Topic 12 – The concept of grammar: Reflection on language

and learning. - Oposinet

20-25 minutos

Throughout this topic I am going to deal with grammar. I am going to

divide my presentation into three different sections. In the first one, I
will present a definition of grammar, and will establish a division
between prescriptive and descriptive grammar. Then I will move on
to give an historical overview of the studies associated with
grammar, and will analyse the evolution from prescriptive to
descriptive grammar. Finally, in my last section I will reflect on the
importance of grammar in language teaching.

Let’s start with a definition of grammar. The term grammar comes

from the Greek word grammatike, which meant “to write”, or from
grammatike techne, meaning “the art of writing”. There has been,
and still are, many definitions of the concept of grammar, depending
on the perspective used. However, I will include a definition which is
widely accepted. Grammar can be defined as the set of rules
governing the sounds, words, sentences and other elements of the
language, as well as their combination and interpretation. The word
grammar also denotes the study of these abstract features or a book
presenting the rules.

Contemporary linguists define grammar as the underlying structure

of a language that any native speaker of the language knows
intuitively. The systematic description of the features of a language
is also known as grammar. These features are the phonology,
morphology, syntax and semantics that all native speakers of a
language control by about the age of six.

Let’s include another definition of grammar. Grammar may be

roughly defined as the way a language manipulates and combines
words or bits of words in order to form longer units of meaning. For
example, the present form of the verb BE in the third person has two
distinct forms, one being used with a singular subject and the other
with a plural subject. If the plural ARE is combined with a singular
subject, the result is usually unacceptable or ungrammatical. Thus, a
sentence like This is a book is grammatical, whereas This are a
book* is not.
Throughout history, there have been different approaches to the
concept of grammar. Important differences can be established
between the prescriptive and the descriptive approaches to
grammar. Prescriptivism is the view that one variety of a language
has an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be
imposed on the whole of the speech community. It is an
authoritarian view, propounded especially in relation to grammar and
vocabulary, and often with reference to pronunciation. The favoured
variety is usually a version of the standard written language,
especially as encountered in literature, or in the formal spoken
language which most closely reflects literary style, and it is
presented in dictionaries, grammars and other official manuals.
Those who speak and write in this variety are said to be using
language “correctly”; those who do not, are said to be using it
“incorrectly”.

The alternative to a prescriptive approach is the descriptive

approach associated mainly with modern linguistics. As the name
suggests, its main aim is to describe and explain the patterns of
usage which are found in all varieties of the language, whether they
are socially prestigious or not. The approach also recognizes the
fact that language is always changing, and that there will accordingly
always be variations in usage. Linguists do not deny the social
importance of the standard language, but they do not condemn as
“ugly”, “incorrect” or “illogical” other dialects which do not share the
same rules.

After presenting a definition of grammar and establishing a

difference between prescriptive and descriptive grammars, I am
going to move on to my second section, in which I will deal with the
evolution of grammar from the prescriptive to the descriptive
approaches.

The study of grammatical theory has been of interest to

philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and literary critics over
the centuries. Today, grammar exists as a field within linguistics, but
still retains a relationship with these other disciplines. For the most
part, however, the development of grammatical theory has had little
impact on the content of the grammar taught in schools or on how it
is taught. For most people, grammar still refers to the body of rules
one must know in order to speak or write correctly. I have pointed
out that grammar is a field of linguistics, so I am going to analyse the
history and evolution of linguistics and grammar from its origin to the
present day.

Linguistics is the study of a language as a system. It is called

theoretical when it attempts to establish a theory of the underlying
structure of language, and it is called applied when linguistic
concepts are put to use for pedagogical purposes. Linguists may
use either a synchronic approach to the language study, that is,
describe a particular language at a particular time, or a diachronic
approach, that is, trace the development of a particular language
through its history. Theoretical linguistics tends to isolate the
structure of a language from actual language production and
therefore favours the synchronic approach when describing
language. Theoretical linguists does not take into account language
acquisition, usage or any other aspects of language that are studied
by scholars in such specialised fields of linguistics as
psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
Findings from these fields often become useful tools in the hands of
applied linguists.

Greek linguists of the 5th c. were the first in the West to be

concerned with linguistic theory. For the philosophers, controversial
linguistic issues revolved around the origin of the human language
and the grammatical structure of Greek. In the 1 st c. BC, the first
complete Greek grammar was written by Dionysus Thrax, an
Alexandrian. It was so influential that it served as a model for
Roman grammarians. To Greeks, grammar was a tool that could be
used in the study of Greek literature; hence their focus on literary
language.

The Romans adopted the grammatical system of the Greeks and

applied it to Latin. Except for Varro, of the 1st c., who believed that
grammarians should discover structures, not dictate them, most
Latin grammarians did not attempt to alter the Greek system, and
also sought to protect their language from decay. Whereas the
model for the Greeks and the Alexandrians was the language of
Homer, the works of Cicero and Virgil set the Latin standard. The
works of Donatus (4th c.) and Priscian (6th c.), the most important
Latin grammarians, were widely used to teach grammar during the
Middle Ages.

In medieval Europe, education was conducted in Latin, and Latin

grammar became the foundation of the liberal arts curriculum. Many
grammars were composed for students during this time. Aelfric, who
wrote the first Latin grammar in Anglo-Saxon in the 11 th c., proposed
that this work served as an introduction to English grammar as well.
Thus began the tradition of devising English grammar according to a
Latin model.

The “modistae”, grammarians of the mid-13th to mid-14th c. who

viewed language as a reflection of reality, looked to philosophy for
explanations of grammatical rules. They sought one “universal”
grammar that would serve as a means of understanding the nature
of being.

In the Middle Ages there were also some attempts of creating

prescriptive grammars of vernacular languages in order to teach
“correct” usage. After the Renaissance, however, interest in the
grammar of the world’s languages started to grow. The fruits of that
interest led to important discoveries that helped establish linguistics
as a science in the 19th century.

In the 17th c., in France, a group of grammarians from Port-Royal

were also interested in the idea of universal grammar. They claimed
that common elements of thought could be discerned in grammatical
categories of all languages. Unlike their Greek and Latin
counterparts, the Port-Royal grammarians did not study literary
language but claimed instead that usage should be dictated by the
actual speech of living languages.

By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed.

These were written primarily for purposes of reforming, purifying or
standardizing language and were put to pedagogical purposes.
Rules of grammar usually accounted for formal, written, literary
language only and did not apply to all the varieties of actual, spoken
language. This prescriptive approach long dominated the schools,
where the study of grammar came to be associated with “parsing”
and sentence diagramming. The simplification of grammar for
classroom contrasted sharply with the complex studies that scholars
of linguistics were conducting about language.

The historical linguists of the 19th c. developed the comparative

method of diachronic description, which consisted of comparing
different languages in terms of their grammar, vocabulary and
phonology in the hope of finding a common ancestral language.
Historical linguists did not limit their inquiries to literary language but
include dialects and contemporary spoken languages as well. They
did not follow earlier prescriptive approaches but were interested,
instead, in discovering where the language under study came from.

As a result of the work of historical grammarians, scholars came to

see that the study of language can be either diachronic (its
development through time) or synchronic (its state at a particular
time). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and other
descriptive linguists began studying the spoken language. Saussure
introduced a distinction between langue (language) and parole
(speech). Langue referred to the unobservable underlying structure
of language and parole was the outward manifestation of that
structure. With the publication of his Cours the Linguistique
Générale (1916), in which these distinctions were made public, a
new era of linguistic study called structuralism began. Saussure
redefined the goal for linguistics: to describe the nature of la langue.
Although the Structuralists who followed Saussure, such as Sapir
and Bloomfield, differed as to what linguistics should specifically
study and for what reasons, there was a concerted effort among
Structuralists to insist that language study should be based on
empirical evidence. Structuralists also moved away from previous
prescriptive approaches by looking at language the way it is, not the
way someone thinks it should be.

By the 1950s, weaknesses in structuralism were being identifies by

some linguists. They pointed out that because structural linguists
had never fully accepted Saussure’s implied notion that the human
language system is a mental property, they had to limit their subject
matter to observable phenomena only. As a result, some of them
tended to ignore those aspects of language that cannot be observed
and to overlook those things that characterize all languages.

Noam Chomsky challenged the Structuralist approach by saying that

universal patterns are present in all languages. Because he was
interested in understanding how the mind works through studying
language, Chomsky stressed the “mentalistic” theory of language
that Structuralists had rejected. The goals of linguistics changed
once again as a result of his work. He claimed that linguistics should
study a native language speaker’s unconscious knowledge of his
language (competence), not the speaker’s actual production of
language (performance). Because Chomsky thought that a
description of the rules that make up a native speaker’s competence
could account for an infinite number of examples of performance, he
wanted to write a grammar that would identify those unconscious
rules. Unlike the Structuralists, who collected samples of language
produced by native speakers and then classified them, Chomsky
developed transformational grammar, a set of rules that could
generate structural descriptions for all the grammatical sentences of
a language, and he tested the results against actual language
samples.

Transformational grammar has been continually evolving since

Chomsky first introduced it in 1957. From the 1970s on, many
transformationalists focussed their attention on the relation between
syntax and semantics an issue that was largely ignored by Chomsky
until 1965.

After introducing the concept of grammar and presenting the

evolution of grammar from prescriptive to descriptive models, I am
going to move on to the last section of my topic, in which I will
present some reflections about the learning of grammar.

There is a set of rules which govern how units of meaning may be

constructed in any language: we may say that a learner who “knows
grammar” is one who has mastered and can apply these rules to
express himself in what should be considered acceptable language
forms. There is no doubt that a knowledge, implicit or explicit, of
grammatical rules is essential for the mastery of a language: you
cannot use words unless you know how they should be put together.
But there has been some discussion in recent years if the question:
do we have to have grammar exercises? Isn’t it better fir learners to
absorb the rules intuitively through communicative activities than to
be taught through special exercises explicitly aimed at teaching
grammar?

The fact that a learning process is aiming for a certain target

behaviour does not necessarily mean that the process itself should
be composed entirely of imitations of that behaviour. In other words,
ability to communicate effectively is probably not attained most
quickly or efficiently through pure communication practice in the
classroom –nor, at least, within the framework of a formal course of
study.

In natural learning, such as the learning of a first language, the

amount of time and motivation devoted to learning is so great that
there is no need for conscious planning of the learning process:
sooner or later the material is absorbed. However, in a formal
course of study, there is very much less time available, and often
less motivation, which means that learning time has to be organized
for optimum efficiency. This means preparing a program of study – a
syllabus- so that bits of the total corpus of knowledge are presented
one after the other for gradual, systematic acquisition, rather than all
at once. It also means preparing an organized, balanced plan of
classroom teaching / learning procedures through which the learners
will be enabled to spend some of their time concentrating on
mastering one or more of the components of the target language on
their way to acquiring it as a whole. These components may be
things like spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary…

Grammar, then, may furnish the basis for a set of classroom

activities during which it becomes temporarily the main learning
objective. The key word is TEMPORARILY. The learning of
grammar should be seen in the long term as one of the means of
acquiring a thorough mastery of the language as a whole, not as an
end in itself. Thus, although at an early stage we may ask our
students to learn a certain structure through exercises that
concentrate on virtually meaningless manipulations of language, we
should quickly progress to activities that use it meaningfully. And
even these activities will be superseded eventually by general
fluency practice, where the emphasis is on successful
communication, and any learning of grammar takes place only as
incidental to this main objective.

Before planning the organization of our teaching we need to have

clear in our minds exactly what our subject-matter is: What sorts of
things are included under the heading Grammar, and what is
involved in “knowing” a structure?

The sheer variety of all the different structures that may be labelled
“grammatical” is enormous. Some have exact parallel in the native
language and are easily mastered; others have no such parallels but
are fairly simple in themselves; while yet others are totally alien and
very difficult to grasp. When we teach any structure, we should get
our students to learn quite a large number of different, though
related, bits of knowledge and skills: how to recognize the examples
of the structure when spoken, how to identify its written form; how to
produce both its spoken and written form; how to understand its
meaning in context and produce meaningful sentences using it
themselves, and so on. Some people, and even some course books,
have a tendency to concentrate only on some of these aspects and
neglect the others. It is important to keep a balance, taking into
account, of course, the needs of the particular class being taught.

It is very difficult to make generalizations about the best way of

teaching grammar, as there are many different methods and
approaches. Any generalization about the “best” way to teach
grammar will have to take into account both the wide range of
knowledge and skills that need to be taught, and the variety of
different kinds of structures subsumed under the heading
“grammar”. Thus, the organization I am going to suggest represents
only a general framework into which a very wide variety of teaching
techniques will fit. I suggest four stages:

1. Presentation: we usually begin by presenting the class with a

text in which the grammatical structure to be taught appears.
The aim of the presentation is to get the learners to perceive
the structure, its form and meaning, in both speech and
writing, and to take it into short-term memory. Often a story or
short dialogue is used which appears in the written form and is
often also read aloud. As a follow-up, students may be asked
to repeat, reproduce or copy out instances of the use of the
structure within the text.
2. Isolation and explanation: in this stage we move away from
the context and focus, temporarily, on the grammatical items
themselves: what they sound and look like, what they mean,
how they function… The objective is that the learners should
understand these various aspects of the structure.
3. Practice: the practice stage consists of a series of exercises
whose aim is to cause the learners to absorb the structure, or
to transfer what they know form short-term memory to long-
term memory. We need to use a series of varied exercises
which will complement each other and together provide
thorough coverage of all aspects of the structure.

We might start by devoting some time to manipulation of the

structure, without relating particularly to meaning. Common
exercises of this type are slot-fillers (e.g: He is ___ boy. We have
___ umbrella (A / AN)) and transformation exercises, in which the
learner changes the structure in some prescribed manner. These
exercises help make the rules clearer.

We should move on to meaning-based activities as soon as we feel

our learners have a fundamental grasp of the rules of form and their
application. Another category of practice procedures still stresses
the production or perception of correct forms, but involves meaning
as well, though yet unlinked to any general situation framework, and
cannot be done without comprehension. Some examples of these
exercises are translations, slot-fillling or multiple choice based on
meaning (e.g. He works / is working at the moment), filling the gaps,
and so on.

The third type of exercise is that in which the stress is on the

production or comprehension of meanings for some non-linguistic
purpose, while keeping an eye on the way structures are being
manipulated in the process. Such practice may be obtained through
information or opinion-gap communication techniques or through
activities based on the production of entertaining ideas. (e.g. Make
up a story to practice past tenses). We may in the course of the
communicative activity find that the students are making consistent
mistakes in a certain structure and decide to return temporarily to an
exercise that focuses on correct forms.

4. Test: learners do tests in order to demonstrate to themselves

and to the teacher how well they have mastered the material
they have been learning. The main objective of tests within a
taught course is to provide feedback, without which neither
teacher nor learner would be able to progress. Normal
examinations are only a kind of testing. Most testing, however,
is done automatically and almost unconsciously by teacher
and learners as the course proceeds, the most valuable
feedback on learning being supplied by the learners’ current
performance in class and in home assignments. Often practice
exercises are used to supply such informal feedback, in which
cases they may function virtually as tests.

To sum up, within this topic I have dealt with the concept and
definition of grammar. I have presented the evolution of theories on
grammar from prescriptive to descriptive models, and finally have
presented some considerations on the teaching of grammar. I would
like to point out that the grammar is a complex subject with many
different views attached, so when teaching, it is necessary to find
the methods that best suit our aims and our learners’ needs.