2 Learning and Teaching

Different Types of Grammar

A language has patterns and regularities that are used to convey meaning, some of
which make up its grammar. One important aspect of grammar in most languages
is the order of words, which is part of syntax: any speaker of English knows that
‘Mr Bean loves Teddy’ does not have the same meaning as ‘Teddy loves Mr Bean’.
Another aspect of grammar consists of changes in the forms of words, part of mor-
phology, more important in some languages than others—‘This bush flowered
in May’ means something different from ‘These bushes flower in May’ because
of the differences between ‘This/these’, ‘bush/bushes’ and ‘flowered/flower’. The
Key Grammatical Terms section on p. 54 defines some grammatical terms.

Box 2.1 A Chinese Student’s View of Learning

English Grammar

As for grammar, personally, it is the most tedious thing which I could

not grasp completely till now, and what I can do is just to be corrected in
written or spoken English by native speakers consistently. When I first
encountered English grammar, it was not difficult but just a matter of
memorising the key sentences and patterns by repeating and translating,
then we would be drilled repeatedly with the same pattern to consoli-
date them in our mind. And when I was in secondary school, in order
to make us understand grammar, the teacher would gave us a plenty of
drills to do like matching, gap filling and close testing. But the most
important thing is, we still cannot grasp the grammar; though we correct
the wrong answers in drills, we forget all the items after just a couple of
days. Thus, it is a difficult thing for me to acquire grammar, however,
developing a language sense is the sort of thing I get used to doing dur-
ing my advanced English learning.

Many linguists consider grammar, made up of syntax ‘above’ the word and
morphology ‘below’ the word, to be the central element in language in the
Lang5 sense of the knowledge in an individual mind, around which other ele-
ments such as pronunciation and vocabulary revolve. However important the
 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar 25
other components of language may be in themselves, what connects them is
grammar—the mortar between the bricks. Chomsky calls grammar the ‘com-
putational system’ of human language that relates sound and meaning, trivial
in itself but impossible to manage without.
Grammar is the aspect of language that is most unique, having features that
do not occur in other mental processes and that are not apparently found in
animal languages; grammar is learnt in different ways from anything else that
people learn. Or at least that is what most linguists say; some psychologists
disagree, claiming that language is just an intersection of many other cogni-
tive processes that have their own uses.
In some ways, as grammar is highly systematic, its effects are usually fairly
obvious and frequent in people’s speech or writing, one reason why so much
SLA research has concentrated on grammar. This chapter first looks at differ-
ent types of grammar and then selects some areas of grammatical research into
L2 learning to represent the main approaches.

2.1. What Is Grammar?

Focusing Questions
• What is grammar?
• How do you think it is learnt?
• How would you teach it?

Keywords
prescriptive grammar: grammar that ‘prescribes’ what people should
or shouldn’t say: ‘you should not split the infinitive ‘to boldly go’.
traditional grammar: ‘school’ grammar largely concerned with label-
ling sentences with parts of speech: ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ etc.
structural grammar: grammar concerned with how words go into
phrases, phrases into sentences.
grammatical (linguistic) competence: the knowledge of structures or
rules etc stored in a person’s mind.
Glosses on some grammatical terminology are given at the end of the
chapter and appear on the website.

To explain what the term ‘grammar’ means in the context of L2 learning, it is

easiest to start by eliminating what it does not mean.

Prescriptive Grammar
One familiar type of grammar is the rules found in schoolbooks, for exam-
ple, the warnings against final prepositions in sentences, ‘This can’t be put
up with’, or the diatribes in letters to the newspaper about split infinitives
26 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar
such as the Star Trek motto ‘To boldly go where no-one has gone before’.
This is called prescriptive grammar because it ‘prescribes’ what people ought
to do rather than ‘describes’ what they actually do; it is the Highway Code
through which the government tells us how to drive rather than observ-
ing what we actually do on the road. Modern grammarians have mostly
avoided prescriptive grammar because they see their job as describing what
the rules of language are, just as the physicist says what the laws of physics
are. The grammarian has no more right to decree how people should speak
than the physicist has to decree how electrons should move: their task is
to describe what happens. Language is bound up with human lives in so
many ways that it is easy to find reasons why some grammatical forms are
‘better’ than others, but these are based on criteria other than the gram-
mar itself, mostly to do with social status; for example you shouldn’t say
‘ain’t’ because that’s what uneducated people say. The linguist’s duty is to
decide what people actually say; after this has been carried out, others may
decide that it would be better to change what people say. Hence all the
other types of grammar discussed below try to describe the grammar that
real people know and use, even if sometimes this claim is given no more
than lip service.
Prescriptive grammar is all but irrelevant to the language teaching class-
room. Since the 1960s people have believed that you should teach the lan-
guage as it is, not as it ought to be, i.e. descriptively not prescriptively. Students
should learn to speak real language that people actually use, not an artificial
ideal form that nobody uses—we all use split infinitives from time to time
when the circumstances make it necessary and it is often awkward to avoid
them. Mostly, however, these prescriptive dos and don’ts about ‘between you
and me’ or ‘it is I’ are not important enough or frequent enough to spend
much time bothering about their implications for language teaching. If L2
learners need to pander to these shibboleths, a teacher can quickly provide a
list of the handful of forms that pedants object to. At best the learner should
be aware that some people take prescriptive grammar seriously and so it may
be better to avoid such chestnuts as split infinitives in formal academic work
as it may offend the people with strong prescriptive views about English but
little knowledge.
One area where prescriptive grammar does still thrive is spelling and
punctuation, where everyone believes there is a single ‘correct’ spelling for
every word: spell <receive> as <recieve> or <news> as <new’s> at your peril.
Another is word-processing; the program I use for writing this warns me against
using final prepositions and passives, common as they are in everyday English.
A third is journal editors, who have often been nasty about my sentences
without verbs—to me a normal variation in prose found on many pages of any
novel but anathema to a non-linguist editor, in my experience psychologists
being the most pedantic—my use of sentences without verbs made one editor
query whether I was a native speaker.
 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar 27
Traditional Grammar
A second popular meaning of ‘grammar’ concerns the parts of speech: the ‘fact’
that ‘a noun is a word that is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea’ is
absorbed by every school pupil in England. This definition comes straight from
Tapestry Writing 1 (Pike-Baky, 2000), a coursebook published in the year 2000,
but differs little from Joseph Priestley (1798) ‘A noun . . . is the name of any
thing’, or indeed from William Cobbett (1819) ‘Nouns are the names of persons
and things’. In England this eighteenth century form of grammar is still alive in
schools: if you ask British undergraduates whether they have been taught gram-
mar, they invariably deny it; if you ask them what a noun is, they nevertheless
all know that it’s the name of a person or thing: someone has taught it to them.
Analysing sentences in this approach means labelling the parts with their
names and giving rules that explain in words how they may be combined. This
is often called traditional grammar. In essence it goes back to the grammars of
Latin, receiving its English form in the grammars of the eighteenth century,
many of which in fact set out to be prescriptive. Grammarians today do not
reject this type of grammar outright so much as feel it is unscientific. After
reading the definition of a noun, we still do not know what it is in the way
that we know what a chemical element is: is ‘fire’ a noun? ‘opening’? ‘she’?
The answer is that we do not know without seeing the word in a sentence,
but the context is not mentioned in the definition. While the parts of speech
are indeed relevant to grammar, there are many other powerful grammatical
concepts that are equally important.
A useful modern source is, oddly enough, the online NASA Manual
(McGaskill, 1990) which provides sensible practical advice in largely tradi-
tional terms, such as: ‘The subject and verb should be the most important
elements of a sentence. Too many modifiers, particularly between the subject
and verb, can over-power these elements.’
Some language teaching uses a type of grammar resembling a sophisticated
form of traditional grammar. Grammar books for language teaching often pre-
sent grammar through a series of visual displays and examples. An example
is the stalwart Essential Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2012). A typical unit is
headed ‘flower/flowers’ (singular and plural). It has a display of singular and
plural forms (‘a flower > some flowers’), lists of idiosyncratic spellings of plurals
(‘babies, shelves’), words that are unexpectedly plural (‘scissors’), and plurals
not in ‘-s’ (‘mice’). It explains ‘The plural of a noun is usually -s’. In other
words, it assumes that students know what the term ‘plural’ means, presumably
because it will translate into all languages. But Japanese does not have plural
forms for nouns; Japanese students have said to me that they only acquired the
concept of singular and plural through learning English. Languages like Ton-
gan or indeed Old English have three forms: singular, dual (‘two people’) and
plural (‘more than two people’). The crucial question, for linguists at any rate,
is how the subject of the sentence agrees with the verb in terms of singular or
28 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar
plural, which is not mentioned in Murphy’s text, although two out of the four
exercises that follow depend upon it.
Even main coursebooks often rely on the students knowing the terms of
traditional grammar. The EFL course for beginners (A1) English Unlimited
(Doff, 2012) has an appendix ‘grammar reference’ that uses the technical
terms in English ‘subject pronouns’, ‘possessive adjectives’, ‘negative’, ‘object
pronouns’ and ‘statement’. Goodness knows where the students are supposed
to have picked up these technical terms in another language; modern lan-
guage teachers in UK schools lament that pupils are no longer equipped with
this framework of traditional grammatical terminology. Nor would explaining
grammar in the students’ first language necessarily be much help: in countries
like Japan grammar does not come out of the Latin-based European tradition
and uses quite different terms and concepts.

Structural Grammar
Language teaching has also made use of structural grammar based on the con-
cept of phrase structure, which shows how some words go together in the
sentence and some do not. In a sentence such as ‘The man fed the dog’, the
word ‘the’ seems somehow to go with ‘man’, but ‘fed’ does not seem to go with
‘the’. Suppose we group the words that seem to go together: ‘the’ clearly goes
with ‘man’, so we can recognise a structure ‘(the man)’; ‘the’ goes with ‘dog’
to get another ‘(the dog)’. Then these structures can be combined with the
remaining words: ‘fed’ belongs with ‘(the dog)’ to get a new structure ‘(fed the
dog)’, not with ‘the man’ in ‘the man fed’. Now the two structures ‘(the man)’
and ‘(fed the dog)’ go together to assemble the whole sentence. This phrase
structure is usually presented in tree diagrams that show how words build up
into phrases and phrases build up into sentences:

The man fed the dog

Figure 2.1 An example of a phrase structure tree.

Structural grammar thus describes how the elements of the sentence fit

together in an overall structure built up from larger and larger structures. The
important thing is not so much the meaning of the sentence as how it is con-
structed. Hence structural grammars define nouns and other parts of speech
in terms of how they behave in structures—a noun is a word that inflects for
plural ‘beer’, that can be modified by an adjective ‘good beer’ and that can be
the subject of a sentence ‘Good beer comes from the North’.
 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar 29
Teachers have been displaying structural grammar in substitution tables
since at least the 1920s. These represent the same information as the phrase
structure tree, but turned on its side, with some alternative vocabulary items
specified. A typical example can be seen in the starter coursebook speakout
(Eales and Oakes, 2012, p. 122):

Ordering
tea,
a mineral water please?
Can I have cake,
coffees,
two colas,
sandwiches

How much is that?

Figure 2.2 A typical grammar table (speakout, 2012).

These graphic displays of grammar are still common in present-day coursebooks

and grammar books. The implication is that sentences are constructed by making
choices from left to right (technically the finite-state Markov process grammar
slammed by Chomsky in 1957), and indeed they were often used as a way of get-
ting students to make up sentences in this fashion, as Chapter 11 illustrates.
Structure drills and pattern practice draw on similar ideas of structure, as in
the following exercise from my own Realistic English (Abbs, Cook and Under-
wood, 1968):

You can go and see him.

Well, if I go . . .
He can come and ask you.
Well, if he comes . . .
They can write and tell her.
…

The students replace the verb each time within the structure ‘Well, if Pronoun
Verb’, dinning in the present tense for possible conditions. Chapter 11 pro-
vides further discussion of such drills.

Grammar as Knowledge in the Mind

SLA research relies mainly on another meaning of ‘grammar’—the knowl-
edge of language that the speaker possesses in the mind, known as linguistic or
30 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar
grammatical competence, originally taken from Chomsky’s work of the 1960s.
A more recent definition is:

By ‘grammatical competence’ I mean the cognitive state that encompasses

all those aspects of form and meaning and their relation, including under-
lying structures that enter into that relation, which are properly assigned
to the specific subsystem of the human mind that relates representations
of form and meaning.
(Chomsky, 1980, p. 59)

All speakers know the grammar of their language in this Lang5 sense of ‘lan-
guage’ as a mental state without having to study it. A speaker of English knows
there is something wrong with ‘Is John is the man who French?’ without
looking it up in any book—indeed few grammar books would be much help.
A native speaker knows the system of the language. He or she may not be able
to verbalise this knowledge clearly; it is ‘implicit’ knowledge below the level
of consciousness.
Nevertheless, no-one could produce a single sentence of English without
having the mental grammar of English present in their minds. A woman who
spontaneously says ‘The keeper fed the lion’ shows that she knows the word
order typical of English in which the subject ‘The keeper’ comes before the
verb ‘fed’. She knows the ways of making irregular past tenses in English—‘fed’
rather than the regular ‘-ed’ (‘feeded’); she knows that ‘lion’ needs an article
‘the’ or ‘a’; and she knows that ‘the’ is used to talk about a lion that the listener
already knows about. This is a very different from being able to talk about the
sentence she has produced, only possible for people who have been taught
explicit ‘grammar’.
A parallel can be found in a teaching exercise that baffles students—
devising instructions for everyday actions. Try asking the students ‘Tell me
how to put my coat on.’ Everyone knows how to put a coat on in one sense
but is unable to describe their actions. Or indeed try telling someone over
the phone how to operate their DVD player. There is one type of knowledge
in our minds which we can talk about consciously, another which is far from
conscious. We can all put on our coats or produce a sentence in our first lan-
guage; few of us can describe how we do it. This view of grammar as knowledge
treats it as something stored unconsciously in the mind—the native speaker’s
competence. The rationale for all the paraphernalia of grammatical analysis
such as sentence trees, structures and rules is ultimately that they describe the
language knowledge in our minds.
As well as grammar, native speakers also possess knowledge of how language
is used. This is often called communicative competence by those who see the
public functions of language as crucial (Hymes, 1972) rather than the private
ways we use language inside our minds. Sheer knowledge of language has little
point if speakers cannot use it appropriately for all the activities in which they
want to take part—complaining, arguing, persuading, declaring war, writing
 Learning and Teaching Types of Grammar 31
love letters, buying season tickets, and so on. Many linguists see language as
having private functions as well as public—language for dreaming or plan-
ning a day out. Hence the more general term pragmatic competence reflects all
the possible uses of language rather than restricting them to communication
(Chomsky, 1986): praying, mental arithmetic, keeping a diary, making a shop-
ping list, and many others. In other words, while no-one denies that there is
more to language than grammar, many linguists see it as the invisible central
spine that holds everything else together.
Box 2.2 shows the typical grammatical elements in beginners’ English
coursebooks. This gives some idea of the types of structure that are taught to
beginners in most of the classrooms around the world. The grammar is the
typical medley of traditional and structural items. A clear presentation of this
can be found in Harmer (2007). Many of these items are the basis for language
teaching and for SLA research.

Box 2.2 English Grammar for Beginners

Here are the elements of English grammar common to lessons 1–5 of

three beginners’ books for adults, with examples.

1 present of to be: It’s in Japan. I’m Mark. He’s Jack Kennedy’s nephew.
2 articles a/an: I’m a student. She is an old woman. It’s an exciting
place.
3 subject pronouns: She’s Italian. I’ve got two brothers and a sister.
Do you have black or white coffee?
4 in/from with places: You ask a woman in the street, the time.
I’m from India. She lives in London.
5 noun plurals: boys parents sandwiches

Box 2.3 Types of Grammar

Grammar can be:
1 a way of telling people what they ought to say, rather than reporting
what they do say (prescriptive grammar)
2 a system for describing sentence structure used in English schools
for centuries based on grammars of classical languages such as Latin
(traditional grammar)
3 a system for describing sentences based on the idea of smaller struc-
tures built up into larger structures (structural grammar)
4 the knowledge of the structural regularities of language in the minds
of speakers (linguistic/grammatical competence)
5 EFL grammar combining elements of (2) and (3).