Grammar

• Paper:- 12 English language Teaching- I

• Roll No:- 26

• M.A. Part ii Sem iii

• Year:- 2013- 15

• Submitted to:- Smt. S.B.Gardi.

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

Prepared By :- Sejal Chauhan

Date: 4/10/2014

• The grammar has multiple meanings

• It is used to both to language users

• It is also refer to a particular school of linguistic thought.

Grammar

How words are formedHow words are

combined

syntaxmorphology

• A study of English grammar includes function words.

Grammar

Includes

phonology semantics

Two types of descriptive grammars

Formal grammars Functional grammars

Starting point the form Social interaction

Structure of language Explain why one linguistic form is more appropriate than another

Communicative purpose in a particular context

No attention given to meaning

Noam Chomsky

FocusLimitation of

languageGrammatical competence

• Realized the phonetic form of sentences

• Aim of formal grammars to explain syntactic facts without recourse to pragmatics

Describe

Grammatical systemWhat speaker say or understand someone

else to say

Speaker’s competence Their competence

• Functional grammarians start from a very different position.

• Different models of functional grammars, theorists share the conviction that:

The language system… is not considered as an autonomous set of rules and principles, the uses of which can only be considered in a secondary phase; rather it is assumed that the rules and principle composing the language system can only be adequately understood when they are analyzed in terms of the conditions of use. In this sense the study of language use precedes the study of formal and semantic properties of linguistic expressions.

(Duck 1991:247)

• Thus where a formal grammarian might accept the challenge to explain how sentence is derived from.

• Functional grammarian is more interested in explain the difference in use between these two according to the notion ‘perspective’.

• (1) Mark McGuire and Sammy Sasa broke the home run record.

• (2) The home run record was broken by Mark McGuire and Sammy Sasa.

• both sentence describe the same events.

• But that this event is presented from the participant’s view point in and from the view point of the result in.

• He or she is then interested in determining what contextual features influenced the speakers choosing one version over the other.

• functional grammarians see meaning as central.

• In Holliday’s systemic functional theory,

• Grammar in Language Education:-

• Formal and functional approaches is reflected in language education.

• Influence of transformational grammar

• Teaching practice

Three types of meaning in grammatical stucture can be identified

Experiential meaning

Interpersonal meaning Textual meaning

• Grammatical structure learned in class to communicative context outside

• Communicative competence

• Communicative approach like role play, information gap activities

• Target language used for communicative purposes

• SLA researchers who sought to account for grammatical development by examining how meaning was negotiated in learner interactions.

• SLA researcher Hatch commented:‘ One learns how to do conversation, one learns how to interact verbally and, out of this interaction, syntactic structure are developed’.

• Research:-• Focus on form:-

• SLA researcher follow Long (1991) in proposing focus on form

• They work within a meaning based or communicative approach

• Aim what form- focused practices are most effective, when they are best used and with which forms.

• Benefits:-

• Help students ‘notice the gap’ between new features in a target language’s structure

• How they differ from the learners interlanguage.

• Help students generalize their knowledge to new structure.

• Sociocultural theory:-• Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory

• Donato studies what he termed “collective scaffolding” to see how language development was brought about through social interaction.

• Donato found evidence that participating in collaborative dialogue, through which learners could provide support for each other, spurred development of learners interlanguage.

• Discourse grammar:-

• Investigations of grammar at this level

• For example:- the present perfect operates at this level to frame a habitual present tense narrative.

• The place of grammar in social interaction.

• Corpus Linguistics:-

• This is another area with important implications for understanding and teaching grammar

• With technological changes, concordance programs can search massive databases of spoken and written language to identify example of particular grammatical patterns.

• Example:- using the 320-millions word COBUILD corpus of British, American and Australian English researchers have found that insist typically occur in the following combination:

insist (that)

He insisted that he hadn’t done it.

insist on He insisted on his innocence.

insist on verb + ingHe insisted on testifying.

insist + quoteHe insisted, ‘I haven’t done it’.

• what is noteworthy is that not every possible combination of words and grammatical structures occur

• It seems that words are not freely substituted into grammatical patterns: once one word is selected, the likelihood of a particular word or phrase following is increased.

• Teachers of grammar should pay more attention to conventionalized lexicogrammatical units.

• Thus at the end we can say that, there is a little disagreement that L2 learners need to learn to communicative grammatically.

• How to characterize the grammar and help L2 learners acquire it is more controversial.

• It should be noted that, as a consequence of the renewed attention grammar has recently received, the complexity of the challenge faced by teachers and researchers is more fully appreciated.

• List of some Grammar books:-

1. How English Works : A Grammar Practice Book by Michael Swan

2. A communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey N. Leech

3. An Introduction to English Grammar( Longman Grammar, syntax and phonology) by Sidney Greenbaum

4. A Practical English Grammar by Audrey Jean Thomson

5. Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts

6. Fundamental of English Grammar by Batty Schrampfer Azar

Thank you

• Reference:-

• The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speaker of Other Languages/Chapter 5/ Grammar/Diane Larsen Freeman