Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

2.1 What is grammar?
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What is grammar?
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How do you think it is learnt?
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How would you teach it?
Focusing questions

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Glosses on some grammatical terminology are given at the end of the chapter and
appear on the website.
To explain what the term ‘grammar’ means in the context of L2 learning, it is
easiest to start by eliminating what it does not mean.
Prescriptive grammar
One familiar type of grammar is the rules found in schoolbooks, for example, the
warnings against final prepositions in sentences, ‘This can’t be put up with’, or the
diatribes in letters to the newspaper about split infinitives, ‘To boldly go where no
one has gone before’. This is called prescriptive grammar because it prescribes what
people ought to do. Modern grammarians have mostly avoided prescriptive gram-
mar because they see their job as describing what the rules of language are, just as
the physicist says what the laws of physics are. The grammarian has no more right
to decree how people should speak than the physicist has to decree how electrons
should move; their task is to describe what happens. Language is bound up with
human lives in so many ways that it is easy to find reasons why some grammat-
ical forms are ‘better’ than others, but these are based on criteria other than the
grammar itself, mostly to do with social status; for example, that you should not
say ‘ain’t’. The grammarian’s duty is to decide what people actually say; after this
has been carried out, others may decide that it would be better to change what
people say. Hence all the other types of grammar discussed below are ‘descriptive’
in that they claim to describe the grammar that real people know and use, even if
sometimes this claim is given no more than lip service.
Prescriptive grammar is all but irrelevant to the language teaching classroom.
Since the 1960s people have believed that you should teach the language as it is,
not as it ought to be. Students should learn to speak real language that people use,
not an artificial form that nobody uses – we all use split infinitives from time to
time when the circumstances make it necessary, and it is often awkward to avoid
them. Mostly, however, these prescriptive dos and don’ts about ‘between you and
me’ or ‘it is I’ are not important enough or frequent enough to spend much time
thinking about their implications for language teaching. If L2 learners need to
pander to these shibboleths, a teacher can quickly provide a list of the handful of
forms that pedants object to.
One area where prescriptive grammar still thrives is spelling and punctuation,
where everyone believes there is a single ‘correct’ spelling for every word: spell
receive as recieve or news as new’s at your peril. Another is word
What is grammar? 19