Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Grammar as knowledge in the mind
SLA research relies mainly on another meaning of ‘grammar’ – the knowledge of
language that the speaker possesses in the mind, known as linguistic or grammati-
cal competence, originally taken from Chomsky’s work of the 1960s. A more recent
definition is as follows:
By ‘grammatical competence’ I mean the cognitive state that encompasses all those
aspects of form and meaning and their relation, including underlying structures
that enter into that relation, which are properly assigned to the specific subsystem
of the human mind that relates representations of form and meaning. (Chomsky,
1980: 59)
All speakers know the grammar of their language in this Lang
5
sense of ‘lan-
guage’ as a mental state without having to study it. A speaker of English knows that
‘Is John is the man who French?’ is wrong, without looking it up in any book –
indeed few grammar books would be much help. A native speaker knows the sys-
tem of the language. He or she may not be able to verbalize this knowledge clearly;
it is ‘implicit’ knowledge below the level of consciousness.
Nevertheless, no one could produce a single sentence of English without having
English grammar present in their minds. A woman who spontaneously says ‘The
man fed the dog’ shows that she knows the word order typical of English in which
the subject ‘The man’ comes before the verb ‘fed’. She knows the ways of making
irregular past tenses in English – ‘fed’ rather than the regular ‘-ed’ (‘feeded’); she
knows that ‘dog’ needs an article ‘the’ or ‘a’; and she knows that ‘the’ is used to
talk about a dog that the listener already knows about. This is very different from
being able to talk about the sentence she has produced, only possible for people
who have been taught explicit ‘grammar’.
A parallel can be found in a teaching exercise that baffles students – devising
instructions for everyday actions. Try asking the students, ‘Tell me how to put my
coat on.’ Everyone knows how to put a coat on in one sense, but is unable to describe
their actions. There is one type of knowledge in our mind which we can talk about
consciously, another which is far from conscious. We can all put on our coats or pro-
duce an English sentence; few of us can describe how we do it. This view of grammar
Learning and teaching different types of grammar
22

---

as knowledge treats it as something stored unconsciously in the mind – the native
speaker’s competence. The rationale for the paraphernalia of grammatical analysis
such as sentence trees, structures and rules is ultimately that they describe the com-
petence in our minds.
As well as grammatical competence, native speakers also possess knowledge of
how language is used. This is often called communicative competence by those who
see the public functions of language as crucial (Hymes, 1972), rather than the ways
we use language inside our minds. Sheer knowledge of language has little point if
speakers cannot use it appropriately for all the activities in which they want to take
part – complaining, arguing, persuading, declaring war, writing love letters, buying
season tickets, and so on. Many linguists see language as having private functions
as well as public – language for dreaming or planning a day out. Hence the more
general term pragmatic competence reflects all the possible uses of language rather
than restricting them to communication (Chomsky, 1986): praying, mental arith-
metic, keeping a diary, making a shopping list, and many others. In other words,
while no one denies that there is far more to language than grammar, many lin-
guists see it as the invisible central spine that holds everything else together.
Box 2.1 shows the typical grammatical elements in beginners’ English course-
books. This gives some idea of the types of structure that are taught to beginners
in most classrooms around the world. The grammar is the typical medley of tradi-
tional and structural items. A clear presentation of this can be found in Harmer
(1998). Many of these items are the basis for language teaching and for SLA
research.
Structure words, morphemes and sequences of acquisition 23
●
What do you understand by a structure (function) word?
●
What do you think are the main characteristics of beginners’ sentences in
English or another modern language?