LEARNING GRAMMAR

Group 4Maretha Yosephine Agape 132122068

Nandah Nurwendah 132122055Yasir Dermawan 132122059

Meliani Najmatussobah 132122065

A. A Place for Grammar In this chapter, I want to open up the idea of

‘grammar’ and to explore grammar from the learners’ perspective.

By doing this, I hope to convince readers that grammar does indeed have a place in children’s foreign language learning, and that skillful grammar teaching can be useful.

To start the chapter,a short conversation with a young learner will help focus on grammar and meaning.Our conversation, in which he was a mostly silent partner and I did nearly all the talking, went like this ( A = adult; P = pupil)

A : what’s that ?P : it’s T rex.A : is it big or small?P : bigA : how big? (silence)A : this big? ( demonstrating small size with hand a few inches off the floor)(Child shakes his head to indicate ‘no’)A : this big? (demonstrating a waist-high size with hand)( Child shakes his head to indicate ‘no’)A : this big? (demonstrating a human size with hand)( Child shakes his head to indicate ‘no’)A : THIS big? ( demonstratig as high as the celling with hand stretched up)( Child nods his head to indicate ’ýes’)A : yes, it was VERY big !

Without the grammatical structure it was very big in his language resources, the child could not tell me all he knew about his dinosaur.

The short conversation about T Rex has illustrated several starting points for thingking about grammar and young learners:

Grammar is necessary to express precise meanings in discourse

Grammar ties closely into vocabulary in learning and using the foreign language

Grammar learning can evolve from the learning of chunks of language

Talking about something meaningful with the child can be a useful way to introduce new grammar.

Grammar can be taught without technical labels (e.g. ‘intensifying adverb’).

B. Different Meanings of ‘Grammar’1.The grammar of a language2.Theoretical and pedagogic grammars3.Internal grammars

1. The grammar of a language Every time native speakers of French use the language, they re-create it to express their ideas or needs to other people, and each time French is used, it changes a little for the people using it. A ‘language’does not really exist as an object or entity, separate from people: we tend to think of it that way, but we might also think of it as a collection of all its uses. As such, a language is constantly changing, it is dynamic.

To teach a language to non-native speakers, we need to stop it, to fix it so that we can understand it as a more static set of ways of talking, and break it into bits to offer to learners.

2. Theoritical and pedagogic grammars

Theoretical linguists concern themselves with finding and describing the patterns in the use of a language. The way they fix and then describe the language depends on their theoritical views about language use and their objectives.

Chomskyan linguists aim to describe language as it is internalised in the mind/ brain, rather than as it is produced by speakers.

Hallidayan linguists, on the other hand, view language as a tool for expressing meaning, and so they categorise language in terms of how meaning is expressed, and produce ‘functional grammar’

Pedagogical grammars are explicit description of patterns, or rules,in a language, presented in way that are helpful to teachers and to learners.

Teachers need an overview and description of the whole of the language that is to be taught, but learners will encounter the pedagogical grammar bit by bit, as parts of it are introduced in text book units..

3. Internal grammars

A futher key distinction needs to be made between this ‘grammar’, and what any individual learner actually learns about the pattern of the language: his or her ‘internal grammar’ of the language. Every learner’s internal grammar is different from every other’s because each has a unique learning experience. Internal grammar is sometimes referred to as ‘interlanguage’or as ‘linguistic competence’.

C. Development of the Internal Grammar

1.From words to Grammar

2.Learning through hypothesis testing

3.Influence of the first language

1. From words to grammar

There is evidence from adult second language learning and from school-based foreign language learning that, in the begining stages, learners seems to use words or chunks strung together to get their meaning across , with little attention paid to grammar that would fit the word or chunk together in conventional patterns.

2. Learning through hypothesis testing

Hypothesis testing is the rather grand name given to mental processes that are evidenced from a very early age. For example, as a baby drops her spoon, wacthes someone pick it up for her, and then drops it again so that it will be picked up again. The baby appears to have constructed a hypothesis ‘ïf I drop my spoon, it will be picked up for me.’and to be testing it through repeated trials. Of course, eventually the child learns that a hypothesis was right, but only for limited number of drops, after which ‘ adult fatigue’ sets in, and the spoons probably disappears.

Evidence that children work naturally with rules and patterns comes from their creative productions of utterance that they can never have heard anyone say but that seem to follow an internal rule the child has constructed: e.g. He tookened my ball (= took), in which a new past form is created according to the child’s current hypothesis.

In the following extract, two 12 years old Norwegian children are retelling story called ‘the playroom’ that they had read previously, the narrative part of the story was written in the past tense and if we look at the past tense verbs they use italicized), we can see how they get some right and others wrong, but also how their errors show their use of rules:

Pupil 1 1. Grandfather show joe around in the house and they come to the

playroom2. Joe gasped when see saw the playroom3. It looked more like a toy shop.....4. In the far comer of the room there was a toy castle5. This castle my father maked with me when was in your age6. I made up stories about knights and dragons

Pupil 27. My father make up maked this tower whe I was in your age 8. And my father and my great and they used to make up stories

when I was a knigth9. After supper Joe climbed upto the bed.

Errors in language use can often act as a window on to the developing inter grammar of the learners, and are signals of growth.

3. Influence of the first language

It will be apparent that constructing hypotheses about the foreign language is much more difficult than for the first language, simply because the learner has relatively little amounts of data to work on.

When data is limited, learners are more likely to use the first language to fill the gaps. So that learners may assume, as a kind of default, that the foreign language grammar works like the first language grammar.

D. A Learning Centred Approach to Teaching Grammar Background

1. Trends in Teaching Grammar2. Teaching Grammar as Explicit3. Communicative approaches: No grammar needed4. Focus on form: The revival of grammar teaching

1.Trends in Teaching GrammarYoung learner classrooms are inevitably affected by the trends that sweep through foreign language teaching, as can be seen from the development of ‘task-based ‘ syllabuses in Malaysia, of the ‘target-oriented’ curriculum in Hong Kong, and of ‘communicative’ syllabuses in many other countries.

Some of these trends turn out to be good for learners and learning; others are less clearly beneficial.

2. Teaching Grammar as Explicit Rules: Learning as building blocksGrammar rules are introduced one-by-one, explicitly, to the learners. Metalinguistics labels are used to talk explicitly about the grammar, e.g. ‘the pas perfect tense’, and the terms and organisation needed to talk .about language become another part of what has to be learnt

3. Communicative Approaches: No grammar neededBeing able to talk about the language is very different from being

able to talk in language, and it was a reaction to the lack of fluency and ease with the foreign language, experienced by many of those taught by grammar-translation, that led to the development of communicative language teaching (CLT) in the late 1970s and 1980s.

A form of CLT that is based entirely on listening to comprehensible input is Total Physical Response (TPR), and variations on TPR are found in many young learner coursebooks. In this method as developed by Asher (1972), students listen to commands in the foreign language and respond only through movement and action e.g. Getting up and sitting down, turning round, putting things on shelves.

4. Focus on form: the revival of grammar teaching

One of the most important sites of language learning theory and research from the 1970s on has been the immersion programs in North America, in which, for example, French-speaking Canadian children might attend an English-medium school.

It was in this context that Krashen and colleagues set out the theory that second language learning could follow the same route as first language acquisition (Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982), and immersion classes formed a huge experiment in learning through communicating in the foreign language.

Batstone (1995) helpfully brings some of these ideas together in a suggested sequencing of grammar learning activities around particular patterns or structure:

(re) noticing

(re) structuring

proceduralizing

• Noticing is, as we have seen, an active process in which learners become aware of the structure, notice connectiond between form and meaning, but do not themselves manipulate language.

•Structuring involves bringing the new grammar pattern into the learner’s internal grammar and, if necessary, reorganising the internal grammar.

•Proceduralisation is the stage of making the new grammar ready for instant and fluent use in communication, and requires practice in choosing and using the form to express meaning.

E. Principles for Learning-Centred Grammar Teaching

The need for grammar• grammatical accuracy and precision matter for meaning•Without attention to form, form will not be learnt accurately•Form-focused instruction is particulary relevant for those features of the foreign language grammar that are different from the first language or are not very noticeable

Potential conflict between meaning and grammar•If learners attention is directed to expressing meaning, they may neglect attention to accuracy and precision.

Importance of attention in the learning process•Teaching can help learners notice and attend to features of grammar in the language they hear and read, or speak and write•Noticing an aspect of form is the first stage of learning it; it then needs to become part of the learner’s internal grammar, and to become part of the learner’s language resources ready for use in a range of situations.

Learning grammar as the development of internal grammar•The learner has to do the learning; just teaching grammar does not make it happen•Grammar learning can work aoutwards from participation in discourse, from vocabulary and from learnt chunks•Learner’s errors can give teachers useful information about their learning processes and their internal grammars

The role of explicit teaching of grammar rules•Children can master metalanguage if it is weel taught; metalanguage can be a useful tool.

F. Teaching Techniques for Supporting Grammar Learning

1. Working from discourse to grammar2. Guided noticing activities3. Language practice activities that offer structuring

opportunities4. Proceduralising activities5. Introducing metalanguage

1. Working from discourse to grammar

The language of classroom management

The language of classroom management an thus act as a meaningful discourse context within which certain patterns arise regularly and help with building the internal grammar.

When organising practical activities, for example, the teacher may ask children to:Give out

The scissorsThe booksThe paperThe pencils

Talking with children

If a child volunteers something in the first language or in what they can manage of the foreign language, the teacher can respond in the foreign language, offering a fuller or more correct way of saying it:

Child : bird treeTeacher : Yes. The bir’s in the tree. He’s sitting on the branch. He’s singing

2. Guided noticing activities Listen and notice Pupils listen to sentences or to a conected piece of talk, e.g story or phone call, and complete a table or grid using what they hear. In order to complete the grid, they need to pay attention to the grammar aspect being taught.

Presentation of new language with puppets When introducing a new pattern, the teacher can construct a dialogue with a story-line, that uses a ‘repetition plus constrast’pattern, to be played out by puppets.

3. Language practice activities that offer structuring opportunities

Questionnaires, surveys and quizzesInformation gap activitiesHelping handsDrills and chants

4. Proceduralising activities

Polar animal description re-visitedDictogloss

5. Introducing Metalanguage Explicit teacher talkCloze activities for word class