A Way out of Trouble with Grammar

A Way out of Trouble with Grammar
(First published in The Island/24th September 2010)
Probably, it isn’t much of a problem to use classical grammatical labels to identify words in English sentences. But it’s a different matter when, even today, some grammarians claim, as those of the eighteenth century did, that the English sentence structure should faithfully follow the Classical Latin sentence structure. They will insist, for example, that it is not correct or proper to say “The girl speaks better than him” (which is more usual among today’s English speakers) and that the sentence should be “corrected” to read “The girl speaks better than he (does)”, or that to say “The manager asked the secretary to carefully re-draft the letter” is wrong, because of the “split infinitive”, and that it should be amended as “The manager asked the secretary to re-draft the letter carefully”. This is what is known as the prescriptive approach.
With the realization that the classical model of grammatical analysis would not fit every language, linguists started adopting a different approach which has prevailed for most of the past one hundred years: they collect samples of the language they want to analyse (called ‘corpora’, the plural form of ‘corpus’ meaning a collection of information about a language in the form of transcripts of speech recorded or written texts in that language), and study these to establish regular patterns of structures of the language in actual use. This descriptive approach is the basis of various modern analyses of language structure.
Structural analysis represents one type of descriptive grammar. Its main purpose is to study the distribution of forms in a language. The usual method is to set ‘test-frames’ such as sentences with slots in them.

The …………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard a …………… yesterday.

We can suggest a lot of forms that will fit into these slots (e.g. dog, parrot, beggar, radio, train). Because they go into the same test-frame we can say that they are probably examples of the same grammatical category. This is the category we label as “nouns”. But there are many other forms that do not fit these test-frames (e.g. George, a train, an engine). Different test-frames are needed for these.

…………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard …………… yesterday.

Among forms that occupy these slots are the engine, a train, the vendor with a megaphone, and an ambulance. They can be said to belong to another grammatical category. The label given to such forms is “noun phrases”. (The example test-frames are from George Yule’s “The Study of Language”, Cambridge University Press, 1997).

As suggested in the barest outline above, a lot of well founded criticism was made against traditional English grammar, and more accurate models of grammatical analysis were proposed instead. However, students of English and teachers the world over still depend on a common core of traditional grammar (prescriptive generalizations about the form and usage of varieties such as British Printed English (i.e. written variety). The main reason for this is that the terms of traditional grammar, notwithstanding their impreciseness and lack of accuracy, help the average users of English to easily identify and understand most forms in the language. The terms provide the metalanguage necessary for dealing with those concepts. The plethora of ‘grammars’ available in the market testifies to the popularity of traditional grammar, which has enjoyed revived pedagogical attention at least for the past twenty years.
I’ll mention the titles of just three grammar books that happen to be on my table at this moment: 1) A Communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvick. Second Edition, 1994. Reprinted by Pearson Education Asia Pte. Ltd. 2000; 2) Collins Cobuild English Grammar edited by John Sinclair et al. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Glasgow. 1990. Reprint 2000; 3) Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. International student’s edition. Oxford University Press. New Delhi. 2006. There are hundreds of such grammar books designed for use by English learners at all levels from the beginning to the advanced.
They present what may be taken as the ’common core’ grammar (touched on above) that marks all varieties of English in the world. The existence of a grammatical ‘common core’ is actually a very good thing for learners of English, for it helps them make sense of English in whatever form it manifests itself .
‘Usage’ provides the basis for determining the correctness or acceptability of grammatical constructions. The compilers of the modern grammars rely on corpora (mentioned above) for their examples. Stored on computers these corpora contain many millions of words of spoken and written English as it is used today. Earlier grammarians had to make up their own examples to illustrate grammar points, and unsurprisingly, these examples seemed stilted, and hence rarely approximated real live usage. By way of example, we may take a look at the Bank of English at the Birmingham University which had collected 20 million words of the English language in the 1980’s; the 1987 first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary was based on this corpus. The 1995 edition of the same dictionary includes patterns of use identified and explained by its editorial team ( headed by Professor John Sinclair) in 200 million words of spoken and written English across the world. To suggest another example, the Cambridge Grammar of English (2006) edited by Professors Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy claim to have skimmed a corpus of “800 million words of real spoken and written English”.
The grammar books I have referred to above can be taken as random examples of commonly available grammars that are more suitable for advanced learners of English who seek a theoretical knowledge of English grammar, especially teachers. For the use of learners of English at the school level there are similarly tailor-made practice grammar books even in greater abundance in the local bookshops {e.g. Essential English Grammar by Raymond Murphy, Advanced English Grammar by Martin Hewings (both available in special low priced South Asian editions), and The Complete Grammar by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas. The last is by American authors; it is a kind of question-answer compendium of English grammar for the average learner of the language without any practice exercises; a low priced Indian reprint of this book is also available.}
All these grammar guides and practice books are written by authors who are from among English speakers of the two main national varieties, British and American. There can’t be any better exponents of common core English grammar than those, in my opinion. Some Sri Lankan authors too have produced very good grammar books. Two examples that come to mind are the latest editions of W.H. Samaranayake’s Practical English (first pub. 1940), and Bertram Chinnaiyah’s Steps to Mastery of English Grammar (first pub. 1985?). There are also cheap, low quality, ersatz English teaching manuals which are mere rehashes of material pilfered from other sources, or which are put together by persons with a smattering knowledge of English in order to make some quick money. It’s up to the teachers, students, and their parents to be discriminating when they shop for good grammar books.
Modern grammar books reflect a sensitivity to both prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Particularly at the beginning levels, prescriptive grammar is a practical necessity: students must be taught the basic rules of the great game of language that is played inside one’s head (thinking), between two people or among many users as the case may be. But all that is said here should be qualified by the principle of unstoppable change that all languages are subject to. All aspects of a language – pronunciation, forms of words, their meanings, even grammar – undergo change over time. It should also be borne in mind that absolutely faultless grammar, either in speech or in writing, is rarely achieved, and that perfect grammatical accuracy is less important than successful communication.
Explicit grammar teaching or learning should not be done as an end in itself. It can only be a necessary initial step towards the gradual development of communicative capacity in the individual learner. In the traditional prescriptive grammar direct explanations are the norm. Language learning is viewed as a linear process; a language is believed to be constituted of discrete entities, and learning it is assumed to involve the gradual accumulation of these distinct items. This is a wrong position to adopt. There is empirical evidence to suggest that language learning is an organic, rather than linear, process. That is, in learning a language there is regression or backsliding, sudden advances in competence, and interaction between grammatical competence and performance; the grammatical forms are not learned in isolation, but in relation to the global context of a meaningful text.
Such a view of language learning supports the idea of grammatical instruction as Consciousness Raising (CR), which may be roughly defined as encouraging learners to focus on a text in order to discover for themselves the grammatical rules in operation there. CR requires learners to think creatively. Explicit grammar instruction can reinforce such independent discovery. Advocates of CR reject the alleged dichotomy between conscious learning and subconscious acquisition (a la Krashen, 1982). Unlike traditional grammar teaching, CR devotes greater attention to the form-function relationship (i.e. how a particular structure expresses meaning). Another speciality of CR is that it focuses on the grammatical structures and elements in relation to a broader discourse context. The rather naïve traditional assumption that once a grammar point has been taught it necessarily becomes a part of a learner’s existing knowledge is alien to CR.
Apart from explicit grammar instruction in the second language classroom, especially at the beginning stages, teachers need to provide for self-learning among their students. There are good grammar books available for this purpose. The Internet provides even better resources for multimodal (not only written) grammar practice. There are hundreds of free websites that offer grammar explanations and exercises at different levels of difficulty. Below are just a few examples of such websites for the interested readers to explore:
http://www.eslgold.com/grammar.html/ (for elementary to advanced), http:www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/English/chairs/linguist/real/index/html/
(for intermediate to advanced),
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc (for high intermediate to advanced).
From a strictly linguistics point of view, it may even be a laughable matter to be talking about this very complex subject of grammar in this manner. But teachers are bound to be more practical than theoretical by the very nature of their metier. At no time in the history of English language teaching has grammar been ignored as irrelevant or dispensable, though the necessity of teaching it has received varying degrees of attention from time to time. Today it is generally agreed that the mastery of grammar along with that of vocabulary plays a central role in language development. Though ordinarily it is possible for most people to attain an acceptable level of proficiency in English without a serious enough formal grounding in its grammar, the ability to speak and write English correctly and coherently is considered one of the most important attributes of an educated person. The lack of such an ability may reveal a poor educational background.
For the average Sri Lankan learners of English the ability to express themselves in good spoken and written English, particularly in education and job situations, is the ultimate goal. For achieving this target, a good practical knowledge of grammar is essential. Though grammar is a very complex affair, its teaching and learning can be simplified through the judicious use of prescriptive as well as descriptive grammar. Explicit teaching of grammar should be backed by copious practice in multifarious, meaningful contexts.