语法学习之争

Culture
文化

Johnson -- More than the sum of its part
约翰逊语言专栏——整体大于部分之和


Teaching grammar is useful if not principally in the way you may think

教语法是有用的，如果不是主要用你以为的那种方式

Absence of evidence is not, as the saying goes, the same thing as evidence of absence.

正如俗话所说，没有证据不等于证据不存在。

But if you continue looking for something intently, and keep failing to find it, you can be forgiven for starting to worry.

但如果你持续专注地寻找某样东西，却总是找不到，那么你开始担心这东西不存在也是情有可原的。

And so it is with the vexed -- and in Britain, highly politicised -- subject of explicit grammar teaching in schools, and its link or otherwise with improved writing ability.

学校里的明晰语法教学这一令人为难的——在英国，它也是高度政治化的——学科，以及它与提高写作能力之间的联系或别的什么，就是这种情况。

Another study, in this case a large randomised controlled trial, has recently been added to the expansive literature on the subject.

另一项研究，这回是一项大型随机对照试验，最近加入到有关这个学科的海量文献中。

Like nearly all its predecessors, it found that teaching kids how to label the bits and pieces in a sentence does not make them better writers.

和几乎所有之前的研究一样，该研究发现，教会孩子们如何标记句子中零碎的单词短语，并不能让他们成为更好的写作者。

It was novel in that it tested six- and seven-year-olds who used a digital platform called Englicious to take grammar lessons, alongside the rote classroom teaching of grammatical particulars and their functions.

这项研究的新颖之处在于，它对两组6-7岁的儿童进行了测试，一组使用一个叫作Englicious的数字平台学习语法，另一组接受惯常的教授语法细节及其功能的课堂教学。

The Englicious group did no better than those receiving ordinary instruction when it came to writing narrative passages.

在写作记叙文方面，Englicious组并没有比接受普通教学的那组儿童表现得更好。

(The extra help slightly improved their performance on a task called "sentence combining", which requires pupils to turn two sentences into one in logical ways, such as the addition of "because". But even this effect was not statistically significant.)

（教学的额外帮助略微提高了他们在“句子组合”任务中的表现，这项任务要求学生按照逻辑将两个句子合并成一个句子，比如加上“因为”。但即使是这一影响，在统计学上也不显著。）

Bas Aarts, one of the researchers on the project and one of the scholars behind Englicious, holds out hope that with longer exposure, or a study of older students, an improvement in writing skills might be detected.

巴斯·阿尔茨是该项目的研究人员之一，也是Englicious背后的学者之一。他希望，通过增长接触时间，或对年龄较大的学生进行研究，能够检测到写作技能的提升。

Other observers may begin to wonder whether the National Curriculum in England, which since 2014 has made grammar such a central part of its English programme, might have gone down a blind alley.

一些观察人士可能会开始怀疑，自2014年以来一直将语法作为其英语课程核心部分的英国国家课程是否已经走进了死胡同。

The force behind the reforms, Michael Gove, a Conservative former secretary of education, is sometimes maligned for other political reasons (especially among opponents of Brexit, which he championed).

这些改革背后的力量，保守党前教育大臣迈克尔·戈夫，有时会因为其他政治原因而遭到中伤（尤其是他支持英国脱欧，成为了反派的一份子）。

He is said to have insisted on the insertion of personal bugbears into the grammar curriculum, notably the subjunctive form, "If I were".

据说，他坚持在语法课程中加入一些难点，尤其是虚拟语气“If I were”。

Mention of his name alone wrinkles many teachers' noses -- partly because some of them were hardly prepared to teach the new material themselves, after decades in which grammar was largely absent from classrooms.

单是提到他的名字就让许多老师感到不快——部分原因是他们中的一些人自己都还没有准备好要教授的新材料，因为几十年来，语法基本上不出现在课堂上。


In retrospect it scarcely seems surprising that learning to underline a modal verb, such as "can", "should" and "may", does little to help students use them effectively in their own writing.

回过头来看，学会划出情态动词（如“can”，“should”和“may”）对学生在自己的写作中有效运用它们几乎没什么帮助这一点似乎并不令人惊讶。

These words are anyway grasped by tiny children without the need to know what they are called.

小孩子不管用什么方法其实都能掌握这些词，而且不需要知道它们被叫作什么。

This may tempt the conclusion that the teaching of grammar should be shelved altogether.

这可能会引出语法教学应该被完全废除这样的结论。

But there are reasons to reform it rather than scrap it.

但相较于废除，我们更有理由对其进行改革。

Understanding of language is part of a wider education in what makes human beings human.

对语言的理解是更广泛的教育的一部分，即什么使人成为人。

How concepts are turned into sounds, and how those sounds combine to form propositions, commands or questions, are issues that have occupied many linguists in philosophy departments.

概念是如何转化成声音的，这些声音又是如何组合成观点、命令或问题的，这是哲学系的许多语言学家一直关注的问题。

What they reveal about the mind has exercised psychologists and cognitive scientists.

它们揭示了关于心灵的什么？这一问题一直困扰着心理学家和认知科学家。

There are practical reasons to ask children to grapple with grammar, too.

让孩子们努力学习语法也有实用方面的原因。

One is that an explicit knowledge of it will make learning a foreign language easier.

其中一点是明确了解语法会使学习一门外语变得更容易。

Even if you did intuit how to make subordinate clauses in your native languages as a toddler -- just without instruction -- getting to grips with them in German or Russian in later years is simpler if you know how to define and spot them.

即使你在很小的时候凭直觉就知道如何用母语造出从句——在完全没有指导的情况下——但如果你知道如何定义和辨别从句，那么在长大之后掌握德语或俄语里的从句就会更简单。

As it is, many English-speakers come to understand grammar by studying a foreign language, rather than the other way round.

事实上，许多说英语的人是通过学习一门外语来理解语法的，而不是反过来。

For grammarians keen on the jobs of the future, the field of natural-language processing is booming.

对于热衷于研究未来工作的语法学家来说，自然语言处理领域正在蓬勃发展。

After many years of poor results, technological wizards have devised programs for automated translation, speech recognition (as in dictation software) and other services that are actually usable, if far from perfect.

在多年的不理想的结果之后，技术奇才们已经设计出了提供自动翻译、语音识别（如听写软件）以及其他服务的程序，这些程序虽然远远算不上完美，但实际上是有用的。

These tools may rely more on knowledge of artificial intelligence than of the subjunctive, but linguistic expertise still matters, and may give budding programmers an edge over rivals whose best language is Python.

这些工具或许更多地依赖于人工智能的知识，而不是虚拟的知识，但语言专业知识仍然很重要，并且它可能会使新手程序员比那些只擅长编程语言而不懂其它语言（最擅长的语言是Python）的对手更具优势。

Grammar could still be taught better.

仍然有更好的教语法的方式。

One small study showed improvement in some students when concepts are linked concretely to writing tasks.

一项小规模的研究表明，当概念与写作任务被具体地联系起来时，一些学生的表现会有所提升。

Even so, it may never be easy to point to a widget-output increase that results directly from improved tuition.

即便如此，要说明一小部分的提升和教学的改善有直接关系可能从来都不是一件易事。

A cook does not need to know chemistry to make a delicious sauce.

厨师不需要懂化学就能做出美味的酱汁。

But the science of how words combine to make meaning is fascinating as well as fundamental.

但是，有关词汇如何组合在一起表达意义的科学既是令人着迷的，也是必不可少的。

来源：经济学人

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