Beginners. Peter Grundy

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      Peter Grundy

      Beginners

      Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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      First published 1994

      2010

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      Acknowledgements

      One of the most exciting things about teaching beginners is the feeling that one is learning more than they are. I vividly remember several groups who taught me more than I taught them. In particular, I benefited from working with Judith Baker on a beginners’ course at Pilgrims some years ago. Since then, Judith and I have shared many beginners ideas and together discussed what a book like this should contain. I had hoped to work more closely with her on the book itself, but unfortunately it was not to be. She remains a silent partner in this endeavour.

      I also owe a great deal to two former MA students at Durham. One is Ian White, whose perceptive dissertation on handwriting planted a seed. His influence is acknowledged more fully at the beginning of Chapter 5. The other is Anna Korea, whose deep understanding of beginners, and particularly child beginners, was an inspiration to me. I have included some of her ideas in this book.

      There are several others to whom I am indebted, including British Council Summer School colleagues and participants at Durham, particularly Melanie Ellis, Printha Ellis, John Morgan, Valentine Philip, and Valentina Toocheva, who all made valuable suggestions on drafts of parts of this book which I gratefully acted on. I have also gratefully accepted ideas from a number of others, who are acknowledged in the body of the book.

      Finally, I owe a great deal to Alan Maley, series editor of Resource Books for Teachers, and to the English Language Teaching division of OUP, and in particular to Cristina Whitecross, Anne Conybeare, Julia Sallabank, and an anonymous reader. Alan, Cristina, and Anne gave me the confidence to pursue this project and helped me to translate it into a better book than it would otherwise have been. Julia’s extremely acute comments on the various drafts and meticulous desk editing turned a whimsical manuscript into the book you are reading now. The remaining faults are mine.

      The author and series editor

      Peter Grundy has taught in schools in Britain and Germany, has worked in higher education as a teacher trainer, and from 1979 to 2002 was a lecturer at the University of Durham, where he taught applied and theoretical linguistics to undergraduates and postgraduates and English for Academic Purposes to the University’s overseas students. He has had considerable experience of language teaching and teacher training on summer schools and seminars in Britain and overseas stretching back over more than twenty years. He is currently Associate Principal Lecturer at Northumbria University. He is the author of Newspapers, in this series (OUP 1993), as well as Doing Pragmatics, Writing for Study Purposes (with Arthur Brookes), and Language through Literature (with Susan Bassnett).

      Alan Maley worked for The British Council from 1962 to 1988, serving as English Language Officer in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, and China, and as Regional Representative for The British Council in South India (Madras). From 1988 to 1993 he was Director-General of the Bell Educational Trust, Cambridge. From 1993 to 1998 he was Senior Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore. From 1998 to 2002 he was Director of the Graduate Programme at Assumption University, Bangkok. He is now a freelance consultant. He has written Literature, in this series (with Alan Duff, OUP 1990), Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intriguing, Words, Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language Learning (all with Alan Duff), The Mind’s Eye (with Françoise Grellet and Alan Duff), Learning to Listen and Poem into Poem (with Sandra Moulding), and Short and Sweet.

      Foreword

      All too often beginners are lumped together under the misleading epithet ‘false beginners’. This book dismantles the twin myths which underlie this categorization.

      The first of these is the convenient belief that there are no ‘real’ beginners any more. (Convenient because it allows us to get on with ‘exciting’ activities with learners, who can be presumed already to be in control of the basics.) This book confronts us with the awkward fact that there are still substantial numbers of real beginners, with problems of a quite different order from those experienced even by ‘false’ beginners.

      The second myth is the belief that ‘beginners’ are a single category. In his acute and helpful analysis, Peter Grundy shows just how many different groups of beginners there are, each requiring subtly different approaches.

      A constant problem with older beginners is the discrepancy between their relatively high levels of affective and cognitive development, and their low level of linguistic competence in the target language. This book is notably successful in showing how activities requiring very limited language can none the less be made cognitively and affectively challenging. In this way, beginning learners are enabled to bring their adult experiences to bear on the language they imperfectly command, without the loss of self-esteem and the sense of hopelessness which low-level materials all too often provoke.

      There is a proper understanding of the very real and stubborn difficulties faced by beginners, especially when a new script is also involved. Chapter 5, ‘Roman script’, is a rare instance of a serious attempt to deal with this set of problems.

      The book succeeds in being simultaneously innovative and realistic. It combines the best of communicative practice with the pragmatic realization that beginners cannot be expected