Learning and Teaching of Different Types of Grammar

8/10/2019 Learning and Teaching of Different Types of Grammar

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Learning and teaching of

different types of grammarTeaching English as a second language. Lecture 2

Tamar Mikeladze

Associate Professor

Telavi State University


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Focusing questions

What is grammar?

How do you think it is learnt?

How would you teach it?


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Keywords

prescriptive grammar: grammar thatprescribes what people should or shouldnot say

traditional grammar: school grammarconcerned with labelling sentences

with parts of speech, and so on

structural grammar: grammar concernedwith how words go into phrases, andphrases into sentences

grammatical (linguistic) competence: theknowledge of language stored in apersons mind


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Prescriptive grammar

One familiar type of grammar is therules found in schoolbooks, for

example, the warnings against final

prepositions in sentences, This cantbe put up with. This is called

prescriptive grammar because it

prescribes what people ought to do. Modern grammarians have mostly

avoided prescriptive grammar


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Traditional grammar

A second popular meaning of grammarconcerns the parts of speech: the fact that anoun is a word that is the name of a person,place, thing, or idea is absorbed by every schoolpupil in England. This definition comes straight

from Tapestry Writing 1 (Pike-Baky, 2000), acourse published in the year 2000, but whichdiffers little from William Cobbetts definition in1819: Nouns are the names of persons andthings.

Basic Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2002, 2nd edn). the technical terms in English subject pronouns,

possessive adjective, contraction andstatement


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Structural grammar

Language teaching has also madeuse of structural grammar based on

the concept of phrase structure, which

shows how some words go together inthe sentence and some do not.

In a sentence such as The man fed

the dog,


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Structural grammar


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Grammar in the mind of the

learner By grammatical competence I mean the

cognitive state that encompasses allthose aspects of form and meaning andtheir relation, including underlying

structures that enter into that relation,which are properly assigned to thespecific subsystem of the human mindthat relates representations of form andmeaning. (Chomsky,1980: 59)

Grammatical competence communicative competencepragmatic competence


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THE TYPICALGRAMMATICAL ELEMENTSIN BEGINNERS ENGLISHCOURSEBOOKS

Many of these items are the basis forlanguage teaching and for SLAresearch.


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Structure words, morphemes

and sequence of acquisition What do you understand by a

structure (function) word?

What do you think are the main

characteristics of beginnerssentences in English or another

modern language?


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Keywords

content words such as table or truth have meanings that canbe found in dictionaries and consist of nouns, verbs, adjectivesand (possibly) prepositions

structure (function) words such as articles the and a exist toform part of phrases and structures and so have meanings that aredifficult to capture in the dictionary

morpheme: the smallest unit of grammar, consisting either of aword (toast) or part of a word (s in Johns)

morphology and syntax: morphology is the branch oflinguistics that deals with the structure of morphemes; syntax isthe branch that deals with the structure of phrases above the level ofthe word

grammatical morphemes are morphemes such as -ing and

the that play a greater part in structure than content words such ashorse (lexical morphemes)

order of difficulty: the scale of difficulty for particular aspectsof grammar for L2 learners

sequence of acquisition: the order in which L2 learners acquirethe grammar,pronunciation, and so on of the language


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Grammar can be:

1. a way of telling people what they ought to say,rather than reporting what they do say (prescriptivegrammar);

2. a system for describing sentence structure usedin English schools for centuries, based ongrammars of classical languages such as Latin(traditional grammar);

3. a system for describing sentences based on theidea of smaller structures built up into largerstructures (structural grammar);

4. the knowledge of the structural regularities of

language in the minds of speakers(linguistic/grammatical competence);

5. EFL grammar combining elements of (2) and (3).


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Theodore Sturgeon story that combines

made-up content words with real

structure words So on Lirht, while the decisions on the

fate of the miserable Hvov were beingformulated, gwik still fardled, funted andfupped.

The same sentence with made-up structure words might haveread:

So kel Mars, dom trelk decisions kel trelkfate mert trelk miserable slaves hiv polst

formulated, deer still grazed, jumpedkosp survived.

Only the first version is comprehensible in some form,even if we have no idea how you fardle and funt.


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Early acquisition of grammar

Content and structure words differ inmany ways, including the ways they areused in sentences and how they arepronounced.

Grammatical morphemes (structurewords and grammatical inflections) arelearnt in a particular sequence in L2

acquisition. L2 learners acquire the same basic

grammar regardless of the first andsecond languages involved.


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Focusing questions

Do you find problems in followingcertain structures in your L2, or indeed

your L1?

Why do you think you find somestructures more difficult to follow than

others?


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Keywords

movement: a way of describing some sentencesas being based on moving various elementsabout.

processability: sequences of acquisition mayreflect the ease with which certain structures can

be processed by the mind. sequence of development: the inevitable

progression of learners through definite stages ofacquisition.

the teachability hypothesis: an L2 structure

can be learnt from instruction only if the learnersinterlanguage is close to the point when thisstructure is acquired in the natural setting(Pienemann, 1984: 201).


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Examples of movement in syntax

The multidimensional model sees movement as the key

element in understanding the learning sequence. The learner

starts with sentences without movement and learns how to move

the various parts of the sentence around to get the final form. Thelearner ascends the structural tree from bottom to top, first

learning to deal with words, next with phrases, then with simple

sentences, and finally with subordinate clauses in complex

sentences.

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Learning and Teaching of Different Types of Grammar