3. The Order and Priority of the Teaching of Verb Forms in English Language Courses. A Case Study.

To what extent do the guidelines suggested by English Language Teaching textbooks and course syllabuses reflect real-life frequency of usage?

The rationale underlying the manner, timing and degree of emphasis with which verb forms are introduced in conventional course-books and courses is rarely made explicit, still less based on any solid analysis of the frequency or usefulness of the forms themselves.

In so far as it is possible to extrapolate a rationale, it would seem to be based on perceptions (or received opinions) regarding simplicity of form, the difficulty learners experience in acquiring a form (or, perhaps more tellingly, that which teachers experience in conveying it), the perceived importance of a form, a tradition whereby some forms are regarded as ‘more advanced,’ than others, and a certain proclivity for ‘clear’ binary distinctions, for which prefabricated (and largely untested) standard tasks and methodologies are easily available.

Raymond Murphy’s English Grammar in Use—for long the standard grammar reference/practice book for learners of the English language—typifies this conventional trend. It is not alone and, at the time it was first produced, had the distinct advantage of being superficially far less confusing and far more accessible than its competitors. Criticism of it is thus perhaps more trenchant in so far as it is one of the ‘best’ examples of the genre.

The version of the Murphy grammars intended, as its subtitle proclaims, ‘for intermediate students’ covers some ground in the initial chapters that is supposedly conceived of as ‘revision’ and then introduces more ‘advanced’ structures.

The order in which the verb forms are revised or introduced is as follows:

1. Present Continuous
2. Present Simple
3. Present Continuous and Present Simple
4. Past Simple
5. Past Continuous
6. Present Perfect
7. Present Perfect Continuous
8. Present Perfect Continuous and Simple
9. Present Perfect and Past
10. Past Perfect
11. Past Perfect Continuous
12. Used to
13. Present Continuous and Present Simple to refer to the Future
14. Going to refer to the Future
15. Will/shall
16. Will vs. going to
17. Will be doing and will have done (Future continuous and Future perfect)

Treatment of various modal verbs follows before the conditional is introduced via ‘if’ rather than ‘would’. This is followed by the Present Simple Passive vs the Past Simple Passive, the Present and Past Perfect, Continuous and Infinitive Passive (all in a single two-page section!) The second half of the book is devoted to syntax, lexis and use of the article and other qualifiers, and finally prepositions.

There are a number of things worth noting here and these are certainly not peculiar to this particular publication. First, clear priority is given to the verb and its various forms. Almost all of the first half of the book is devoted to this topic.

The book is billed wisely as a ‘reference and practice book’ to be dipped into at will or as need demands. However, in my experience, learners, unless guided otherwise by an astute teacher, rarely use such books in this way. They start at the beginning and work their way painstakingly through. If evidence of the exercises filled in in discarded copies of the book I have found in second-hand bookshops is anything to go by, most learners start at the beginning, move through in a doggedly linear fashion and give up or get bored at best halfway through.

Given that most learners will use such a book in this way, despite clear guidance to the contrary in the preface entitled “To the Teacher,” the order of topics, wittingly or not, sends a clear message: the verb, its various forms and the ways in which it is used, is the most important/basic/challenging thing to learn. This is something of a dishearteningly mixed message: the most basic thing is also the most challenging.

Leaving this—at the very least dubious assumption—aside for the time being, let us examine the number of pages devoted in the Murphy grammar to each verb form.

Given that each ‘topic’ is accorded a double-page spread, I shall count two for a double page devoted to a single verb form and one for each form when two forms are compared in a binary fashion and compare this with the relative frequency of the form as outlined in the previous section. I shall ignore for now the footnote-like sections dealing with ‘irregularities’ that often undermine/deconstruct the message the main body of the text strives to convey.

Table 1: The Percentage of Verb Section of Murphy Grammar Book Devoted to each Verb Form compared with Estimated Percentage Frequency in Real Life Use.

Verb Form	Frequency in Murphy Grammar		Estimated Frequency of Real-Life Use (%)
	Absolute (pages)	Percentage
Present Perfect Simple Active	7	14	4.1
Present Continuous Active	4	8	3.3
Present Simple Active	4	8	44.1
Past Simple Active	4	8	27.6
Future with will simple active	4	8	4.5
Present Perfect Continuous Active	3	6	< 3.1
Future with going to	3	6	< 3.1
Past Continuous Active	2	4	1.5
Past Perfect Simple Active	2	4	2.4
Past Perfect Continuous Active	2	4	< 3.1
Used to	2	4	< 3.1
Future with shall	2	4	< 3.1
Conditional Present	2	4	3.8
Future with Present Continuous	1	2	< 3.1
Future with Present Simple	1	2	< 3.1
Future with will continuous	1	2	< 3.1
Future Perfect Simple Active	1	2	< 3.1
Conditional Past	1	2	< 3.1
Present Simple Passive	1	2	3.8
Past Simple Passive	1	2	1.8
Present Continuous Passive	1	2	< 3.1
Present Perfect Simple Passive	1	2	< 3.1
TOTAL	50	100

The first most obvious difference is that while the active forms of the Present Simple and the Past Simple make up over 70% of all the verb forms used in any kind of discourse in the English language, grammar and exercise books (at least at an intermediate level—whatever that means) devote only 16% of their pages to these forms, compared to 14% to the Present Perfect Simple Active alone, which accounts for only 4.1% of verb forms in actual discourse.

This means that many learners and teachers will be attempting to develop ‘knowledge’ of these relatively obscure forms, while neglecting learning the irregularities and subtleties of usage and meaning of the much more common simple active present and past. It is much more useful to know that the past tense of ‘buy’ is ‘bought’ and how it is pronounced than to agonize over whether “I bought some shoes in Rio,” or “I have bought some shoes in Rio,” is the correct form. This is a nice distinction, but one far less likely to impede communication than pronouncing ‘bought’ with an ‘f’ sound before the ‘t’ or not bothering to use the past tense at all, as many students who pore over arcane distinctions and regard themselves and are regarded as ‘intermediate level’ learners are still apt to do.

In the Murphy grammar, as in most others, the irregular past simple forms of verbs are relegated to an appendix and then in a boring alphabetical list and in the form of archaic Latinate ‘principal parts’ of the verb, with little or no guide as to how to accomplish a comprehensible pronunciation of the word, still less how frequent—and hence useful—it is.

More shocking still is the fact that 28% of Murphy’s introductory pages for the intermediate student are devoted to various obscure continuous forms of the verb, while these forms account for only 4.8% of natural English discourse of any kind.

This prejudice (a bizarre and inexplicable one) in favor of the Present Continuous is signaled in the very first chapters of the intermediate-level Murphy grammar . The very first chapter of the book is devoted to this form and the third to a supposedly binary contrast (note the direction of the comparison) between continuous and simple forms of the present tense.

This leads in to the fourth section of this essay, which deals with the way false dichotomies are introduced in grammar books and by English teachers, in the interest of simplicity, but in fact only sow confusion and deflect attention from much more easily acquired specific quirks.

Bibliography

Murphy, Raymond (1995) English Grammar in Use. A reference and practice book for intermediate students. Cambridge University Press.