A New Approach to English Pedagogical Grammar

The Order of Meanings

Akira Tajino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315396644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This book proposes Meaning-order Approach to Pedagogical Grammar (MAP Grammar) as a practical pedagogical approach in ESL and EFL contexts. Teaching grammar through an easy-to-understand three-dimensional model, MAP Grammar establishes the clause as the fundamental unit of English and interprets meaning units in the sentence, thus allowing visualizable association between individual grammar items. By focusing on the order of meaning (rather than the order of words) in a sentence, MAP Grammar also distills current descriptive sentence structures (typically taught as five or seven patterns) into one meaning-based sentence structure for teaching and learning. MAP Grammar makes syllabus design and teaching easier in the following ways:

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• Visualizing English grammar in a clear model, allowing association between individual grammar items.

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• Instruction relies on meaning, not metalanguage, making MAP Grammar easy to grasp.

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• The meaning-based sentence structure allows teachers to address global errors, and learners to produce comprehensible English.

Part I
A meaning-order approach to pedagogical grammar (MAP Grammar)

Theoretical background

1
MAP Grammar

A systemic approach to ELT

Akira Tajino

This chapter describes the nature and theoretical background of MAP Grammar and demonstrates how it may be applied to the teaching and learning of English grammar. As noted in the Introduction, there is a need for grammar road maps for teachers and learners. A review of grammar course books used worldwide by ESL/EFL learners and teachers shows that the collection of essential grammatical items is typically listed in a simple way, with the first unit covering the ‘present tense’, and the second unit the ‘past tense’, which is then followed by ‘present perfect’, and so on. Yet critical questions about such a presentation of English grammar features should be addressed: ‘Why is each grammatical item typically arranged to stand alone, often without explaining the connections to other items?’ and ‘Why is the order of introducing grammatical items so similar in many of the books?’ Given the dominant use of such materials, how can grammar be taught and learnt in a systemic way? I suggest that it is necessary to provide a road map of English grammar with a clear starting point which has a connection to the end goal. Teachers and learners need a grammar map which clearly shows interrelations among grammatical items, and this is what MAP Grammar aims to offer.

The significance of a holistic view

MAP Grammar involves a dynamic approach to language pedagogy. It provides a way to visualize English grammar that shows the whole picture of grammar revealing interrelations among grammatical items. In this way, it may serve as a road map, allowing grammar to be taught and learnt in a systemic way.

How should grammar be learnt and taught? With some empirical evidence from observation, Nunan (1998, pp. 101–102) argues that grammar learning should not be described as constructing a wall which is “erected one linguistic block at a time”, but rather like “growing a garden”; thus, he proposes an organic approach to grammar teaching. The conventional approach involves a systematic way to teach because it allows us to teach one grammatical item “at a time, in a sequential, step-by-step fashion” so that “learners [may] acquire one grammatical item at a time” (Nunan, 1998, p. 101). Like the detailed discrete map discussed in the Introduction, this approach may often fail to show learners interrelations among the grammatical items.

The organic approach, on the other hand, would allow us to teach in a systemic way so that ‘emergent properties’ (see Tajino, 2009) might appear in the course of teaching and learning through a revelation of the connections between grammatical items; that is, certain characteristics of the language may emerge as a result of teaching dynamically. This involves the teaching of a particular item by relating it to another one at the same time, or by teaching more than one item at the same time. To do this, we would be required to design a layout (i.e., the whole picture) of a complete organic grammar garden. What does an entire grammar look like, and how should it be taught? This is what the present chapter aims to discuss.

Designing a grammar map: A two-dimensional approach

Figure 1.1 Food system: A two-dimensional approach

In order to design a grammar map in which the grammatical items are related to one another, we have taken a two-dimensional approach by referring to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a founder of modern linguistics. In introducing Saussure’s syntagmatic and paradigmatic approach, Culler (1976) uses a food-system metaphor (Figure 1.1). He states,

In the food system, for example, one defines on the syntagmatic axis the combinations of courses which can make up meals of various sorts; and each course or slot can be filled by one of a number of dishes which are in paradigmatic contrasts with one another (one wouldn’t combine roast beef and lamb chops in a single meal: they would be alternatives on any menu).

(p. 104)

Thus, the typical flow in Western food culture, ‘appetizer > main dish > dessert’ can be used to represent the ‘axis of combination’ on a horizontal axis, and the contents of the course, the ‘axis of selection’ (e.g., beef, chicken or fish as the main dish) on a vertical axis. In this way, it is possible to describe English grammar by the ‘axis of combination of words or phrases’ (i.e., a sentence or clause) and the ‘axis of selection of grammatical items’ each of which can be associated with a particular part of the clause. In this way, the syntagmatic (i.e., horizontal) axis and the paradigmatic (i.e., vertical) axis will be used in drawing the grammar map.

Clause structure on the horizontal axis and grammatical items on the vertical axis

Clause structure: The main road of MAP Grammar

MAP Grammar starts with the following assumptions and research findings from linguistics and applied linguistics:

1. Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has revealed that every second or foreign language learner makes grammatical errors (see, for example, Corder, 1981; Ellis, 1994), and such learner errors can be differentiated in terms of gravity for communicative purposes – i.e., ‘global errors’ and ‘local errors’ (see Burt, 1975).
2. Since English is a fixed-word-order language (Pinker, 1994), errors in its clause structure, which can be regarded as ‘global errors’, should be avoided.
3. Sharing the conceptual elements with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the English clause structure can be viewed as a single structure consisting of ‘meaning units’ (see Halliday, 1994; de Oliveira & Schleppegrell, 2015).

If this is the case, a critical question to be addressed would be ‘What kind of errors should be avoided first for communicative purposes?’ Therefore, when communicating in English, word order would be of the utmost importance as it can determine the meaning of what we say or write (Kuiper & Nokes, 2014). Considering that the English language is “a fixed-word-order, poorly inflected, subject-prominent language” (Pinker, 1994, p. 235) and that meaning can be determined by the ordering of words or phrases, errors in word order would surely impede communication. As Examples 1a and 1b show, if one reverses the word order of ‘the dog’ and ‘the biscuit’, it would result in completely different meanings.

• 1a.The dog ate the biscuit. (It was the dog that performed the action of eating.)
• 1b.The biscuit ate the dog. (It was the biscuit that performed the action of eating.???)
• 1c.Dog ate biscuit.

Figure 1.2 Clause structure on a horizontal axis

In applied linguistics, such errors (as in Examples 1a and 1b) can be categorized as ‘global errors’, which are the sort of errors that impede the meaning of an utterance or sentence (see, for example, Burt, 1975). On the other hand, ‘local errors’ are those that do not necessarily distort the meaning of an utterance, such as the dropping of the third-person singular s or articles (as in Example 1c).

Thus, for communicative purposes, we should help learners avoid making ‘global errors’ (e.g., errors in word order). This is not, of course, to say that reducing ‘local errors’ is not of importance, but rather it is simply a question of ‘error gravity’ – i.e., which errors to target first. Therefore, like the course meal, we can take clause structure as the main road (i.e., horizontal axis) and grammatical items as the side streets (i.e., vertical axis) of MAP Grammar (see Figure 1.2).

Clause structure: The order of meanings

As we know, the so-called seven clause patterns have been most commonly used.¹ This may be quite reasonable from an analytic perspective; that is, metalanguage terms (e.g., Subject and Object) are used in order to analyze English clauses, leading to the seven clause patterns. However, we should ask if this is the most appropriate way for learners if our teaching purposes include a ‘communicative aspect’ and if it is also viewed from the learners’ perspectives.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English (2006), for example, ‘to communicate’ refers to “share or exchange information, news, or ideas”. It would be fair to say that grammar should serve to meet this need, and thus, the teaching of clause structure should be meaning-based. For this purpose, we take the SFL model proposed by M.A.K. Halliday which tells us how grammar works. SFL interprets language “not as a set of structures but as a network of SYSTEMS, or interrelated sets of options for making meaning” (Halliday, 1994, p. 15), and classifies the function of language into three broad categories: the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual metafunctions. In other words, these are the “three aspects of the ways grammar makes meaning” (de Oliveira & Schleppegrell, 2015, p. 47). The ideational function involves understanding and representing the world; the interpersonal one, interacting with and enacting relationships with others; and the textual one, relating what is said or written to the rest of the text (Bloor & Bloor, 2013; Coffin, Donohue, & North, 2009).

Among these three aspects of language, we have chosen to focus on the ideational function (i.e., understanding and presenting ideas). From a pedagogical perspective, without the ideational function, the interpersonal and textual functions would have little or no role to play. Thus, MAP Grammar takes the id...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: Why this book now?
• PART I A meaning-order approach to pedagogical grammar (MAP Grammar): Theoretical background
• PART II MAP Grammar and issues in ELT
• PART III MAP Grammar: Practice reports and lesson plans
• Epilogue: A message for teachers
• Index