.

And that is only one difference – there are many other major differences between real English conversations and textbook conversations or so-called “dialogues.”

This helps to explain why even “advanced” English students have such trouble when they come to the United States. While these students may have good individual vocabulary (usually formal), they have absolutely no exposure to real spoken English. In school they learned how people “should” speak English – but what they really needed to learn is how people actually DO speak English.