Talking about Grammar without Grumbling

Talking about Grammar without Grumbling
(First published in The Island/17th September 2010)
A fairly widely held belief among learners of English as a second language is that the study of grammar is a major stumbling block to their making any headway. They seem to view grammar as esoteric and abstruse; their attitude is: ‘Why should we bother about something which only a few specialists understand and which many ordinary people would have a hard time grappling with if they wanted to learn it?’ Such an outlook is both erroneous and harmful, because the truth is that a sound knowledge of any language is not possible without a proper grounding in its grammar. But learning it by rote is equally unhelpful. When properly approached, grammar will prove that, after all, it is not such a bugbear as some people make it out to be.
The two most important aspects of a language that a language learner must tackle are its vocabulary and its grammar. Learning a language entails fleshing out the skeleton of grammar in words and phrases; in other words, it basically involves the internalizing of grammatical rules and the learning of vocabulary items which are adequate for effective communication in that language in a particular context. Therefore a course of language instruction needs to focus on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, while maximizing the communicative use of the target language; the latter (i.e. the communicative use of the target language) may be regarded as the mainstay of language instruction.
When Communicative Language Teaching came into general acceptance, the previous insistence on the mechanical mastery of structure under the so-called audio-lingual approach was abandoned in favour of an emphasis on the importance of learning to communicate as the main goal of language learning. However, as before, grammatical rules were left to be inductively learned by the students; in other words, explicit explanation of grammatical points was avoided. Later, this attitude was relaxed, and whatever technique seemed to help the learners to communicate through the target language was accepted depending on the age, the proficiency level, and the needs, etc. of the students. More modern research has revealed that no efficient language learning results from exclusive reliance on discovery learning alone, and that explicit teaching of grammar is necessary. We need to recognize the usefulness of mother tongue/first language translations (a pragmatic throwback, on occasion, to the traditionally discredited Grammar Translation technique, which, however, refuses to be completely banished wherever English is taught in the world); similarly, the usefulness of accommodating in our methods other devices such as mechanical drills on a peripheral basis perhaps, though these may run counter to commonly accepted practice in the field, shouldn’t be lost sight of.
A word of caution will not be out of place here: such strategies should not be resorted to as a means of camouflaging the teachers’ own ignorance, ill-preparedness or plain incompetence. A well conceived methodology makes for efficiency in the long run. But the practical teacher is not averse to trying out even old fashioned techniques that prove handy as short cuts in certain classroom situations.
In spite of the beliefs of teachers and researchers, there are many English language learners who believe that they need to be taught grammar, and that the majority of language teaching experts agree that they are right. However, no explicit teaching should be done for its own sake, but only as ancillary to the more productive autonomous efforts of students who rely, for their progress, on a sense of language awareness driven by an inquiring mind.
By ‘language awareness’ is meant a motivated language learner’s sensitivity to the way a language operates, including a desire to discover structural patterns and relationships that underlie its expressive potential. This is especially important for second language learners. Human babies are born with an innate capacity for acquiring the language that surrounds them. Second language learners have already internalized the grammar of their mother tongue. Their familiarity with how people learn a language enables them to make a conscious effort to make sense of a second language, which is facilitated by language awareness.
Traditional grammar came in for criticism with the advent of the ‘science’ of linguistics at the beginning of the previous century. Later in the same century formal grammar teaching fell into disrepute because of at least four reasons: 1) the traditional Grammar Translation technique focused on the mere teaching of grammar rules, without paying attention to the vital need for speaking and using the language; 2) all structural approaches including the audiolingual method had little to do with real communication which was later identified as the main purpose of language learning; 3) contemporary English language teaching often insisted on grammar teaching that emphasized usage rules or rules of language etiquette; such rules, while containing mere do’s and don’ts, were found to be inadequate to account for the deep structural patterns in the language; and 4) traditional English grammar is modelled on analytical frames applied to the study of classical Latin and Greek, and it does not reveal the truth about the structure of English which is a very different language from them.
Such a reasoned negative attitude to grammar is different from the uninformed cavilling at it that we sometimes hear today. But rejecting grammar teaching/learning even on such grounds as those just mentioned would be premature for learners of English who are still at a basic level of proficiency in the language.
The vast majority of our learners of English learn it as a second language. This means that they have already acquired their mother tongue and may even have had a formal training in the basic elements of its vocabulary and grammar at school, a situation that could facilitate the intellectual feat involved in the acquisition of a second language. To put it in different words, the experience of learning their mother tongue can help them to grasp the basic ideas about the vocabulary and the grammar of the English language.
Very often objections are raised against the learning of English grammar as difficult by students, and even by uninformed adults. Perhaps it is a bit too complicated, but it is not prohibitively so. And one reason for a feeling of relief on the part of the learners is that grammar rules are finite in number, as opposed to the infinity of correct sentences in the language that these few rules make it possible for a competent user of the language to construct. An English language course of more than ten years’ duration that is administered in our schools will be more than adequate for learners of English to learn all these rules, practise them thoroughly, and internalize them.
Then, what actually do we mean by ‘grammar’?
Combinatoriality is a distinguishing feature of human language. This is the principle by which linguistic rules combine elements of language to generate more complex structures. For example, phonemes are combined into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into clauses and sentences. In a very generalized sense, the study of these rules constitutes what is known as grammar.
There are at least three basic views of grammar. The first is a psychological view of grammar: each competent speaker of a language has a kind of ‘mental grammar’, an internalized linguistic knowledge which enables them to produce and to understand ‘correctly’ structured expressions in that language; this grammar knowledge cannot be taught; it is subconsciously acquired by individual speakers. (This was a notion identified as “competence” in Chomskyan linguistics.) The second looks at grammar from a sociological point of view, and represents a ‘prescriptive’ approach to grammar: it involves what are identified as the proper or best structures to be used in a language. A third concept of grammar (embodied in a ‘descriptive’ approach) involves the investigation of structures actually found in a language, usually for the purpose of describing the grammar of a particular language as distinct from the grammar of any other language. Modern grammatical analysis usually adopts this third view.
Further, grammar may be defined in two ways according to Dr David Crystal (The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998): 1) ‘A systematic analysis of the structure of a language’; in this sort of analysis a distinction is often drawn between a descriptive grammar and a prescriptive grammar. The same definition covers a number of other grammars such as a reference grammar, a performance grammar, a competence grammar, and so on; 2) ‘A level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics, generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology’; morphology studies the structure of words, and syntax the rules that govern the way words are combined to form sentences.
In traditional grammar, sentential analysis involves the use of such terms as the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions); there are also terms that refer to other grammatical categories: person, number, tense, voice, gender, etc. These words actually originated in the grammatical analyses of the Classical Latin and Greek languages, which were the languages of learning, philosophy, science, and religion in Europe before ‘vernacular’ languages like English came into prominence. English grammarians since the Renaissance (14th to 16th century) considered it appropriate to subject English to the same sort of analysis as that applied to those ‘prestigious’ languages. It was not realized at the beginning that an established descriptive frame used for Latin, though probably suitable for other Romance languages like Spanish or Italian, would not be so useful for dealing with the grammar of a Germanic language such as English. That Classical Latin grammar based analytical concepts were even more unsatisfactory for describing non-European languages became clear when American scholars wanted to investigate North American Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century. And it was only after the emergence of the study of linguistics, usually associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), in the second decade of the twentieth century that terms used in traditional grammatical analysis were found inappropriate for representing the reality about the structure of the English language accurately.
The imprecision of simple definitions of the usual elements such as the parts of speech found in traditional English grammar is well known to those who are concerned with such matters. Nouns, for example, used to be defined as “names of persons, places, and things”; but this wouldn’t accommodate words such as “happiness”, “love” (as in “He sang about love”), “driving” (as in “His driving is awful”) in the category of nouns although they function like nouns; a more elaborate description of nouns is: “nouns are words that refer to people, creatures, objects, places, states (e.g. parenthood, childhood), phenomena, and abstract ideas as if they were things”. “As if they were things” doesn’t make for precision! Then there are other traditional categories such as person (First, Second, Third), number (singular, plural), tense, voice (active, passive), and gender. In English the gender relationship is in terms of natural gender (the biological distinction between male and female): In “The woman fed her child” the agreement between the ‘woman’ and ‘her’ is based on this biological distinction. In English gender does not have the significance that it has in French, Spanish or German in which languages gender distinctions are grammatically based.