Grammar McNuggets

A polemical term coined by Scott Thornbury at IATEFL Dublin (2000) for the artificially packaged, decontextualised grammar items that dominate the published EFL syllabus. The "McNuggets" image points at two faults at once: the discrete-item form (bite-sized, easily consumed) and the simulacral substance. Like the Chicken McNugget, pedagogic grammar has had "the skin, gristle and bones of language" removed, leaving an inauthentic processed product with only a loose relation to how language actually works.

The argument

Thornbury was not the first to notice that grammar gets fragmented for teaching: William Rutherford (1987) called the same phenomenon "accumulated entities," and "discrete items" had been around for longer. What "Grammar McNuggets" added was a critique of production and marketing, a frame borrowed from cultural studies (Stuart Hall's "circuit of culture," Du Gay et al. 1997) and from Ritzer's thesis on McDonaldisation. Pedagogic grammar is not simply a description of language; it is a reproducible, marketable product whose form is shaped by publishers, exam boards, and the institutional appetite for things that can be "covered" and tested.

The substantive complaint is that the canonical syllabus inflates its own architecture. Corpus evidence shows that "some relatively common linguistic constructions are overlooked, while some relatively rare constructions receive considerable attention" (Biber et al. 1994). The "elaborate architecture of the so-called tense system" (future-in-the-past, past perfect continuous, the first/second/third conditionals) survives in coursebooks despite having "little or no linguistic, let alone psychological, reality." Adrian Underhill's formulation in the comment thread is that "the grammar we teach is way downstream from the phenomenon it purports to describe." This echoes Hopper's emergentist line that grammar is "the set of sedimented conventions that have been routinized out of the more frequently occurring ways of saying things."

Why the McNugget persists

Thornbury concedes (after pushback from coursebook author Simon Greenall) that the publishers are not solely to blame. The McNugget is sustained by a circuit that includes Ministries of Education, exam washback ("less washback than tsunami" where exams are grammar-focused), teachers who wear grammatical knowledge as a badge of competence, and learners who report wanting "more grammar" when what they often mean is "language to do this task." Newer coursebooks that bolt on lexical, functional, or "spoken grammar" content tend to reproduce the same logic, "merely selling more McNuggets in the same small basket" (Constantinides). The risk is that corpus findings themselves get McNuggetised: packaged into yet more discrete items rather than reshaping the syllabus.

What follows from the critique

Thornbury is careful that he is "not advocating no grammar, so much as no grammar-led syllabus, especially one that consists entirely of the canonical McNuggets." Some bite-sized items genuinely prime later acquisition (Schmidt and Frota's 1986 Portuguese diary study is the standard reference), but more research is needed on which McNuggets generate uptake and which simply clog the system. In response to Greenall's "so what should I actually do?" question, Thornbury sketches a tentative programme:

• aim for intuitions ("a feel for what is right") over declarative knowledge of rules
• deal with grammar after communicative engagement with text, not before
• foreground grammaticisation skills (Larsen-Freeman's "grammaring") via task repetition, dictogloss, writing-after-speaking
• encourage retrospective noticing across whole lessons, like a bird-watcher's log
• adopt a semantic syllabus (thematic, functional, notional) and map forms on at the point of need

This is essentially the Dogme ELT / analytic-syllabus orientation reframed as practical advice for materials writers.

Conceptual neighbours

"Grammar McNuggets" is the most quotable label for the synthetic-syllabus problem. It belongs alongside Synthetic Syllabus (the formal description), Focus on FormS (the methodological correlate), PPP (the typical delivery), and Coursebook (the vehicle). Its theoretical opposites are Emergentism and the Lexical Approach; its practical opposite is Dogme ELT.

References

• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1994). Corpus-based approaches to issues in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 15(2), 169–189.
• du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., MacKay, H., & Negus, K. (1997). Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Open University.
• Hopper, P.J. (1998). Emergent language. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The New Psychology of Language. Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Ritzer, G. (1998). The McDonaldization Thesis. Sage.
• Rutherford, W.E. (1987). Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching. Longman.
• Schmidt, R., & Frota, S. (1986). Developing basic conversational ability in a second language. In R. Day (Ed.), Talking to Learn. Newbury House.
• Thornbury, S. (2010). G is for Grammar McNuggets. An A–Z of ELT [blog post].