Why just reading in English isn’t enough: overcome your grammar blindness
Do you know that pesky tense, Past Perfect? I had never seen it before last year? I’m sure you must have studied it at one point or another. Have you ever asked yourself, do people actually use this tense?
If you’re like one of my students, your immediate answer might be no. You might say, I never actually hear people use this tense. Or, I can’t remember the last time I saw this tense in writing, either.
You’d be somewhat right: it’s absolutely true that Past Perfect is less common than many other tenses, like Present Simple or Past Simple, for instance. You can easily communicate most, if not all, of your thoughts without ever using Past Perfect. But… I hear and see this tense all the time!
The reason your experience might be different is a phenomenon I will refer to here as grammar blindness. Imagine you are reading the sentence below in a story. Which words are you likely to pay the most attention to?
Holding her breath, the girl peered through the window, which the wind had blown open.
My guess is, you will prioritise words you know, and words that carry the most meaning.
Holding her breath, the girl peered through the window, which the wind had blown open.
If you’re not familiar with the word peered, you’ll probably skip over it and use the rest of the sentence to guess its meaning (it means zajrzeć!). You might not pay a lot of attention to the exact form of the words (whether it’s blow or blown, for instance), and function words such as the, which or had will probably escape your notice, as they don’t carry very much meaning.
As a result, if you are asked to recreate this sentence from memory, it is very likely that you will get some of the grammar wrong. For instance, you may forget to add the before girl; or you might forget the had in Past Perfect.
This is a very normal thing that happens when reading, and generally it can be helpful: it allows us to read faster, and not to worry too much about phrases we’re not familiar with. However, it also means that you are missing out on a lot of learning: if you don’t notice the grammar in this sentence, you won’t remember it, and it can’t help you develop your grammar skills!
For B2 and C1-level students, Celeste Ng is a good choice for a first book: her work is well-written and critically-acclaimed, but the language isn’t too complicated, the books are short, and there is plenty of dialogue. They’re usually easy to find in bookshops, too (you can find this one here, for instance).
Grammar deafness is a thing, too
The same thing happens with listening… only it’s worse. Our brains see what they expect to see, and hear only what they expect to hear. When advanced English speakers talk, the individual words are all connected into one string of sound, and it takes a bit of guessing to understand what’s going on. Imagine you hear someone say:
She said I’d told her I’d do it.
Only it might sound a little more like: Shsaidatolderadoit.
If you’re not very familiar with Past Perfect, you won’t expect it to hear it, so you might understand the sentence as:
She said I told her I’d do it.
If you don’t know that would can be shortened to ‘d, too, you might even think the sentence goes:
She said I told her I do it.
If you’re a lower-level student and you don’t know that is incorrect, you might even miss one of the I’s in the sentence and hear:
She said told her I do it.
Why it’s a problem
This might seem like a fairly obvious question, so let me offer only a brief answer:
Noticing has been found to be a vital component of learning a language. If you don’t notice, you don’t learn. Reading books may be a fantastic way to understand and learn Past Perfect, because novels are full of it. But if you read a hundred books in English and don’t notice the Past Perfect in any of them, you won’t learn Past Perfect!
What to do about it
You’ve already done the most important thing: you are aware that this is a thing!
You won’t be able to notice all the grammar, all the time. But there are small steps you can take to improve your grammar awareness.
Listen to songs with lyrics. This is a great way to notice what different grammar forms actually sound like: singers “eat” a lot of sounds.
Learn more about how spoken English connects words together and makes certain words very small and quiet. This is something you can ask your teacher about or explore with online resources or a good pronunciation book, such as English Pronunciation in Use.
The next time you read a text, take a moment to re-read one paragraph and pay attention to the grammar. Name the tenses you can see. Try to explain to yourself why these tenses are here. Notice where the article a is used, or the article the. Notice if that’s of or on or off. Find a sentence you like which uses a grammar structure you don’t know very well, and copy it out. Then, rewrite the sentence with your own idea. (For an example of how to work with a text like that, have a look at this post.)
When you’re learning a new grammar structure or revising one, look for it in everything you read and listen to. Find examples and note them down. It will help you focus your attention and develop an instinct for how the structure works.
Keep learning! A student has told me recently that, when before he didn’t think he’d ever heard Present Perfect Continuous used anywhere, after the few lessons we spent discussing it he started to hear it everywhere. After studying the tense in class, he understood how it worked, so he was able to pick it out from articles and TV series, but he wasn’t able to use it naturally in conversation yet. And after a few weeks of noticing examples of real use, he began to use it without thinking.
Ready to get started? Check out this post to see how my students and I explored grammar when reading a chapter of Winnie the Pooh.
Next week, I will be sharing tips on where to find the right reading material for your grammar learning. Lots of recommendations coming, so be sure to sign up to the newsletter below or follow me on social media if you don’t want to miss it.
This post is the third in a series where I explore how to learn grammar differently. Check out the first post in the series here.