Преп. Бовкунова О.В.

Днепропетровский национальный университет им. Олеся Гончара, Украина

Teaching English through Linguistic Universals

First-year-of-study students of higher educational institutions often show very low level of knowledge of basic linguistic notions and terms which prevents acquiring necessary skills in reading and translating texts in English as well as in doing various grammar exercises. Considering different levels of EFL acquisition in student groups, it is advisable to find a starting point that should level participants of the teaching process. Linguistic universals may be such a starting point due to the fact that they have already been learnt, sometimes not satisfactorily, though, at high school.

A universal is an idea or feature that exists everywhere. Linguistic universals are phenomena and features typical to a certain extent for all the languages of the world, in this case, Indo-European ones. The examples of universals are parts of speech and parts of a sentence, grammatical phenomena of person, number, tense, voice and aspect. The first thing that should be done by a teacher of mixed-level groups in order to make the students familiar with linguistic universals is to give the lists of the latter – starting with the simplest ones, such as parts of speech and parts of a sentence – and to analyze these lists in the Russian, Ukrainian and English languages. The teacher should be able to show the learners that such different – or seemingly different – languages as English, on the one hand, and Russian or Ukrainian, on the other hand, have a lot of common features. The lists may be given as straightforward information for studying and comparing or in the form of matching tests depending on the teacher’s opinion on the students’ “residual” knowledge in the sphere of general philological basis. Sentences that follow the lists serve as examples of parts of speech in contexts. The information with the examples should be preceded with the task like the given below:

Analyze the lists given below and name parts of speech in the sentences that serve as examples:

Russian Ukrainian English

Существительное Іменник Noun

Местоимение Займенник Pronoun

Глагол Дієслово Verb

Прилагательное Прикметник Adjective

Наречие Прислівник Adverb

Числительное Чисельник Numeral

Предлог Прийменник Preposition

Союз Сполучник Conjunction

Междометие Вигук Interjection

Мои родители всегда помогают мне и моему брату в трудных ситуациях.

Мої батьки завжди допомагають мені та моєму брату у складних ситуаціях.

My parents always help me and my brother in difficult situations.

Considering that while reading and translating the students will inevitably come across complex sentences sooner or later it is worthwhile to go further and remember how the parts of speech are connected with parts of a sentence that is how they function in speech. This might be trickier because, as experience shows, students’ basic knowledge of linguistic essentials is often rather poor. Anyway, the teacher can give another list, similar to the above, with the names of parts of a sentence in three languages and/or draw simple mind maps to show that the subject, for instance, is expressed not only by the noun or the pronoun, but also by the infinitive, the gerund and the numeral. It is even possible to paraphrase the same illustrative sentences like:

Помогать своим детям в трудных ситуациях – обязанность родителей.

Допомагати своїм дітям у складних ситуаціях – обов’язок батьків.

To help (helping) their children in difficult situations is the parents’ duty.

The question of the predicate is no less important. The students should understand that the subject and the predicate make the “core” of any sentence, English especially, because they are always present in an English sentence. That is why, while analyzing long and complex English sentences it is necessary, first of all, to find the subject and the predicate as a starting point for defining other parts of the sentence. For this, five English verb-forms are to be introduced in order to show the students which of those forms can function as a predicate and to illustrate why the rest of them cannot, under any conditions. To understand why the infinitive, participle I and participle II cannot function as independent predicates is very important for it will help remove difficulties and avoid grave mistakes in the process of understanding texts, doing translations and, certainly, grammar tests and exercises, especially cloze tests. So, the line of five English verb-forms should be given to the students:

Infinitive Present (I) Past (II) Past Participle (III) Present Participle

To give Give Gave Given Giving

The students must know that only two of these forms – Present (bare infinitive) and Past (Past Simple) can serve as independent predicates; the rest of the forms can serve as parts of predicates in combination with other verbs mostly. Ideally, this line should be supported with Russian and Ukrainian analogues but it is not easy taking into account a bigger number of forms in Russian and Ukrainian due to the phenomena of conjugation and declension.

Subject-predicate relations must be illustrated with a lot of examples to be commented and analyzed:

We were given not enough time to consider this point.

In the next chapter we briefly consider major results.

Considering the above, one can make certain conclusions.

The experiment went smoothly, all things considered.

Such examples may be approached from different angles: to find subjects and define the parts of speech that express them, to identify nouns and their functions, to find predicates and the corresponding verb-forms, to identify verb-forms and their functions, to translate the sentences into a native language and analyze the changes, if any, in the original and translated versions.

A typological approach, the basis of which is linguistic universals, has been considered of late suitable for studying a foreign language, not for teaching one. Modern and fashionable methods of teaching a foreign language tend to use a communicative or, more recently, a project approach. However, taking into account the students’ initial level of a foreign language knowledge, the form of a teaching process and the distribution of class hours typical for it, it is possible to state that the typological approach gives not less effective results, though, maybe, not so spectacular. The typological approach lays basic knowledge, and basic knowledge, as it is widely known, lasts for a long time.