Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

prescriptive grammar: grammar that ‘prescribes’ what people should or
should not say
traditional grammar: ‘school’ grammar concerned with labelling sentences
with parts of speech, and so on
structural grammar: grammar concerned with how words go into phrases, and
phrases into sentences
grammatical (linguistic) competence: the knowledge of language stored in a
person’s mind
Keywords

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processing; the program I use for writing this warns me against using final prepo-
sitions and passives, common as they are in everyday English. A third is journal edi-
tors, who have often been nasty about my sentences without verbs – to me a
normal variation in prose found on many pages of any novel.
Traditional grammar
A second popular meaning of ‘grammar’ concerns the parts of speech: the ‘fact’
that ‘a noun is a word that is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea’ is
absorbed by every school pupil in England. This definition comes straight from
Tapestry Writing 1 (Pike-Baky, 2000), a course published in the year 2000, but
which differs little from William Cobbett’s definition in 1819: ‘Nouns are the
names of persons and things’.
Analysing sentences in this approach means labelling the parts with their
names and giving rules that explain in words how they may be combined. This is
often called traditional grammar. In essence it goes back to the grammars of Latin,
receiving its English form in the grammars of the eighteenth century, many of
which in fact set out to be prescriptive. Grammarians today do not reject this type
of grammar outright so much as feel that it is unscientific. After reading the defi-
nition of a noun, we still do not know what it is, in the way that we know what a
chemical element is: is ‘fire’ a noun? ‘opening’? ‘she’? The answer is that we do
not know without seeing the word in a sentence, but the context is not men-
tioned in the definition. While the parts of speech are indeed relevant to gram-
mar, there are many other powerful grammatical concepts that are equally
important.
A useful modern source is the NASA Manual in the list of links on the website,
which provides sensible advice in largely traditional terms, such as: ‘The subject
and verb should be the most important elements of a sentence. Too many modi-
fiers, particularly between the subject and verb, can over-power these elements.’
Some language teaching uses a type of grammar resembling a sophisticated
form of traditional grammar. Grammar books for language teaching often present
grammar through a series of visual displays and examples. A case in point is the
stalwart Basic Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2002, 2nd edn). A typical unit is headed
‘flower/flowers’ (singular and plural). It has a display of singular and plural forms
(‘a flower 
 some flowers’), lists of idiosyncratic spellings of plurals (‘babies,
shelves’), words that are unexpectedly plural (‘scissors’), and plurals not in ‘-s’
(‘mice’). It explains: ‘The plural of a noun is usually ‘-s’.’ In other words, it assumes
that students know what the term ‘plural’ means, presumably because it will
translate into all languages. But Japanese does not have plural forms for nouns;
Japanese students have said to me that they only acquired the concept of singular
and plural through learning English. Languages like Tongan, or indeed Old
English, have three forms: singular, plural and dual (‘two people’). The crucial
question, for linguists at any rate, is how the subject of the sentence agrees with
the verb in terms of singular or plural, which is not mentioned in Murphy’s text,
although two out of the four exercises that follow depend on it.
Even main coursebooks often rely on the students knowing the terms of tradi-
tional grammar. In the very first lesson of an EFL course for beginners called
Changes (Richards, 1998: 16), the grammar summary uses the technical terms in
English ‘subject pronouns’, ‘possessive adjective’, ‘contraction’ and ‘statement’.
Goodness knows how the students are supposed to have learnt these technical
Learning and teaching different types of grammar
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terms in another language; modern language teachers in UK schools lament that
pupils are no longer equipped with this framework of traditional grammatical term-
inology. Nor would switching to the students’ first language necessarily be much
help: in countries like Japan grammar does not come out of the Latin-based
European traditional grammar, and it uses quite different terms and concepts.