ജ്യോതിസ്സ്
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
How to teach Grammar
A major concern for the English teacher has been how to help students make all and only correct sentences. Perhaps our teachers have developed a notion that the minimal unit that can serve the function of communication is the sentence because every sentence carries some information. Let’s see whether this argument can stand.
Read the following expressions.
1. There is an interesting story in this magazine. I am good at cooking. Do you know anything about ELT? Take that boy to the hospital. This is Nageswara Rao. Who will help me with some money?
2. I hope you understand my problem. What? Oh, no! It’s not just money that matters. I mean it. Listen! Yes, I must. I must meet you. Yes, it’s urgent. I told you, I am content with what I have. What about this afternoon? Fine!
• Which one makes a part of a unified whole?
• What sort of texts are these?
• How do we distinguish between the two?
The first piece contains six sentences and all of them are correct. Yet as a whole it makes no sense. It doesn’t give us any feeling of unity. The sentences in it are probably related to different contexts. On the other hand, the second piece contains several incomplete sentences. But it has a sense. It has an organic unity.
Coherence
What is the distinctive quality of the second piece?
Surely, it is the quality of being meaningful and unified, which is known as coherence.
Without coherence communication does not take place. Most importantly, this cannot be achieved by concentrating on the internal grammar of sentences.
It is fairly easy to recognise that linguistic units such as sounds, words, and sentences are not entities in isolation. They become meaningful only when they appear as part of discourses. There is language everywhere around us; it is there in the print media (in newspapers, magazines, etc.), in visual media (TV, movies, etc.) and in day to day life. Language exists in all these in the form of discourses only.
If language exists only in the form of discourses we have to face a couple of problems in the language class.
1. Why do teachers and students concentrate exclusively upon the production of correct sentences if these alone will not suffice to communicate?
2. If it is not the rule of the sentence that enables us to communicate, what is it?
Some general features of discourses When we think about discourses two different kinds of language serve as potential objects of inquiry:
i. An abstracted one in order to teach a language or literacy, or to study how the rules of language work.
ii. Another kind of language that is used to communicate something and has coherence.
It is possible to take a sentence from a discourse and subject it to grammatical analysis. It is also possible to take a sentence from a language textbook and say it to someone in a suitable occasion. Therefore both these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In natural situations people acquire language not by practising discrete sentences but through experiencing discourses.
It is not necessary that a discourse emerging in communicative situations consist of all and only grammatically well-formed sentences. There may be one or more of these but there can be ungrammatical sentences as well. This does not mean that the discourse is insensitive to rules of grammar. As G.Cook has observed, discourse makes use of grammar rules as a resource; it conforms to them when it needs to, but departs from them when it does not. The following piece of conversation will help us see this point clearly.
Waiter Can I help you?
Customer Well, chapatti … Do you have dry ones? …Three chapattis …chicken, er… chilly chicken, hot … corn soup …
Waiter Like to go for mushroom soup, sir?
Customer Oh, no! Doesn’t go with my tongue. Forget it.
Waiter Anything else?
Customer No, thanks. Make it fast.
This is an exchange that took place at a restaurant. We can see that there are points where the discourse departs from rules of grammar.
Sometimes discourse can be anything: it can be a grunt or a single expletive (i.e. an expression used in exclamations), short conversations, scribbled notes or even a novel. The only point that counts is that it communicates and is considered coherent by its receivers.
Subjectivity
Read the following exchange between two men.
Man 1: Yes?
Man 2: Yes.
Man 1: Why?
Man 2: Just like that.
Man 1: Just like that?
Man 2: Hmm!
The above exchange is meaningful to the two men but not to anyone else. As exemplified in this discourse, what matters is not its conformity to rules, but it communicates to the persons involved in it. This means that there is a degree of subjectivity in identifying a piece of language as discourse; a certain discourse may be meaningful and communicates to one person in a way which another person does not have the knowledge to make sense of.
Grammar beyond the sentence
We know that rules of grammar operate within a sentence. For e.g., if someone begins a sentence with ‘The…’ we know that any word cannot follow it. The rules of grammar allow only certain words after ‘the’. Are there rules that operate beyond the sentence? In other words, are there rules within discourses which decide what kind of sentence can follow another? If we violate rules of grammar within the sentence, we will get incorrect sentences of three kinds in addition to those with writing errors of spelling and punctuation.
There are rules of grammar beyond the sentence, within the discourse. These rules will decide which sentence can follow another one. If we violate these we will get sequences of sentences that lack coherence. This will affect communication. Consider the two sequences of sentences given below:
A. The boy ate all the mangoes. His stomach became upset.
B. The boy ate all the mangoes. The frog was in the pond.
The sequence of sentences in A will be accepted as an appropriate one for discourse whereas that in B will be rejected as it fails the test of coherence.
But we cannot come to a ready conclusion like this in the case of B. There is nothing ‘wrong’ about it because we can cook up a story which will contain this sequence. All what we need is stretch out our imagination by virtue of which we can create a context for the appearance of sequence B.
At this point we have two possible answers to the problem of how we identify a piece of language as unified and meaningful.
i. Invoke rules of grammar that operate within the sentence as well as within the discourse.
ii. Make use of our knowledge - of the world, of the speaker, of social convention, of what is going on around us as we read or listen.
It follows that factors outside language also are important for making a stretch of language coherent. In order to account for discourse we have to look at the situation, the people involved, what they know and what they are doing.
The pedagogic considerations of grammar teaching
When it comes to teaching of grammar we have to address ourselves to a few questions.
1. Why should we teach grammar?
2. What kind of grammar is to be taught?
3. At what point of formal education should we teach grammar?
4. What methodology would be appropriate for teaching grammar?
Why should we teach grammar?
Let us take the first question. There is a good old saying - ‘grammar is caught rather than taught’. Paradoxically, we keep on saying this and continue teaching some aspects of formal grammar in one way or the other. Descriptive grammars have displaced prescriptive grammars. Nevertheless, for most teachers the term grammar is associated with a set of definitions and rules because grammar was taught taking recourse to traditional approach for a long time. It was guided by a set of rigid rules. The experts working in the field of education began looking at teaching of English grammar with a changed vision.
Functional grammar was given thrust and it got its place in classroom teaching. The notion of teaching grammar through examples in different situations has gained much currency with the expectation that this would make grammar learning more interesting than ever before. It is claimed that by virtue of this strategy the learners would get the benefit of learning grammar without any emphasis on rote learning. Today in ELT circles grammar teaching has become participatory, interesting and learner-friendly through varieties of activities like games, rhymes, riddles and role play. The learners are involved in learning grammar spontaneously.
Nevertheless, the question remains unanswered: ‘Why should we teach grammar?’ More than fifty percent of learners fail to operate and write English with accuracy and fluency eventhough they apparently can do the grammar exercises in their textbooks correctly. This is probably because they know ‘about’ grammar and are able to attempt the ‘fill in the blanks’ items quite successfully. So where lies the problem? It is in the way we teach grammar. Functional grammar is the call of the hour. It is now necessary to orient ourselves, as teacher, to teach grammar in an interesting and flexible manner using authentic discourses and grammar games.
Teachers put forward several arguments in defence of concentrating on sentences while teaching a language:
• In the case of mother tongue, students already know how to communicate orally. What they need is to learn where to put full stops and how to write grammatical sentences.
• In the case of second languages what students need are formal skills and knowledge in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar which will provide the basis for communicating and interacting.
• These skills are demanded by examinations and are signs of acceptable language behaviour.
• Exercises can be neatly presented in sentences, with a tick or a mark for each one. This is important in formal teaching because exercises help students know where they are going and how far they have developed formal skills.
• Given practice in, and exposure to, correct sentences, the rest will follow in a natural way.
• The treatment of language in terms of sentences helps us know how language works; within the sentence we can establish rules and constraints that distinguish between licit and illicit sentence constructions.
• Sentences analyzed in linguistics are abstractions. Though these may appear very odd they are useful for language study.
We have noticed that a child internalises the grammar of the mother tongue through exposure to the language. Similarly, in second language acquisition, we must concentrate on giving exposure to the learners using interesting and authentic texts which will make them aware of the structures as well as the functions of the second language. The learners will be able to intuitively distinguish the so-called grammatical utterances from the ungrammatical ones.
At the same time we will introduce grammar at the secondary level for which we can put forward a few pedagogic justifications.
1. The acquisition paradigm followed at the primary level helps the learner to develop knowledge of language non-consciously. Once this target is achieved, we have to take the learners to a higher levels of knowledge of language where the learners apart from developing intuitions about well-formed constructions will also learn about some aspects of formal grammar. This knowledge, hopefully, will serve the learner better as a conscious monitor while undertaking the editing of discourses at a higher level.
2. At the higher secondary level the learners have the freedom to choose subject of their own choice from among a variety of knowledge domains. So the learner has to have basic concepts related to these knowledge areas by the time he/ she completes education at the secondary level. Language is a knowledge area that deserves to be treated at par with other knowledge areas such as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Commerce, and so on. This justifies learning about language at the secondary and higher secondary levels.
2. We know that every creative writer imprints his/ her marks of identity on their writings. That is why we are able to distinguish the personal style of an author. We listen to the writer’s voice when we read a poem, a novel or an essay. We expect the learners to identify the voice of the author from his/her writings which will eventually lead him/ her to identify his/ her own voice as a second language user. The learners at the secondary level should learn about these devices. A pre-requisite to this at the secondary level is that they should be able to identify linguistic elements that constitute various syntactic structures and how these are configured using devices such as complementation, subordination, coordination, relativization, clefting, passivisation and so on.
What kind of grammar?
What kind of grammar should we teach at the secondary and higher secondary levels?
There are different types of grammar such as lexical grammar, categorical grammar, relational grammar, functional grammar, phrase structure grammar, generative grammar, transformational generative grammar and the like to mention a few. Each one of these approaches language as a system from different points of view. ELT experts of our own times across the world say that if at all we have to teach grammar it is functional grammar. They argue that learners of English as a second language should have a clear idea about what kind of expressions are to be used for specific communicative functions. The implicit assumption is that if learners are well- familiarised with the structures that will serve these purposes they will be able to maintain both fluency and accuracy while communicating with others using English.
When we look at this assumption through critical lens we will see that it cannot be sustained. We have acquired our mother tongue through meaningful discourses and we will be able to use it doing full justice to its functional aspects. We do not have to learn separately how to invite people or how to apologise. Acquiring a language implies acquiring both its structures and functions. Native speakers of any language will be able to use it by virtue of the intuitive structure consciousness they have acquired. Therefore there is no point in teaching functional grammar.
At the secondary and higher secondary levels we will be focusing on lexical, phrasal and clausal categories of language and how these are interconnected in different ways to yield different structures. Also the learners will learn what structural changes are in operation in a given configuration and how licit and illicit structures are generated by these operations. This implies that the learners will have to get sensitised on some aspects of transformational generative grammar.
When to teach grammar?
From what we have discussed above it is clear that we do not have to teach grammar at the primary level, that is from classes I to VII. By learning English grammar consciously what the learners get is ‘knowledge about’ the language. This knowledge will not help them to speak spontaneously in English in interpersonal communicative situations. For this they should possess ‘knowledge of’ the language. This knowledge is acquired non-consciously and precisely this is the reason why we have replaced the fragmentary approach to teaching language with discourse-oriented pedagogy. Of course, as part of discourse construction they will be generating both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The syntactic and morphological errors and the errors of spelling and punctuation that they may make are taken up and rectified through the process of editing. Editing at the primary level implies editing within the domain of sentence grammar. At the secondary level we will have to go for different levels of editing as mentioned below.
1. Editing related to sentence grammar
• Syntactic editing
• Morphological editing
• Editing errors of spelling and punctuation
2. Errors related to discourse grammar
3. Thematic editing
4. Editing related to discourse features
The Methodology
The curriculum, syllabi and textbooks have been developed and are meant to be transacted in tune with social constructivism and critical pedagogy. Construction of knowledge has to take place at all levels of learning and in all domains of knowledge. This implies that we cannot stuff the learners with lots and lots of information pertaining to grammar. Grammatical concepts are to be constructed by the learners by analysing a certain body of linguistic data available from the discourses and categorising them in specific ways. The general processes of the constructivist classroom will be retained intact for facilitating concept attainment in the realm of grammar.
Read the following expressions.
1. There is an interesting story in this magazine. I am good at cooking. Do you know anything about ELT? Take that boy to the hospital. This is Nageswara Rao. Who will help me with some money?
2. I hope you understand my problem. What? Oh, no! It’s not just money that matters. I mean it. Listen! Yes, I must. I must meet you. Yes, it’s urgent. I told you, I am content with what I have. What about this afternoon? Fine!
• Which one makes a part of a unified whole?
• What sort of texts are these?
• How do we distinguish between the two?
The first piece contains six sentences and all of them are correct. Yet as a whole it makes no sense. It doesn’t give us any feeling of unity. The sentences in it are probably related to different contexts. On the other hand, the second piece contains several incomplete sentences. But it has a sense. It has an organic unity.
Coherence
What is the distinctive quality of the second piece?
Surely, it is the quality of being meaningful and unified, which is known as coherence.
Without coherence communication does not take place. Most importantly, this cannot be achieved by concentrating on the internal grammar of sentences.
It is fairly easy to recognise that linguistic units such as sounds, words, and sentences are not entities in isolation. They become meaningful only when they appear as part of discourses. There is language everywhere around us; it is there in the print media (in newspapers, magazines, etc.), in visual media (TV, movies, etc.) and in day to day life. Language exists in all these in the form of discourses only.
If language exists only in the form of discourses we have to face a couple of problems in the language class.
1. Why do teachers and students concentrate exclusively upon the production of correct sentences if these alone will not suffice to communicate?
2. If it is not the rule of the sentence that enables us to communicate, what is it?
Some general features of discourses When we think about discourses two different kinds of language serve as potential objects of inquiry:
i. An abstracted one in order to teach a language or literacy, or to study how the rules of language work.
ii. Another kind of language that is used to communicate something and has coherence.
It is possible to take a sentence from a discourse and subject it to grammatical analysis. It is also possible to take a sentence from a language textbook and say it to someone in a suitable occasion. Therefore both these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In natural situations people acquire language not by practising discrete sentences but through experiencing discourses.
It is not necessary that a discourse emerging in communicative situations consist of all and only grammatically well-formed sentences. There may be one or more of these but there can be ungrammatical sentences as well. This does not mean that the discourse is insensitive to rules of grammar. As G.Cook has observed, discourse makes use of grammar rules as a resource; it conforms to them when it needs to, but departs from them when it does not. The following piece of conversation will help us see this point clearly.
Waiter Can I help you?
Customer Well, chapatti … Do you have dry ones? …Three chapattis …chicken, er… chilly chicken, hot … corn soup …
Waiter Like to go for mushroom soup, sir?
Customer Oh, no! Doesn’t go with my tongue. Forget it.
Waiter Anything else?
Customer No, thanks. Make it fast.
This is an exchange that took place at a restaurant. We can see that there are points where the discourse departs from rules of grammar.
Sometimes discourse can be anything: it can be a grunt or a single expletive (i.e. an expression used in exclamations), short conversations, scribbled notes or even a novel. The only point that counts is that it communicates and is considered coherent by its receivers.
Subjectivity
Read the following exchange between two men.
Man 1: Yes?
Man 2: Yes.
Man 1: Why?
Man 2: Just like that.
Man 1: Just like that?
Man 2: Hmm!
The above exchange is meaningful to the two men but not to anyone else. As exemplified in this discourse, what matters is not its conformity to rules, but it communicates to the persons involved in it. This means that there is a degree of subjectivity in identifying a piece of language as discourse; a certain discourse may be meaningful and communicates to one person in a way which another person does not have the knowledge to make sense of.
Grammar beyond the sentence
We know that rules of grammar operate within a sentence. For e.g., if someone begins a sentence with ‘The…’ we know that any word cannot follow it. The rules of grammar allow only certain words after ‘the’. Are there rules that operate beyond the sentence? In other words, are there rules within discourses which decide what kind of sentence can follow another? If we violate rules of grammar within the sentence, we will get incorrect sentences of three kinds in addition to those with writing errors of spelling and punctuation.
There are rules of grammar beyond the sentence, within the discourse. These rules will decide which sentence can follow another one. If we violate these we will get sequences of sentences that lack coherence. This will affect communication. Consider the two sequences of sentences given below:
A. The boy ate all the mangoes. His stomach became upset.
B. The boy ate all the mangoes. The frog was in the pond.
The sequence of sentences in A will be accepted as an appropriate one for discourse whereas that in B will be rejected as it fails the test of coherence.
But we cannot come to a ready conclusion like this in the case of B. There is nothing ‘wrong’ about it because we can cook up a story which will contain this sequence. All what we need is stretch out our imagination by virtue of which we can create a context for the appearance of sequence B.
At this point we have two possible answers to the problem of how we identify a piece of language as unified and meaningful.
i. Invoke rules of grammar that operate within the sentence as well as within the discourse.
ii. Make use of our knowledge - of the world, of the speaker, of social convention, of what is going on around us as we read or listen.
It follows that factors outside language also are important for making a stretch of language coherent. In order to account for discourse we have to look at the situation, the people involved, what they know and what they are doing.
The pedagogic considerations of grammar teaching
When it comes to teaching of grammar we have to address ourselves to a few questions.
1. Why should we teach grammar?
2. What kind of grammar is to be taught?
3. At what point of formal education should we teach grammar?
4. What methodology would be appropriate for teaching grammar?
Why should we teach grammar?
Let us take the first question. There is a good old saying - ‘grammar is caught rather than taught’. Paradoxically, we keep on saying this and continue teaching some aspects of formal grammar in one way or the other. Descriptive grammars have displaced prescriptive grammars. Nevertheless, for most teachers the term grammar is associated with a set of definitions and rules because grammar was taught taking recourse to traditional approach for a long time. It was guided by a set of rigid rules. The experts working in the field of education began looking at teaching of English grammar with a changed vision.
Functional grammar was given thrust and it got its place in classroom teaching. The notion of teaching grammar through examples in different situations has gained much currency with the expectation that this would make grammar learning more interesting than ever before. It is claimed that by virtue of this strategy the learners would get the benefit of learning grammar without any emphasis on rote learning. Today in ELT circles grammar teaching has become participatory, interesting and learner-friendly through varieties of activities like games, rhymes, riddles and role play. The learners are involved in learning grammar spontaneously.
Nevertheless, the question remains unanswered: ‘Why should we teach grammar?’ More than fifty percent of learners fail to operate and write English with accuracy and fluency eventhough they apparently can do the grammar exercises in their textbooks correctly. This is probably because they know ‘about’ grammar and are able to attempt the ‘fill in the blanks’ items quite successfully. So where lies the problem? It is in the way we teach grammar. Functional grammar is the call of the hour. It is now necessary to orient ourselves, as teacher, to teach grammar in an interesting and flexible manner using authentic discourses and grammar games.
Teachers put forward several arguments in defence of concentrating on sentences while teaching a language:
• In the case of mother tongue, students already know how to communicate orally. What they need is to learn where to put full stops and how to write grammatical sentences.
• In the case of second languages what students need are formal skills and knowledge in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar which will provide the basis for communicating and interacting.
• These skills are demanded by examinations and are signs of acceptable language behaviour.
• Exercises can be neatly presented in sentences, with a tick or a mark for each one. This is important in formal teaching because exercises help students know where they are going and how far they have developed formal skills.
• Given practice in, and exposure to, correct sentences, the rest will follow in a natural way.
• The treatment of language in terms of sentences helps us know how language works; within the sentence we can establish rules and constraints that distinguish between licit and illicit sentence constructions.
• Sentences analyzed in linguistics are abstractions. Though these may appear very odd they are useful for language study.
We have noticed that a child internalises the grammar of the mother tongue through exposure to the language. Similarly, in second language acquisition, we must concentrate on giving exposure to the learners using interesting and authentic texts which will make them aware of the structures as well as the functions of the second language. The learners will be able to intuitively distinguish the so-called grammatical utterances from the ungrammatical ones.
At the same time we will introduce grammar at the secondary level for which we can put forward a few pedagogic justifications.
1. The acquisition paradigm followed at the primary level helps the learner to develop knowledge of language non-consciously. Once this target is achieved, we have to take the learners to a higher levels of knowledge of language where the learners apart from developing intuitions about well-formed constructions will also learn about some aspects of formal grammar. This knowledge, hopefully, will serve the learner better as a conscious monitor while undertaking the editing of discourses at a higher level.
2. At the higher secondary level the learners have the freedom to choose subject of their own choice from among a variety of knowledge domains. So the learner has to have basic concepts related to these knowledge areas by the time he/ she completes education at the secondary level. Language is a knowledge area that deserves to be treated at par with other knowledge areas such as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Commerce, and so on. This justifies learning about language at the secondary and higher secondary levels.
2. We know that every creative writer imprints his/ her marks of identity on their writings. That is why we are able to distinguish the personal style of an author. We listen to the writer’s voice when we read a poem, a novel or an essay. We expect the learners to identify the voice of the author from his/her writings which will eventually lead him/ her to identify his/ her own voice as a second language user. The learners at the secondary level should learn about these devices. A pre-requisite to this at the secondary level is that they should be able to identify linguistic elements that constitute various syntactic structures and how these are configured using devices such as complementation, subordination, coordination, relativization, clefting, passivisation and so on.
What kind of grammar?
What kind of grammar should we teach at the secondary and higher secondary levels?
There are different types of grammar such as lexical grammar, categorical grammar, relational grammar, functional grammar, phrase structure grammar, generative grammar, transformational generative grammar and the like to mention a few. Each one of these approaches language as a system from different points of view. ELT experts of our own times across the world say that if at all we have to teach grammar it is functional grammar. They argue that learners of English as a second language should have a clear idea about what kind of expressions are to be used for specific communicative functions. The implicit assumption is that if learners are well- familiarised with the structures that will serve these purposes they will be able to maintain both fluency and accuracy while communicating with others using English.
When we look at this assumption through critical lens we will see that it cannot be sustained. We have acquired our mother tongue through meaningful discourses and we will be able to use it doing full justice to its functional aspects. We do not have to learn separately how to invite people or how to apologise. Acquiring a language implies acquiring both its structures and functions. Native speakers of any language will be able to use it by virtue of the intuitive structure consciousness they have acquired. Therefore there is no point in teaching functional grammar.
At the secondary and higher secondary levels we will be focusing on lexical, phrasal and clausal categories of language and how these are interconnected in different ways to yield different structures. Also the learners will learn what structural changes are in operation in a given configuration and how licit and illicit structures are generated by these operations. This implies that the learners will have to get sensitised on some aspects of transformational generative grammar.
When to teach grammar?
From what we have discussed above it is clear that we do not have to teach grammar at the primary level, that is from classes I to VII. By learning English grammar consciously what the learners get is ‘knowledge about’ the language. This knowledge will not help them to speak spontaneously in English in interpersonal communicative situations. For this they should possess ‘knowledge of’ the language. This knowledge is acquired non-consciously and precisely this is the reason why we have replaced the fragmentary approach to teaching language with discourse-oriented pedagogy. Of course, as part of discourse construction they will be generating both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. The syntactic and morphological errors and the errors of spelling and punctuation that they may make are taken up and rectified through the process of editing. Editing at the primary level implies editing within the domain of sentence grammar. At the secondary level we will have to go for different levels of editing as mentioned below.
1. Editing related to sentence grammar
• Syntactic editing
• Morphological editing
• Editing errors of spelling and punctuation
2. Errors related to discourse grammar
3. Thematic editing
4. Editing related to discourse features
The Methodology
The curriculum, syllabi and textbooks have been developed and are meant to be transacted in tune with social constructivism and critical pedagogy. Construction of knowledge has to take place at all levels of learning and in all domains of knowledge. This implies that we cannot stuff the learners with lots and lots of information pertaining to grammar. Grammatical concepts are to be constructed by the learners by analysing a certain body of linguistic data available from the discourses and categorising them in specific ways. The general processes of the constructivist classroom will be retained intact for facilitating concept attainment in the realm of grammar.
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