Mai 2013
The teaching of grammar has always
been a central aspect of foreign language teaching. Grammar is the system of
rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationships of words in a
sentence. Grammar tells us how to construct a sentence (word order, verb and
noun systems, modifiers, phrases, clauses, etc.).
Many students ask teachers a typical question: is grammar really important for a us? The
answer is clear and simple: “indeed”. Grammar is the pylon of a language and
without it any single thing you know may be in a sort of jelly, without much
consistency. Grammar provides students with the structure they need in order to
organize and put their messages and ideas across. It is the railway through
which their messages will be transported. Without it, in the same way as a
train cannot move without railways, they won’t be able to convey their ideas to
their full extension without a good command of the underlying grammar patterns
and structures of the language.
Grammar mechanism must be assimilating
in order to understand and to express oneself correctly in English; one may
know all the words in a sentence and still to fail to understand it, if one
does not see the relation between the words in the sentence, and conversely, a
sentence may contain one, or more unknown words but if one has a good knowledge
of the structure of the language one can easily guess the meaning of these
words, or at least find them in the dictionary.
How can we teach grammar to support learning in all
language skills?
If the teacher think of the grammar that he teach as a
language about language, then grammar is useful any time he discuss particular
words or sentences with the students. The formal term for this language about
language is metalanguage, a vocabulary about language itself, one that
makes it possible for us to redirect our words back on themselves so that we
can talk and write about how we talk and write.
How can we teach grammar so that students discover
its rules and principles on their own instead of hearing teacher impose those
rules and principles on them?
Grammaris a tricky word. On the one hand, it means “the
languageof language”. On the other hand, you may need to remind yourselffrom
time to time that all of us are grammar experts: we all knowgrammar; we all
know how to manoeuver words and phrases in orderto communicate effectively
nearly all the time. We also are all keen observersof language. We see and hear
the kinds of language that peopleuse in different situations. The teacher’s
challenge is to tap into all thisexpertise. You may want to consciously
practice a repertoire of a fewflexible questions and directions that can help
elicit points of grammarin many different classroom discussions:
s “How would you say [or write]
this in a certain situation, with a certain audience? How have you heard other
people say it?”
s “Find examples of [a phrase, a
type of sentence, a construction, etc.] in someone’s writing or in
conversation.”
s “What is the pattern in these
examples?”
s “What could the rule or definition
be? Test it out on another example.”
Teachers’ primary goal (as second language teachers) must
be to create users or the language, not linguists!
The study of the structure of the
language can have general educational advantages and values that high schools
and colleges may want to include in their language programs. It is obvious that
examining irregularity, formulating rules and teaching complex facts about the
target language is “language
appreciation” or linguistics,
not language teaching.
The
only instance in which the teaching of grammar can result in language
acquisition (and proficiency) is when the students are interested in the
subject and the target language is used as a medium of instruction. Very often,
when this occurs, both teachers and students are convinced that the study of
formal grammar is essential for second language acquisition, and the teacher is
skillful
enough to present explanations in the target language so that the students
understand. In other words, the teacher talk meets the requirements for
comprehensible input and perhaps with the students’ participation the classroom
becomes an environment suitable for acquisition. Also, the filter is low in
regard to the language of explanation, as the students’ conscious efforts are
usually on the subject matter, on what is being talked about, and not the
medium. This is a subtle point. In effect, both teachers and students are
deceiving themselves. They believe that it is the subject matter itself, the
study of grammar, that is responsible for the students’ progress, but in
reality their progress is coming from the medium and not the message. Any
subject matter that held their interest would do just as well.
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