¡Descarga Understanding Different Types of Grammar and Their Role in Language Learning - Prof. Sanz y más Apuntes en PDF de Lingüística solo en Docsity! LEARNING AND TEACHING DIFFERENT TYPES OF GRAMMAR 1. What is grammar? Grammar is divided into three types: prescriptive, traditional and structural, and when this grammar is acquired then we talk about grammatical competence. -Prescriptive grammar: It is related to the imposition of rules; correctness. This type of grammar recommend, choose, what people should use or not. It has a pragmatic competence too. To language teaching classroom this grammar is not so useful because students need to learn the use of the language, and not only the correct grammar. - Traditional grammar This grammar classifies the parts of speech and gives rules to combine them. Traditional grammar is descriptive. Traditional English grammar, has difficulties to explain its rules in many languages because it is based on Latin grammar, so to non-European languages, this grammar is inappropriate because they do not know the concepts and terms of traditional grammar, for instance the plural. - Structural grammar It has to do with the elements of the sentence and how are they combined from smaller structures like phrases. In language teaching classroom it is used in substitution tables. - Grammatical competence It is the amount of knowledge of grammar and the functions of language that people is able to use automatically because it has been acquired before. These are the basic elements in grammar which are presented to beginners students in language teaching: 1.present of to be 2. articles a/ an 3.subject pronouns 4. in / from with places 5.noun plurals. 2. Structure words, morphemes and sequences of acquisition There is a distinction for language teaching between content and structure words. Content words have definable meaning and belong to open word class because a new content word could be invented easily. The meaning of structure words is grammatical, are limited in number. The smallest unit with meaning is the morpheme ,which can be a word, like in book, or can be a part of a word, as we can see in hamburger. In morphology we can see how the morpheme behaves meanwhile syntax has to do with phrases, clauses... Grammatical morphemes are those that play a more important role in the structure than content words. In language teaching we can see how there is a sort of list of rules that are easier for students of a second language, being easier to acquire the plural and the most difficult the possessive s’. That means, that most English students, follow and create similar grammar to acquire the language, all of them develop a similar interlanguage grammar stage. 3. The processability model In order to learn a second language, learners go through different stages as we have said before, and this stages are based on the movements of the elements of the sentence; how this elements could be combined; how learners learn the grammatical structure of the language stage by stage in order. Stage 1: At the beginning, learners only have words without a grammatical structure. Stage 2: At second stage, learners are able to use the typical word order of the language. In English, subject, verb and object. In this stage, they cannot use movements between this elements yet. Stage 3: In this stage, learners start to move elements to the beginning of the sentence Stage 4: Learners are able to separate prepositions from phrases and move auxiliaries to get yes/no questions. Stage 5: Learners start to move the structure of the sentence and acquire the grammatical morpheme “-s”. Stage 6: Learners acquire the order of subordinate clauses and structures where the indirect object precedes the direct object. In language teaching, there is a problem because normally, textbooks do not follow these stages, so ,the process of learning and acquiring becomes more difficult. Learners cannot acquire grammar and structures beyond their current levels. 4. Principles and parameters grammar
