Learning and teaching of

different types of grammar

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.