Anna Mudrenko

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University

To the issue of grammar teaching

In fact, no other issues has so preoccupied theorists and practitioners as the grammar debate, and the history of language teaching is essentially the history of the claims and attitude to the role of grammar underpin differences between methods, between teachers and between learners. It is a subject that everyone involved in language teaching and learning has an opinion on. And these opinions are often strongly and uncompromisingly stated.

There are many arguments for putting grammar in the foreground in the second language teaching.

The sentence- machine argument. Part of the process of language learning must be what is sometimes called item-learning – that is the memorization of individual items such as words and phrases. However, there is a limit to the number of items a person can both retain and retrieve. Even travellers’ phrase books have limited usefulness – good for a short holiday, but there comes a point when we need to learn some patterns or rules to enable us to generate new sentences. That is to say, grammar. Grammar is a description of the regularities in a language, and knowledge of these regularities provides the learner with the means to generate a potentially enormous number of original sentences. The number of possible new sentences is constrained only by the vocabulary at the learner’s command and his or her creativity. Grammar is a kind of ‘sentence – making machine’. It follows that a teaching of grammar offers the learner the means for potentially limitless linguistic creativity.

The fine-tuning argument. The purpose of grammar seems to be to allow for greater subtlety of meaning that a merely lexical system can cater for. While it is possible to get a lot of communicative mileage out of simply stringing words and phrases together, there comes a point where ‘Me Bill, you Jane’- type language fails to deliver, both in terms of intelligibility and in terms of appropriacy. This is particularly the case for written language, which generally needs to be more explicit than spoken language. The teaching of grammar serves as a corrective against the kind of ambiguity.

The fossilization argument. It is possible for highly motivated learners with a particular aptitude for languages to achieve amazing levels of proficiency without any formal study. But more often ‘pick it up as you go along’ learners reach a language plateau beyond which it is very difficult to progress. To put it technically, their linguistic competence fossilizes. Research suggests that learners who receive no instruction seem to be at risk of fossilizing sooner than those who do receive instructions. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean taking formal lessons – the grammar study can be self-directed.

The advance-organiser argument. Grammar instruction might also have a delayed effect. Initially learners enroll in formal language classes where there is a heavy emphasis on grammar. When they subsequently leave these classes to travel, to communicate with other people and put it into practice their language makes good progress, a fact they attribute to the use they are making of it. Noticing is a prerequisite for acquisition. The grammar teaching they have received previously, while insufficient in itself to turn them into a fluent speaker. They notice what might otherwise go unnoticed, and hence has indirectly influenced their learning. It acts as a kind of advance organiser for their later acquisition of the language.

The discrete item argument. Language – any language – seen from ‘outside’, can seem to be an insuperable challenge for the learner. Because grammar consists of an apparently finite set of rules, it can help to reduce the apparent enormity of the language learning task for both teachers and students. By tidying language up and organizing it into neat categories (sometimes called discrete items), grammarians make language digestible. A discrete item is any unit of the grammar system that is sufficiently narrowly defined to form the focus of a lesson or an exercise: e.g. the past simple, the possessive case, the passive voice. Nouns, on the other hand, or sentences are not categories that are sufficiently discrete for teaching purposes, since they allow for further sub-categories. Each discrete item can be isolated from the language that normally envelops it. It can be then slotted into a syllabus of other discrete items, and targeted for individual attention and testing. Other ways of packaging language for teaching purposes are less easily organized into a syllabus.

The rule-of- law argument. It follows from the discrete-item argument that, since grammar is a system of learnable rules, it lends itself to a view of teaching and learning known as transmission. A transmission view sees the role of education as a transfer of a body of knowledge to those that do not. Such a view is typically associated with the kind of institutionalized learning where rules, order, and discipline are highly valued. The need for rules, order, and discipline is particularly acute in large classes. In this situation grammar offers the teacher a structured system that can be taught and tested in methodical steps. The alternative – allowing simply experiencing the language through communication – may simply be out of question.

A grammar is acquired through practice; it is merely perfected through grammar. We have looked at the arguments for incorporating grammar into language teaching, and concluded that there is a convincing case for a role for grammar.