TOPIC 12 Jerusalén López Urruzola

“Grammar is a piano I play by ear”. Joan Didion

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, Horrocks (1985) states, 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.

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. 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” (Halliday, 1985).
The alternative to a prescriptive approach is the descriptive approach
associated mainly with modern linguistics. As the name suggests, its main aims
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.

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.

According to Howatt (1984), Greek linguists of the 5th c. were the first in
the West to be concerned with linguistic theory. Later, the Romans adopted the
grammatical system of the Greeks and applied it to Latin. In medieval Europe,
education was conducted in Latin, and Latin grammar became the foundation of
the liberal arts curriculum. Then, 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. By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been
printed. Rules of grammar usually accounted for formal, written, literary language

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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 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.

As a result, 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 (1916) 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.

Noam Chomsky challenged the Structuralist approach by saying that

universal patterns are present in all languages, and 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).
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.

As for our teaching practice, 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 on the question of whether or not we
should have grammar exercises or if it would be better for learners to absorb the
rules intuitively through communicative activities.

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 we are suggesting represents only a general
framework into which a very wide variety of teaching techniques will fit.

We usually begin by presenting the class with a text in which the

grammatical structure to be taught appears, in order 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. At a second stage of isolation and explanation,
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…

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The objective is that the learners should understand these various aspects of the
structure. Afterwards, 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. Finally, learners do tests in order to
demonstrate how well they have mastered the material they have been learning,
and to provide feedback, without which neither teacher nor learner would be able
to progress (Hedge, 2000).