Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Some grammatical terms
(See also the glossary on the website.)
articles: specifiers of nouns divided in English into definite articles ‘the man in
the photo’, indefinite articles ‘a man came in’, and zero article (i.e. none) ‘Man is
mortal’
grammar: the system of relationships between elements of the sentence that links
the ‘sounds’ to the ‘meanings’, using word order, word forms, and so on
number: this is a way of signalling how many entities are involved, for example,
through the forms of nouns, pronouns and verbs. English has two numbers: sin-
gular (he) and plural (they); other languages do not have grammatical number
(Japanese), have three numbers (Old English), and so on
passive and active: passive sentences express similar meanings to active sen-
tences by shifting focus from the agent doing the object to the object enduring
the action ‘I broke the mirror’/ ‘The mirror was broken’
phrase structure: one way of linking all the parts of a sentence together in a struc-
ture like that of a family tree, by splitting the sentence into smaller and smaller
bits
preposition: prepositions are words like to, by and with which come before nouns
to make preposition phrases; when they come after a noun, as in Japanese, they
are called ‘postpositions’ ‘Nippon ni’ ( Japan in)
subject pronouns: some languages show the role of nouns in the sentences with
different case forms; in English this only applies to the pronouns – ‘she’ is the sub-
ject form, ‘her’ is the object form, and so on
tense: the relationship between the sentence and time is indicated by tense,
English having present and past tenses but no future; in English the two tenses are
shown by inflections ‘-s’ and ‘-ed’, with several regular and irregular forms
Learning and teaching different types of grammar