Assignment 11.1

“Little Words, Big Grammar” – the natural way to teach grammar.

In the introduction to his book Natural Grammar, Scott Thornbury quotes Professor John Sinclair: “Learners would do well to learn the common words of the language very thoroughly, because they carry the main patterns of the language. “ As language teachers, we expend a great deal of classroom time drilling the difference between going to and will, the use of the first versus the second conditional, and the importance of verb backshift in reported speech. What we often overlook, however, is the vital importance of those couple of hundred little words that make up over fifty percent of all written and spoken language (and, by inference, the same amount of all written and spoken grammar).

“Words have grammar,” says Thornbury; it’s difficult to argue when the verb get, for example, connects to ten distinct patterns, from get + adverbial (What time did you get home?) for talking about arriving at places to get + noun phrase + noun phrase (Can you get me a coffee?), used to talk about giving and fetching things for other people. To take another example, will has four distinct patterns, including:

1 will / won’t + bare infinitive – used to make offers and promises, requests or orders, statements and predictions about future events and to talk about predictable behaviour, such as habits.

2 will + have + past participle – to predict something that will be finished at a certain time.

By teaching these patterns together, we will be equipping our students to use the most commonly occurring words in the English language and, as a bonus, teaching them grammar for free. For, as Thornbury and Sinclair have argued, whenever we use a word we are obliged to choose from the set selection of grammar patterns that accompanies it.

The traditional way of teaching grammar – often overly concerned with prescriptive rules and written language – can lead to confusion and the fossilization of errors: how many of us have come across an intermediate level student who still remembers being taught that going to and will are synonymous, or that we use going to for things we’re sure about and will for things we aren’t? Writing on One Stop English, Adrian Tennant concludes: “Instead of looking at grammar as a set of abstract rules and then examining how words fit into these patterns, we may well be better off starting from words and looking at the grammar they generate. By doing this we may well avoid the typical problem of only taking one meaning or use of a word and being guilty of oversimplification.”

When building a house, you start with the foundations. Learning a language is no different. As we have seen, grammar does not exist in isolation: in its most basic form – its foundations - it is no more or less than the patterns formed by the combination of words. We would do well to concentrate on these building blocks.

Word Count = 494 words.

Bibliography:

Adrian Tennent – Approaches to Grammar Teaching

http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?docid=144972

Scott Thornbury – Natural Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2004)