Grammar and Grammar Teaching

When we talk about grammar, we will usually refer to the detailed instruction rules of grammar. In China, grammar is usually taught explicitly in formal

instructions, which is different from that in some western countries. So there are some controversial questions coming out: Should there be formal instruction of grammar? Should grammar be taught explicitly or implicitly? After taking the course of Grammar and Communication and doing lots of relevant readings, I get some ideas. In this paper, I am going to talk about some of my understanding of grammar and how to teach grammar in communicative language teaching classroom in China.

2 My Understanding of Grammar

Grammar is often misunderstood in the language teaching and learning field. Some people think that grammar is a collection of rules on sentence structures of the language. Before I took this course I had such kind of conception too.However, grammar does not just mean this. It is not one-dimensional and not meaningless. Actually, it includes three dimensions: (morpho)

syntax―form,semantics―meaning, and pragmatics―use (Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Diane Larsen-Freeman, 1999:4). These three dimensions are interrelated, if one changes, the others will change too. Despite their

interrelationship, they each offer a unique perspective on grammar. For instance, in dealing with form, we usually refer it to how a particular grammar structure is constructed―its morphology and its syntax; in dealing with meaning, we usually refer it to what a particular English grammar structure means, what semantic

contribution it makes whenever it is used; pragmatics deals with issues concerning the choices that user of a particular language make when using the forms of language in communication (Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Diane Larsen-Freeman, 1999:4-5).

There is another misconception of grammar, that is, the rules of grammar are arbitrary. According to this, some people think that ‘Grammar is acquired naturally; it need not to be taught.’ I do not agree with this kind of conception. To a certain extent, we can say grammar rules were formed arbitrarily through the long history of language use. But not all of what is deemed arbitrary is

so (Diane Larsen-Freeman, 2005). If we consider it in a broad enough perspective, it is possible to see why things are the way they are. For example, sentence (1) There is the boy missing. sentence (2) There is a boy missing. sentence (1) is ungrammatical because sentences with the existential word ‘there’ always take an definite noun phrases in the predicate. Why? ‘There’ is used to introduce new information, and the preferred position for new information is toward the end of a sentence. A noun phrase that contains new information is marked by the use of the indefinite article, a or an, if it is a singular common noun, as in sentence (2) (Diane Larsen-Freeman, 2005). So here the reason is not arbitrary. I think that is also the reason why it is necessary to teach grammar explicitly in formal instructions. Learners can learn new grammar structures by themselves according to their former knowledge of grammar.

3How to Teach Grammar in Communicative Language Teaching Classroom

The central concern of the communicative approach to language teaching is to increase the proportion of meaning-oriented ‘fluency work’ in the second language