Teaching Grammar, Structure and Meaning

Exploring theory and practice for post-16 English Language teachers

Marcello Giovanelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317646938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching Grammar, Structure and Meaning introduces teachers to some basic ideas from the increasingly popular field of cognitive linguistics as a way of explaining and teaching key grammatical concepts. Particularly suitable for those teaching post-16 English Language, this book offers a methodology for teaching key aspects of linguistic form and an extensive set of learning activities. Written by an experienced linguist and teacher, this book contains:

· an evaluation of current approaches to the teaching of grammar and linguistic form

· a revised pedagogy based on principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics

· a comprehensive set of activities and resources to support the teaching of key linguistic topics and text types

· a detailed set of suggestions for further reading and a guide to available resources

Arguing for the use of drama, role play, gesture, energy dynamics, and visual and spatial representations as ways of enabling students to understand grammatical features, this book explores and analyses language use in a range of text types, genres and contexts. This innovative approach to teaching aspects of grammar is aimed at English teachers, student teachers and teacher trainers.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315762029-1

The mind is inherently embodied

Thought is mostly unconscious

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical

(Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 3)

This is a not a conventional book about grammar and grammar teaching. It is not a textbook, and does not offer lists of grammatical terms together with exercises and ‘answers’. It is not a book that promises success in examinations by sharing hints and tips about what examination boards require. It isn’t driven by a rigid assessment/objective-led pedagogy; in fact, there isn’t an ‘AO’ in sight. And, while it acknowledges past debates about the value and status of teaching grammar, it refuses to be side-tracked into covering old ground for the sake of merely offering another academic and ideological position.

Instead, this is a book for teachers of English Language (although I would hope that teachers of English Literature would find it useful as well) that draws on recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, academic fields that for good reasons have remained largely outside most teachers’ knowledge, expertise and application. In doing so, I hope to show that these disciplines can offer teachers and researchers new ways of thinking about learning and teaching, and new ways of developing students’ abilities to explore aspects of grammar, structure and meaning in purposeful and learner-centred ways. Needless to say, this is a book that also promotes the importance of language work in the English curriculum, and the importance of students being given opportunities to explore the structural, sociological and psychological dimensions of their own and others’ language use. A further argument in this book is that linguistics as an academic discipline can play a critical role in developing both teachers’ subject and pedagogical knowledge, and encourage them to think about their own classroom practice in new and insightful ways.

Traditionally in English schools, grammar teaching has been dominated by either formalist approaches (exploring in-built structures, rules and idealised examples of language), or by functional ones (focusing more on the wider contexts of language, the relationships between communicators and the purposes of speaking or writing). These have brought their own theoretical and, at times, political agendas with them_ formal approaches tend to concentrate on language as a system of rules, and notions of correctness and standards; functional approaches have emphasised the importance of language as a social event, and associated notions of appropriateness and diversity. In most cases, each approach has largely ignored the concerns of the other; in the few cases where they have been brought together, it has been without any real coherence.

My aim in this book is to steer the debate in a different direction by exploring what some elementary principles from cognitive linguistics might have to offer the teacher in supporting teaching about grammar and meaning at post-16. As I demonstrate throughout this book, the central premise of this kind of applied cognitive linguistic approach is that the conceptual basis of language (including aspects of lexis, semantics and grammar) originates from experience that is rooted in physical movement and physical imagery. Consequently, the way we think, conceptualise and use language is based on our existence as physical beings, and the affordances and constraints our human-specific bodies give us in terms of viewing and making sense of the physical and abstract world. This is known as the principle of embodied cognition.

The influence our physical environment and experiences have on the shaping of more complex and abstract understanding can be traced back to very early infancy. Numerous studies have demonstrated that babies and very young children use and understand movement in a variety of ways and functions, drawing a sense of meaning through the various interactions they have in their immediate physical environments with objects and with their parents, and caregivers, and other children. Very young children are able to understand the notion of causality through their own manipulation of objects in their immediate space. For example, a child manipulating toys such as building blocks soon understands the concept of force as one block hits another, and subsequently reconfigures this into a conceptual model of energy transfer. In Figure 1.1 a young child pushes the blocks against each other, which results in various kinds of force as blocks move and topple over. In this instance, the child becomes aware of the causes and effects of the physical force inherent in her actions.

Figure 1.1 Building blocks and the transfer of energy

These kinds of primitive gestures and movements — another example would be a very young child pushing away from or moving towards an adult for attention — are more than just involuntary reactions, they are meaningful embodiments of experience and meaning, and form the basis for other, later more developed modes of expression, including language. As I explain throughout this book, this is an important and powerful idea and positions language as integrated within a broader notion of cognitive and social development, rejecting the idea that language exists in isolation from other cognitive faculties. Instead, we can view language as having a fundamental experiential basis in its forms and structures. For example, the notion of force is both an important conceptual aspect of modal forms, which denote certain attitudes or stances that a speaker holds towards an event or situation. Strong modal expressions like ‘You must’ contain an inherent psychological force that is analogous to a physical pressure being applied, while a weaker form such as ‘You might’ can be understood using the same physical terms. As I explain in Chapters 5 and 6, the notions of force and energy transfer also underpin the grammatical concept of clause transitivity (one entity doing something to another entity). A cognitive approach to linguistics therefore proposes that language can be viewed as more than simply a series of arbitrary signs, and instead as inherently iconic, since an interpretative relationship exists between grammatical form and semantic content. These principles form my basis for thinking about how teachers might use this knowledge to support learners in the classroom.

Language and grammar

Arguments about the value of teaching grammar in schools and beyond have remained largely unchanged over the last 100 years. As I explain in Chapters 2 and 3, these have largely focused on two primary concerns. First, the value of dedicating valuable curriculum space to the study of something that research has shown to have little measurable impact on student competences and skills. In some schools, and for some teachers, this meant that grammar ended up being omitted entirely from classrooms. Second, the emphasis from some quarters on standards, correctness and a thinly disguised notion of linguistic policing has inevitably led to very narrow notions of what language study could look like in the classroom. This deficit view of grammar continues to have a strong hold in contemporary politics and educational policymaking, as recent changes to the English National Curriculum and Key Stage 2 testing arrangements have demonstrated. The following extract from a blog by Harry Mount published on The Telegraph website gives a flavour of this kind of attitude.

Without grammar you are back in the Stone Age, reduced to making the simplest of statements; or, by trying to make more complicated ones and not being able to do it, you write nonsense. Grammar doesn’t exclude; not knowing grammar does. Without good grammar, you don’t have full access to one of the great joys of happening to be born in this country — being able to read and write English.

(Mount 2013)

Mount’s comments present a right-wing view of grammar teaching. They explicitly emphasise the notion of a correct way of speaking, and implicitly downplay nonstandard forms and varieties of English. They are typical of a prescriptive approach to language, emphasising rules and the importance of adhering to them. By contrast, a descriptive approach finds value in looking at varieties of use in all forms, and linking these to specific contexts, the motivations of different writers, readers, speakers and listeners and their purposes for wanting to communicate. As I will show in Chapters 2 and 3, these competing and polarised views remain at the centre of debates both for and against the explicit teaching of language in schools.

These positions have been translated into pedagogical viewpoints that have underpinned attitudes towards grammar and language work for many years. Nearly fifty years ago, Michael Halliday drew a distinction between what he called three primary aims of grammar teaching: productive, descriptive and prescriptive (Halliday 1967: 83).

A productive aim focuses on the development of students’ functional skills related to speaking, reading and writing. A descriptive aim is more content-driven, building students’ knowledge about the language levels of discourse, semantics, syntax, lexis, morphology and graphology in ways that allow them to describe different kinds of language use accurately and systematically, with due attention to the contexts in which communication takes place. The tension between the two aims in current practice is most clearly seen in the staggering difference in focus between GCSE English Language (largely productive aims) and A level English Language (largely descriptive aims). A third aim of prescriptivism, deeply entrenched in the values of writers like Harry Mount, has moved in and out of school culture with various changes of government, policy and wider societal values. As Halliday himself remarks, it exists as

linguistic table-manners…unlike [productive teaching]… [it] adds nothing to the pupil’s linguistic abilities; it makes his performance more socially acceptable.

(Halliday 1967: 83)

My aim in this book is a descriptive one, and the language ideas and concepts I examine are designed to equip students with a set of analytical resources with which they can approach, explore and discuss texts and their contexts confidently. However, I also argue that knowledge about linguistics is as valuable a tool for the teacher as it is the student. As I demonstrate throughout the book, and as numerous research studies and reports have demonstrated, one of the biggest hurdles to effective language teaching has been the lack of confidence teachers from largely literature backgrounds have had in their own subject knowledge. These colleagues are often given scant professional development opportunities both in pre-service and in-service training, and yet over time have been expected to both embrace and embed successive language and grammar initiatives. These demands have often clashed with their own identities as English teachers, which have been largely shaped by the nature of their undergraduate degrees and their initial teacher training (see Poulson et al. 1996).

However, the recent work by researchers at the University of Exeter on the link between contextualised grammar teaching and an improvement in students’ writing, the introduction of grammar, spelling and punctuation tests at Key Stage 2, the added weighting attached to technical accuracy on GCSE papers and the continued growth of A level English Language as a viable alternative to English Literature for post-16 students all mean that it is as important as it has ever been to debate and explore the very best pedagogical models for teaching language and grammar. As Hancock and Kolln have recently argued:

knowing about language can empower us in many ways. It can help us resist standards as well as follow them. It helps make the power and effectiveness of nonstandard dialects incontrovertible fact, not just a political assertion. It can help guide us in thoughtfully nuanced expression, in recognizing the inherent connection between formal choice and rhetorical effect. The question should be about which grammar, not about when or if

(Hancock and Kolln 2010: 36)

In this book, I argue that one of the ways we might do this is to look towards recent advances in linguistics and the learning sciences for ways that might empower teachers and inform their classroom practice. I firmly believe that these disciplines have the potential to offer more insightful and user-friendly ways of studying language than formalist and functional linguistic models.

Organisation of the book

This book consists of seven chapters. Following this introduction, in Chapter 2, I provide an overview of grammar and language teaching in English schools. Surveying the twentieth and the early-twenty-first centuries from the publication of the 1921 Newbolt Report to current work on GCSE and A level reform, I explore the debates surrounding grammar teaching, and the initiatives and insights from linguistics that have been filtered down to teachers in schools. I consider the relationship between the demands of the classroom and teacher subject and pedagogical knowledge, and examine the problems associated with a pedagogy that has often attached more importance to the acquisition and use of terminology than conceptual understanding. In this chapter I also argue that debates about language study have been dominated by political and ideological stances rather than pedagogical ones, and suggest that advances in cognitive linguistics present an opportunity to illuminate teacher and student knowledge about how language operates.

In Chapter 3, I develop these ideas by debating the characteristics of different models of grammar, and introducing some basic principles from cognitive linguistics to the reader. First, I summarise the models of grammar that have formed the basis of policymaking and teaching in English schools. I show how structural and generative models of grammar offered little to suggest that they could be adequate replacements for a traditional latinate school grammar that had been the dominant model for the first part of the twentieth century. By contrast, I draw on my discussion in Chapter 1 to explain how an emerging interest in a functional linguistics in UK higher education, led by Michael Halliday at University College London in the 1960s, filtered down into schools and has remained, in spirit at least, as the foundation for much language work that goes on in schools. However, the majority of this chapter is spent beginning to explore some cognitive linguistic principles. Here, I show how cognitive linguistics views language development as integrated into a child’s general physical and intellectual development, explain the inherently physical basis of conceptualisation, meaning and, therefore grammar and exemplify the relationship between word forms and the stores of knowledge that we have from our experience of interaction in the world.

In Chapter 4, I build on these basic principles in more detail. First, I examine how human thought is rooted in our interaction in the physical environments in which we live and function, and how we draw on concrete analogies to help us understand more abstract ideas. I then draw on a number of research reports and studies from psychology and education that have shown how students may use gesture to support their learning by making their implicit knowledge and understanding more explicit. I consequently examine some of the ways in which gesture might be useful in teaching language and grammar in the classroom. Towards the end of the chapter, I provide details of two case studies from the US and France, where educators have used cognitive linguistic principles to inform their pedagogical practices. These form the basis for my own teaching model that I outline in the next two chapters.

Chapters 5 and 6 operate as a pair, providing a background set of frameworks, concepts and terms, and a practical set of texts and activities for teachers to use. In Chapter 5, I outline some suitable areas of study from a cognitive linguistic perspective, in each case describing its theoretical concerns and its place within the cognitive model of language study. I then provide an example analysis of a short text to exemplify the model/approach and to demonstrate its explanatory and pedagogical potential. Since this chapter informs the following one, I hope that Chapter 5 will prove useful as a reference point for teachers. In Chapter 6, I provide detail...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Teaching grammar and language: An overview
• 3 Why should teachers be interested in cognitive linguistics?
• 4 Embodied cognition and learning
• 5 Cognitive linguistic concepts for teachers
• 6 Embodied learning activities for the classroom
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index