Teaching English as a second language. Lecture 2 Tamar Mikeladze Associate Professor Telavi State University
Focusing questions What is grammar? How do you think it is learnt? How would you teach it? Keywords prescriptive grammar: grammar that prescribes what people should or should not say traditional grammar: school grammar concerned with labelling sentences with parts of speech, and so on structural grammar: grammar concerned with how words go into phrases, and phrases into sentences grammatical (linguistic) competence: the knowledge of language stored in a persons mind Prescriptive grammar
One familiar type of grammar is the rules found in schoolbooks, for example, the warnings against final prepositions in sentences, This cant be put up with. This is called prescriptive grammar because it prescribes what people ought to do. Modern grammarians have mostly avoided prescriptive grammar Traditional grammar A second popular meaning of grammar concerns the parts of speech: the fact that a noun is a word that is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea is absorbed by every school pupil in England. This definition comes straight from Tapestry Writing 1 (Pike-Baky, 2000), a course published in the year 2000, but which differs little from William Cobbetts definition in 1819: Nouns are the names of persons and things. Basic Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2002, 2nd edn). the technical terms in English subject pronouns, possessive adjective, contraction and statement Structural grammar Language teaching has also made use of structural grammar based on the concept of phrase structure, which shows how some words go together in the sentence and some do not. In a sentence such as The man fed the dog,
Structural grammar Grammar in the mind of the learner By grammatical competence I mean the cognitive state that encompasses all those aspects of form and meaning and their relation, including underlying structures that enter into that relation, which are properly assigned to the specific subsystem of the human mind that relates representations of form and meaning. (Chomsky,1980: 59) Grammatical competence communicative competence pragmatic competence
THE TYPICAL GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS IN BEGINNERS ENGLISH COURSEBOOKS Many of these items are the basis for language teaching and for SLA research. 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 beginners sentences in English or another modern language? Keywords content words such as table or truth have meanings that can be found in dictionaries and consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives and (possibly) prepositions structure (function) words such as articles the and a exist to form part of phrases and structures and so have meanings that are difficult to capture in the dictionary morpheme: the smallest unit of grammar, consisting either of a word (toast) or part of a word (s in Johns) morphology and syntax: morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals with the structure of morphemes; syntax is the branch that deals with the structure of phrases above the level of the word grammatical morphemes are morphemes such as -ing and the that play a greater part in structure than content words such as horse (lexical morphemes) order of difficulty: the scale of difficulty for particular aspects of grammar for L2 learners sequence of acquisition: the order in which L2 learners acquire the grammar,pronunciation, and so on of the language Grammar can be:
1. a way of telling people what they ought to say, rather than reporting what they do say (prescriptive grammar); 2. a system for describing sentence structure used in English schools for centuries, based on grammars of classical languages such as Latin (traditional grammar); 3. a system for describing sentences based on the idea of smaller structures built up into larger structures (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). 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 being formulated, gwik still fardled, funted and fupped. The same sentence with made-up structure words might have read: So kel Mars, dom trelk decisions kel trelk fate mert trelk miserable slaves hiv polst formulated, deer still grazed, jumped kosp survived. Only the first version is comprehensible in some form, even if we have no idea how you fardle and funt. Early acquisition of grammar Content and structure words differ in many ways, including the ways they are used in sentences and how they are pronounced. Grammatical morphemes (structure words and grammatical inflections) are learnt in a particular sequence in L2 acquisition. L2 learners acquire the same basic grammar regardless of the first and second languages involved. Focusing questions Do you find problems in following certain structures in your L2, or indeed your L1? Why do you think you find some structures more difficult to follow than others? Keywords movement: a way of describing some sentences as being based on moving various elements about. processability: sequences of acquisition may reflect the ease with which certain structures can be processed by the mind. sequence of development: the inevitable progression of learners through definite stages of acquisition. the teachability hypothesis: an L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only if the learners interlanguage is close to the point when this structure is acquired in the natural setting (Pienemann, 1984: 201). 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. The learner 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.