Teaching Grammar
The term grammar is perhaps one of the most misused and misunderstood words that pertain to language. Generally, the term has come to encompass not only the structure of a language but also aspects of usage and social acceptability [86, p. 6].
Teaching grammar may be defined as the study and description of the grammar for forming words (morphology) and combining them into sentences (syntax). The words are arranged into syntagms (segmental level) and combinations of phrases are incorporated into sentences and texts (suprasegmental level).
Virtually all methodologists and teachers of grammar agree that a good command of grammar is a necessary prerequisite to fluent speaking of the language as it affects the learner's performance in four linguistic modes: listening, speaking, reading, writing. The reaction to the subject matter from teachers of grammar seems to be varied: from jealous to avertive; some indulge in it, others simply avoid studying or teaching it. Though there are others who enjoy studying English grammar and willingly accept the challenge of presenting it clearly and interestingly to the learners.
Students are inquisitive learners and ask for explanations when misunderstanding occurs. When a student makes an error, the EFL/ESL teacher is supposed to detect it, diagnose it, and furnish effective correction strategies, remedial work if such necessity arises.
There are different types of grammar: traditional, comparative or descriptive, differential, structural, transformational, transformational-generative, functional and others.
Traditional grammar involves the teaching of grammar through analysis, as opposed to teaching it through analogy (compare Audio-Lingual Method or Grammar-Translation Method). Traditional grammar originated in Greece in the 5th century and was developed on the basis of Greek and Latin. Traditional grammarians were mainly concerned with the standard literary usage; they tended to condemn more informal and colloquial usage both in speech and in writing as "incorrect". Furthermore, they often failed to realize that the standard language is, from the historical point of view, merely that regional or social dialect which has acquired prestige. The grammar involved the study of the parts of speech, their paradigms and paradigmatic relationships (declarative, imperative, affirmative, interrogative, and negative sentences). Traditional grammar was subsequently applied, with few modifications, to the description of a large number of other languages (Lyons, 1970).
Differential grammar in Halliday’s et al. opinion is a system of superimposing the grammatical patterns of one language upon those of another. Differential grammar makes it possible to determine some of the main grammatical difficulties involved in learning the target language. Thus, what is required is a special type of description that accounts for all types of differences and equivalents. Firstly, we must establish limits of tolerance and areas of usage; secondly, we must distinguish the unique forms from alternative ones. For example, the adverb well in He speaks well of you is the equivalent of an adjective Він про вас доброї думки (cf. 116, p. 68).
Differential description of grammar, as described in the book cited, is concerned with a small fixed number of possibilities and a clear line between them. For instance, the Past Indefinite tense of regular verbs is expressed by adding the suffix -d, or –ed to the infinitive. In lexis, on the other hand, there may be a limited choice too, as between positive and negative forms; but there may be a wide range of possibilities, for example: He was sitting on the chair /bench/stool/seat... These two types of choice are known respectively as "closed" and "open". The range of possibilities in a closed choice is called a "system"; that in an open choice a "set". The closed system is thus characteristic of grammar, the open set for lexis.
A short statement of the definition would be thus: grammar deals with closed system choices which may be between items this, that; he, she, we or between categories (singular, plural; past, present, future); lexis is concerned with open set choices which are always between items (chair, bench, seat, stool).
Thus differential grammar is a modification of traditional grammar; paradigms are replaced by a system of choices and categories and notions of norm and usus are introduced.
The theory of structural grammar also known as phrase-structure grammar or immediate constituent grammar is associated with the names of such linguists as L. Bloomfield, C. Fries. According to L. Bloomfield “a sentence is an independent linguistic form, not included by virtue of any grammatical construction in any larger linguistic form”. W. Elkins gives a formal definition: “ a sentence is a linguistic unit consisting of sound and meaning symbols that follow the structural pattern N-V and produce an intonation pattern satisfactory to the speaker/listener [86, p. 78]. The parts into which a sentence can be segmented are the constituents of the sentence. The term immediate constituent (IC's) refers to those constituents that together form a higher-order constituent. In our example, a and walk are the IC's of a walk, took, and a walk are the IC's of took a walk, while John and took a walk, are the IC's of the sentence. Since the sentence is commonly regarded as the largest unit of syntactic description, John took a walk cannot be said to be an IC of anything. It is true of course, that certain relations do exist between a sentence and the context in which it occurs, but these relations are of different order from the sentence-internal relations with which a syntactic description is concerned. The immediate constituent grammar differs from traditional grammar in its concentration on structural meanings which are "specifically signalled by a complex system of contrastive patterns" (Fries). Ch. Fries provided frames to enable anyone to derive for major word classes — noun, verb, adjective and adverb. It referred to the major classes by number, the minor ones by letter. The authors of structural grammar developed the technique of immediate constituent analysis, a technique of splitting a sentence into its immediate constituents, which in turn were broken down into their immediate constituents and so on to the ultimate constituent. The aim of their structural grammar approach was to be as concrete and objective as possible. An attempt was also made to devise a system whose purpose was to indicate all the phonetic clues to grammar [116, p. 70].
Transformational grammar, developed by N. Chomsky, tried to give a mathematically precise description of some of the most striking features of language. Of particular importance in this connection is the ability of children to derive structural regularities of their native language - its grammatical rules - from the utterances of their parents and others around them, and then to make use of the same regularities in the construction of utterances they have never heard before. N. Chomsky has claimed that the principles underlying the structure of language are so specific and so highly articulated that they must be regarded as being biologically determined: that is as constituting part of what we call "human nature" and as being genetically transmitted from parents to children [116, p. 71].
N. Chomsky claims that an understanding of transformation and grammar is essential for a philosopher, psychologist, biologist or linguist whose wish is to take account of man’s capacity for language [J.Lyons, 1970].
Transformational-generative (T-G grammar) is a grammar in which transformations are included among the rules, by which a set of grammatical items are specified. This approach to grammatical analysis, first published by N. Chomsky in his book "Syntactic Structures", has been the main source for ideas about the method of description (cf. R. Scott, E. Morokhovs’ka). Its theory attempted to provide descriptions of many aspects which structural grammar did not touch upon. N. Chomsky states that grammar must be based on two things: observation of language and ability to satisfy the native speaker's intuition about his language. For example, it must be explained that active and passive sentences are related to each other; that some pairs of sentences, though alike on the surface, are different at a deeper level. Thus, the following pair of sentences The man was eager to please and The man was easy to please are alike in their surface structure but are different in their deep structure. Consider the rules required to form the sentence The headlights penetrated the darkness. According to T-G analysis, it is a sentence (S) that consists of a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP); in turn, the (NP) consists of a determiner (D) and a noun (N); the (VP) consists of a transitive verb (Vt) and a noun phrase (NP) and this last (NP) consists of a determiner and a noun. This information can be represented in a tree diagram:
S
NP
VP
D N Vt NP
D N
The headlights penetrated the darkness.
Such analysis becomes generative when it is expressed in the form of rules. The analysis above could be expressed in the following rules:
1. S – NP+VP
2. VP – Vt+NP
3. NP – D+N
4. Vt – penetrated
5. D – the
6. N – headlights, darkness
In these rules the arrow means written as. Rules that allow for a single symbol at a time to be written or replaced by another symbol or string of symbols (e.g. D, N) are known as “phrase-structure rules”. By adding further words to the right-hand side of rules 4, 5 and 6, they could produce hundreds of sentences [116, p.72].
Transformational grammar has provided much new information about its nature; it is explicitly generative and its rules are arranged in a definite sequence. The "rules" of a generative grammar are not to be identified with the prescriptive "rules" that formed a part of traditional grammar. A prescriptive grammatical rule is a statement - such as “you should never end a sentence with a preposition” - that tells us whether we are right or wrong to use a particular construction. Generative rules have no such implication of social correctness. They are objective descriptions of the grammatical patterns that occur.
For a practical application of teaching grammar see O. Thomas and E. Kintgen, R. Scott, E. Morokhovs'ka, and others.
Other types of grammar are historical which trace the development of the structure of a language back to its origins, comparative or descriptive which traces the development of contemporary language forms in a number of different languages, and functional in which meanings are emphasised over forms.
For many years situationally based dialogues have provided students with a corpus of foreign language words and expressions with which to work. The situations, frequently found in present-day textbooks, describe experiences common to the foreign culture, introduce the students to typically American or British way of interacting and reacting. In some textbooks (Streamline, Headway, etc.) students are expected to comprehend the meaning through action-chains or through simple English explanations. The Total Physical Response relies exclusively on the use of physical actions at introductory level of instruction where verbal rehearsals accompanied by motor activity increase the probability of successful response [cf. 75, p. 88].
Dialogue instructions can serve several purposes; some dialogues are designed to demonstrate grammatical rules, and examples of rules in use and the variations of paradigms are introduced systematically in the exchanges [114, p. 24].
Bill — Where are you going this evening?
Jane — I am going out with my family. We are going to the cinema.
Bill — What are you going to see?
Jane — "Gone with the wind". My cousin's going with us. He and his wife are going to meet us there.
The aim of grammar-demonstration dialogues is to lead students to inductive recognition of the rule or the paradigm. These dialogues need not be memorized: they can be studied and discussed, dramatized and used as a basis for recombinations. They lead naturally to grammatical explanations and intensive practice exercises through which the operation of the rule or paradigm becomes clear to students, enters their repertoire, and is then used by them in a genuinely communicative interchange.
To sum it up, grammar in its development has traversed the way from observation to elucidation, from didactics to analysis, and from analysis to conceptualisation. Two steps can usually be distinguished in the study of grammar. The first step is to identify units such as "word", "phrase", and "sentence", the second step is to analyse the patterns into which these units fall, and the relationships of meaning that these patterns convey. But no grammar-book has so far registered all multifarious kinds of formal patterning and abstract relationships.
General Principles of Teaching Grammar.
A brief account of the underlying principles of teaching grammar is given in G. Rogova’s book which include conscious, practical, structural, situational, and differential approaches [57, pp. 155-159]. Current investigations expand the number of approaches and there is definitive information about functional and heuristic approaches that could be applied in teaching grammar.
Functional approach helps overcome the gap between paradigmatics and pragmatics of the language, i.e. the elements of language structure are judged and assessed in view of their usefulness for speech activity.
The functional approach offers a polysemy of grammatical forms. Thus analyzing the Present Continuous tense forms, attention is paid not only to dominant semantics – processivity oriented towards the moment of speaking but also to secondary meanings (a planned future action, emotional colouring, etc.). This approach allows for such organization of grammatical material as to convey a certain communicative intent. To express encouragement there is a vast range of possibilities – will you?, would you?, can you?, could you?, etc.
The functional approach to grammar reveals oppositions based on the common principle of semantic likeness. Such opposition may include Future Indefinite and Present Continuos, Past Indefinite and Present Perfect tense forms. For example,
I'll read this book and I'm going to read this book.
— Has Mary fed the cat?
— Yes, she fed him before lunch.
As it was mentioned above each method is characterised by its content and practical application. But there are some constraints that have stood the test of time and are resorted to by most teachers. These constraints include the material to be assimilated by inductive and deductive means. Each approach has its rationale and supporters and is still administered at certain stages of instruction depending on the type of a lesson, level of instruction, objectives, etc.
Although the grammar is rightly banished from elementary stage of instruction (the basis of instruction being primarily oral), it is possible to familiarise the pupils with some of its principles as soon as they have heard enough to furnish a few examples of some grammatical category [cf. 122, p. 116].
Thus as soon as the students have met with several examples of a certain case or other inflexion, the teacher calls their attention to that category, explaining what these words have in common, as far as it is possible without using any special terminology. In the same way the pupils' attention is drawn to the words which make up such a paradigm as I am, you are, he is. When this has gone on for some time, the teacher may expect the pupils to find out for themselves what grammatical category a word belongs. This is the inductive method of teaching grammar, or rather of preparing for the systematic study of grammar. This approach has stages of development, according to a gnostic development of pupils, and according to the grammatical categories to be defined. As already remarked, there will be no harm in varying the course of inductive grammar by an occasional application of deductive means (as in cases of irregularities, verbals, etc.) - although this ought not to be made an integral part of the course.
After all, the main thing is that the texts and the grammar should be closely associated and studied as much as possible simultaneously.
The aforesaid is consistent with Mc. Lean’s (1988) co-operative and inductive teaching strategies. In his opinion an inductive strategy of instruction is a pedagogy that brings students to infer general rules from observing specific cases. Students learn by solving problems that are meaningful to them; they are more motivated and learn more when they can verify that the knowledge they have acquired is useful.
As it was mentioned elsewhere, the acquisition of grammatical habits and skills involves the following stages: perception, recognition or identification, imitation, substitution, transformation, combination, expansion, production and construction. All these stages are recognised and practised by most teachers. An experienced teacher consults the syllabus and begins with the shortest grammar he can find. He first takes a general bird’s-eye view of the language, finds out what are its special difficulties, what has to be brought under general rules, what to learn detail by detail, what to put off till a later time.
The aim of the first stages is to understand topical texts, which involves only the power of perceiving and recognizing grammatical forms, not of constructing them, as in the further stages of writing or speaking the language. Learners in the first stages are expected to find out for themselves that men is the plural for man, and that work is the Present Indefinite tense form. He will then be able to infer from what he has learned in the grammar that the plural form of woman is women, but the inference belongs to the subsequent stages.
We have already seen how the first or mechanical, pre-grammatical stages may be utilised to convey a good deal of grammatical information not directly through rules, but indirectly through examples. In the first stages – perception, recognition and imitation – a great part of grammatical knowledge will be unconscious instead of analytic and systematic. Thus the learner has a certain understanding of paradigmatic relations, has advanced half way towards knowing them – a result which is a special help in mastering irregularities. Thus in the initial step grammar "two hands", "two feet", "two men", etc. the learner finds that the paradigm of the number offers hardly any difficulties.
At an introductory level teachers of English do not question the necessity for the grammar teaching. Nevertheless, they have considerable doubts about how this grammar should be taught. The analysis of words in English reveals the following groups of words: concrete (things, actions, qualities) for example: house, hand, big, read, etc., abstract for example: love, beauty, believe, etc., structural (auxiliary and modal verbs, adverbs, etc.), functional (articles, prepositions, conjunctions).
The first principle used in English for fitting words into sentences is word order. For example:
I go, you go, two of us go, and they go?
Notice that in English the verb doesn't change here; but a small group of words is used to show the change in meaning: did, will, does.
How do you say in your own language?
At the house,
to the house,
in the house,
from the house?
Notice again that in English the chief word house is not changed; but a small word is used before it: at, to, in, from (at the house; at my house; at the other house). Words such as the, an, a, this, by, of, etc. represent functional words or empty words, the ones that do not have a referent outside the language. Although these words are relatively few in number, they have a vital influence on English utterance [86, p. 31]. That gives the second part of the answer to the question, "What ways are used in English to fit words together into sentences?" The second part of the answer is that in English, words do not usually change when they are put into sentences, English uses helping words like do, will, can, etc.; they are called structural words because they are necessary to the structure of the English sentence.
The second principle is the use of English structures. However, there are a few changes in words, which have to be learned:
in verbs: I go, you go, she goes, he goes, it goes.
I answer now. I answered yesterday.
But there is no change in:
I went, you went, she went, he went, it went.
in nouns: one boy, two boys, a boy's look, a day’s work.
in adjectives and adverbs: quick-er-est; good-better-best.
The third principle in English is the use of a small number of inflections.
The bones of the English language are therefore of three kinds:
word order: I know it. The man rides a horse there.
structural words: I go home. I go to school. I am writing. I have written.
a few inflections: I think I can. I thought I could.
Of these three, by far the most important is word order, because word order in English is fixed, and upon it depends the plan of each standard model sentence.
The paradigms and tabulations in an elementary grammar ought to be regarded mainly as summings-up of what has already been learnt indirectly or in the form of scattered details [122, p.133].
The second stage includes substitution, transformation and combination. The use of substitution or variation tables presumes some prior learning of specific structural elements, the possessive pronouns, the singular and the plural forms of the verb to be in the third person. The drill then focuses on contexts that involve choice in the use of the indefinite article. It serves a useful purpose in drawing together in a systematic way what has been learned and what is being learned [114, p. 125].
At a later stage substitution tables can be used to familiarize students with the logical segmentation of sentences into subject, predicate, object and adverbial modifier.
Transformation
The passive voice is par excellence the grammatical structure that exemplifies the concept of transformation [cf. 111, p. 81]. For let us consider: John plays the piano. We can change the tense and aspect (or any combination of these) to produce:
John played the piano.
John is playing the piano.
John has played the piano.
John has been playing the piano.
But we cannot change the voice to give the sentence:
*John is played the piano.
Rather we need a transformation that involves a change in position of the subject and the object (as well as the addition of by):
The piano is played by John.
It follows from this that the passive is possible only with transitive verbs (i.e. those that may have objects).
There is no similar restriction on the other verbal categories.
It is possible to write a simple and general formula for the transformation of the passive from the active:
N
P1
Vact NP2 NP2 Vpas by NP1
Here Vact and Vpas stand for "active verb" and "passive verb" respectively.
It was thought, before the idea of transformation was proposed, that active and passive sentences were related semantically only. But a little consideration will show that voice (with transformation) is no less formal than tense (or aspect). For transformation must take place to preserve the grammaticality of the sentence, and, with rare exceptions, every active sentence has a corresponding passive one.
There is one very important syntactic point about the passive – that there may be no second NP (the one preceded by by). The NP that is the subject of the active sentence may be omitted:
The animals were killed
The thieves were caught.
Combination
If students are to speak and write well they must be shaken out of the shelter of simple and compound sentences with and and but. One way of eliciting complex sentences from students has been the combination exercise [114, p. 302]. For example, combine the following sentences into one by using relative pronouns.
e.g. My aunt made the soup.
I ate the soup.
(Expected combination: I ate the soup (that) my aunt made.
Discrete sentences can be joined assyndetically i.e. without using and or but.
e.g. Do you see the policeman?
He is stopping the cars.
He is letting the old lady cross the road.
(Expected combination: Do you see that policeman stopping the cars to let the old lady cross the road?).
The procedure of combining sentences to form one utterance can be used for creating dependent phrases beginning with present participle (he arrived at the station: he went straight to the ticket office – Arriving at the station, he went straight to the ticket office), or with prepositions such as before and after. Where one clause will be subordinate to the other, it must be clear to the student which of the two sentences to be combined will be the main clause and which the dependent clause. Sometimes temporal relationships will make this clear [114, p. 136].
Expansion
A suprasegmental level is another interesting approach that challenges the student's ingenuity. Students are asked to think of simple sentences that are written on the blackboard. Students are then given time, singly, in pairs, or in groups, to combine these sentences in any way they like to make a meaningful paragraph. No simple sentences may be used and only one and and one but for joining clauses are permissible in each paragraph. Adverbs, adjectives, and a few phrases may be added to improve the narrative. Below is an example of how the procedure might work.
Sentences provided by students.
The man leaves the house.
The baker sells bread.
A cat chases a mouse.
The dog barks
The mother scolds her little boy.
The little boy drops his toys.
Santa Claus kisses the children.
A possible paragraph:
The baker sells bread during the day, but at night he puts on a red suit and a white beard and leaves the house to play Santa Claus at the shopping centre. He kisses the little children before he gives them toys. Suddenly a dog barks because it sees a black cat chasing a tiny mouse. As a little boy is rushing over to see the cat he drops his toys. His mother, who is very upset, scolds her little boy in front of Santa Claus.
Production
Productivity is a function of combination. The more combinations permitted by the grouping of the material, the higher the productivity. The productivity of a structure is a number of possible combinations that it can produce from elements of its immediately inferior level [cf. 107, p. 300]. In the sense of a hierarchy, phonemes pattern into morphemes, morphemes may pattern into words, and words may pattern into phrases, clauses, sentences, and texts [86, p. 13].
Construction
A matrix of this concept evolves all previous cells, their selection, gradation and presentation as a single coherent and cohesive entity. The new forms being learned need to be incorporated into oral, reading and writing activities, where their relationship with all aspects of grammar may be observed. Construction highlights aspects of the grammar, lexis, register and style that are no longer thought of as discrete "rules" but as the elements in an interacting system. An orderly progression of study and practice, encouraging students to express themselves freely through the steps outlined above will provide them with a framework for spontaneous communicative creation.
Most classroom teachers use a mixture of inductive and deductive, situational and functional approaches according to the linguistic content of the subject matter, psychological peculiarities of the learners, methodological principles and techniques, and the degree of complication of the problems being presented.
The system of exercises in teaching grammar constitutes another problem because exercises in the methodology of FLT either belong to the media of instruction or to the functional aspect of FLT [cf. I.Bim]. V. Bukhbinder in his article speaks about three main types of exercises: informational, operational and motivational. The proponents of CC-LT speak about completely and predominantly manipulative, and predominantly and completely communicative activities which could be applied to teaching grammar. G. Rogova suggests the following types of exercises: recognition exercises, drills, and creative (speech) exercises.
B. Lapidous speaks about three sets of exercises: drills, quasi-communicative and communicative. V. Skalkin suggests two types of exercises: drills and communicative exercises. The latter are subdivided into responsive, situational, reproductive, descriptive, discussive, compositional and initiative exercises. In W. Makey's opinion the various types of grammar exercises include: addition, inclusion, replacement, integration, conversion, completion, transformation, transposition, rejoinder, contraction, and restatement.
To sum it up the system of exercises remains a moot problem that is still to be elucidated. All methodologists agree that drills, pre-communicative and communicative exercises have a key role to play in teaching grammar.