On education and the National Program for Training

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING GRAMMAR IN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES

In order to understand a language and to express oneself correctly one must assimilate the grammar mechanism of the language studied. Indeed, one may know all the words in a sentence and yet fail to understand it, if one does not see the relationship between the words in the given sentence. And vice versa, a sentence may contain one, two, and more unknown words but if one has a good knowledge of the structure of the language one can easily guess the meaning of these words or at least find them in a dictionary. For instance, one can hardly understand the following sentences without a knowledge of grammar even if all words are familiar: We see him book a ticket. It made me return home. ( It made me happy.) because each of them, and an unusual meaning of the familiar words book and make. However, if a pupil has assimilated the model of the Complex Object in the English language he will understand that in the sentence We saw him book a ticket the word book is not a noun, it cannot be a noun since him book is a complex object. In this sentence book is an infinitive, therefore, the pupil must look it up in a dictionary under v. In the second sentence the verb make is used in the meaning of заставлять since there is the infinitive construction to make somebody do something which the pupil can easily recognize if he has learnt it. [11:134]
Grammar is the sound, structure, and meaning system of language. All languages have grammar, and each language has its own grammar. People who speak the same language are able to communicate because they intuitively know the grammar system of that language—that is, the rules of making meaning. Students who are native speakers of English already know English grammar. They recognize the sounds of English words, the meanings of those words, and the different ways of putting words together to make meaningful sentences. However, while students may be effective speakers of English, they need guidance to become effective writers. They need to learn how to transfer their knowledge of grammatical concepts from oral language to written language. In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules which influences the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given language. It is the systematic study and description of a language, and it helps us to understand how words and their component parts combine to form sentences. Some people think that correct English grammar matters only to teachers and is of no real importance in daily life. This is certainly not true. Grammar, regardless of the country or the language, is the foundation for communication. Grammar rules can help learners develop the habit of thinking logically and clearly. After studying grammar, learners are able to become more accurate when using a language. Without good grammar, clear communication is impossible. Proper grammar keeps you from being misunderstood while expressing your thoughts and ideas. A person with poor grammar skill can form a negative impression on others. First impressions can be lasting, and may hide the true judgment of character. Some people consider good grammar to be a mark of intelligence and education. Don’t allow strangers to form a negative impression of you based on your poor communication skills. Grammar improves the development of fluency. When a person has learned grammar, it will be easier for that person to know how to organize and express the ideas in their mind without difficulty. As a result, they will be able to speak, read and write the language more fluently. [4:274]
It is generally accepted that there are four language skills: Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing. Learners in foreign language situations need to learn and master the four skills in this order or in another order depending on the objectives and goals of learning for any particular group. For instance, air traffic controllers must possess a very high level of mastery in speaking and listening because these are the most important skills they need to do their job properly and efficiently; so there should be more focus on the two skills: speaking and listening. Grammar and vocabulary are not language skills. They are language components which are essential to the mastery of all the four skills. You cannot use any language skill without using grammar and vocabulary. Grammar is not an end in itself but it is a means to an end—to improve learners’ proficiency in the four language skills. Grammar is the backbone of language and without it, the produced text, whether it is spoken or written, will be classified with many labels: broken, uneducated, incomprehensible or simply not belonging to the English language. One way to improve your grammar is to read more in English. The more you read, the more you improve your grammar and vocabulary. It may be tiring and difficult to understand everything, but this is one step you cannot skip if you want to get better at grammar. Reading helps you to see how English works and how the grammar works.
Grammar is one of the main linguistic disciplines which studies the grammatical system of language. The grammatical system is the whole set of regularities determining the combinations of words in the formation of utterances. The aim of theoretical grammar of a language is to present a theoretical description of its grammatical system. Learning English grammar and using it correctly takes a lot of time, effort, and practice.
The nature of grammar is better understood in the light of discriminating the two planes of language — the plane of content and the plane of expression. The two planes are inseparably connected. Grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression, or a unity of form and meaning. [6:28]
Listening to others who use good English and watching television also helps. It works better if you watch what you are really interested in. Remember that the English spoken in America is different from that spoken in England. Some parts of spelling and grammar are different between the two countries. Make sure you work through all your grammar exercises in your course book regularly. To learn English grammar well, you will need to practice each grammar point until you can easily use it. Look for a book of grammar exercises that also has answers for additional practice. Online activities and quizzes can also help.
A person can’t learn a foreign language accurately only through a process of unconscious assimilation. Grammar is a sure ground of reference when linguistic habits fail us. So grammar is indispensable for the student. But modern language learners have different views and take different approaches. Modern language learners understand that grammar is the glue of language, and modern technology has adapted to this understanding. One example is the Grammar, a convenient grammar checker for your browser that checks your English writing for errors whenever you type anything online. Technology like this shows that we know grammar still matters for clarity, but we also don’t want to have to think about it all the time. [6:98]
Grammar is rules of a language. ―Grammar is a system of meaningful structures and patterns that are governed by particular pragmatic constraints. In another definition ―grammar is a description of the rules for forming sentences, including an account of the meanings that these forms convey. In foreign language acquisition accurate understanding of the language structures is the key part so teaching grammar is an essential aspect of foreign language instruction. There has always been a debate about the most effective way of teaching grammar. Grammar instruction through context positively affects learners’ competence to use grammatical structures accurately in language skills. It is always useful for learners to see how language works in sentences or paragraphs; therefore, teaching grammar in context will give learners opportunities to see how grammatical structures function in the sentences. [5:584]
Teaching grammar in context will help learners to acquire nature of the language which will facilitate their understanding of the language. Grammar instruction should not be ignored. About grammar teaching, suggests that ―much of the effort spent arguing against the teaching of grammar might be better spent on convincing true believers in grammar instruction that grammar has a newly defined but useful role to play in language teaching and in showing them what it is. For a better language improvement, grammar plays a crucial role.
To be an effective language user, learners should study grammar, because grammar skills will help learners to organize words and messages and make them meaningful. Knowing more about grammar will enable learners to build better sentences in speaking and writing performances. A good knowledge of grammar helps learners to make sentences clear enough to understand. Improper use of grammar will not convey meaningful messages. Tabbert stresses the importance of grammar simply as: ―It is frequently pointed out that students confuse lie and lay, do not choose who and whom correctly, say infer instead of imply, mismatch subjects and verbs, mix up pronoun reference, use double negatives, etc., and that these mistakes are evidence of their need to study grammar. To establish an effective communication, learners need grammar skills; therefore, without grammar, speech gets meaningless.
Grammar is an essential aspect to communicate effectively. Moreover, grammar simply is creating well- organized reading and writing performances. John Warriner supporting this idea writes: "The chief usefulness of grammar is that it provides a convenient and, indeed, as English is taught today, an almost indispensable set of terms to use in talking about Language. Grammar will give learners the competence how to combine words to form sentences. To create fully-developed sentences, grammar knowledge is indispensable. With little understanding of how language functions, learners cannot develop their language skills. ―Just as there are careful and effective drivers who do not know what makes a car run, so there are those who, through practice and skillful observation, have become satisfactory, even effective, writers with very little understanding of the mechanics of the language. But it follows that the more you know about the form and function of the parts that make up the larger unit, the sentence, the better equipped you are to recognize and to construct well-formed sentences. [5:588]
Grammar instruction holds an important place in foreign language learning. It needs to be noted that grammar skills will make great contribution to language competence. ―The study of the structure and history of language, including English grammar, is a valuable asset to a liberal education and an important part of the English program. It should, however, be taught for its own sake, not as a substitute for composition, and not with the pretense that it is taught only to improve writing. Teaching grammar is to show how language works. Accurate teaching of grammar guides learners how to use the language correctly. Azar highlights the significance of teaching grammar as: ―One important aspect of grammar teaching is that it helps learners discover the nature of language, i.e., that language consists of predictable patterns that make what we say, read, hear and write intelligible. Without grammar, we would have only individual words or sounds, pictures, and body expressions to communicate meaning. Grammar is the weaving that creates the fabric. Language acquisition without grammar will be confusing. Learners will fail to use the language correctly without grammar skills. ―People now agree that grammar is too important to be ignored, and that without a good knowledge of grammar, learners’ language development will be severely constrained. Richards and Renandya point out two good reasons for teaching grammar
a) Comprehensibility: knowing how to build and use certain structures makes it possible to communicate common types of meaning successfully. Without these structures, it is difficult to make comprehensible sentences. We must, therefore, try to identify these structures and teach them well.
b) Acceptability: in some social contexts, serious deviance from native-speaker norms can hinder integration and excite prejudice- a person who speaks badly may not be taken seriously, or may be considered uneducated or stupid.
Students may therefore want or need a higher level of grammatical correctness than is required for mere comprehensibility. [9:76]
Teaching grammar will help learners to understand the nature of language. Azar notes down the benefits of grammar teaching as: ―One of the principal benefits of GBT (Grammar-Based Teaching) is that it helps students gain an understanding of grammar concepts: concepts such as subordination and coordination; concepts of expressing time relationships through the use of verb forms; concepts of nouns and adjectives, subjects and verbs, clauses and phrases. Students can understand grammar concepts with simplified terminology, with a minimum of metalanguage and grammatical analysis, and even without definition of key terms such as noun or verb. With a good knowledge of grammar, the relationship between grammatical concepts gets clear. Being aware of this relationship facilitates understanding the language. Grammar instruction provides learners with a better improvement. Grammar knowledge will increase learners’ comprehension of the language. Azar, from her experiences writes that ―I observed that students in my writing class who had experienced grammar instruction had an advantage over those students who had not. Students with a good grounding in grammar needed only to be reminded that, for example, they were trying to say "I was really bored" not "I was really boring." Those without that grounding in grammar needed a lot more teaching time in order to understand, just as one example, the difference between –ing and –ed adjectives.
No speaking is possible without the knowledge of grammar, without the forming of a grammar mechanism. If a learner has acquired such a mechanism, he can produce correct sentences in a foreign language. Paul Roberts writes: “ Grammar is something that produces the sentences of a language. By something we mean a speaker of English. If you speak English natively, you have built into you the rules of English grammar. In a sense, you are an English grammar. You possess, as an essential part of being, a very complicated apparatus which enables you to produce infinitely many sentences, all English ones, including many that you have never specifically learned. Furthermore, by applying your rule you can easily tell whether a sentence that you hear is a grammatical English sentences or not.” [15]
A common of English as is envisaged by the school syllabus cannot be ensured without the study of grammar. Pupils need grammar to be able to aud, speak, read, and write in the target language. Grammar seems to be something which is hovering like a threatening cloud below the classroom ceiling. If the teacher accidentally let slip out that today’s lesson will consist of grammar instructions, a murmur would be heard in the classroom which would be likely to express boredom or lack of interest. That is one reason why applied linguists and teachers alike are trying to find a way in which grammar could be taught both effectively and interestingly.
According to Penny Ur (1999), in the case of the learners, grammatical rules enable them to know and apply how such sentence patterns should be put together. The teaching of grammar should also ultimately centre attention on the way grammatical items or sentence patterns are correctly used. In other words, teaching grammar should encompass language structure or sentence patterns, meaning and use. Further, grammar is thought to furnish the basis for a set of language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In listening and speaking, grammar plays a crucial part in grasping and expressing spoken language since learning the grammar of a language is considered necessary to acquire the capability of producing grammatically acceptable utterances in the language. In reading, grammar enables learners to comprehend sentence interrelationship in a paragraph, a passage and a text.
In the context of EFL, teaching grammar has traditionally been dominated by a grammar-translation method where the use of mother tongue is clearly important to elicit the meaning of target language by translating the target language into native languages. For example, in such a method learners are required to learn about grammar rules and vocabulary of the target language. In the case of grammar, it is deductively taught; that is, learners are provided the grammar rules and examples, are told to memorize them, and then are asked to apply the rules to other examples. According to Thornbury (2006), there are seven reasons why grammar is taught in English language teaching as presented in the following:
The fine-tuning argument- The teaching of grammar serves as a corrective against the kind of ambiguity.
The fossilization argument- the teaching of grammar helps learners reduce their incorrect grammatical structure.
The rule-law argument-The teaching of grammar offers teachers a structured system that can be taught and tested in methodical steps. It allows learners to experience the language through communication. [8:70]
The learner-expectation argument- the teaching of grammar provides students with learning experience more efficient and systematic. In the case of teaching grammar to EFL learners, a teacher may feel frustrated when learners are taught grammatical items separately. Students may become good at grammar; however, when told to write and speak, they often make grammatical mistakes. This case is very challenging to solve. Teaching grammar is not a ‘one size fits all’ experience. As teachers, we have the freedom to choose how we present and teach new language, we can change our minds if we find that the approach we originally chose isn’t working. For example, we can use PPP approach: