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    Teaching Grammar Form Meaning and Use

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    Kimberley Sicat Bautista
    This chapter discusses different perspectives on grammar and approaches to teaching it. It describes deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar rules and notes that both can be effective depending on context. The chapter advocates teaching grammar through a balanced focus on form, meaning, and use. It provides examples of how the same grammar feature, like phrasal verbs or the present progressive, can be described in terms of its form, the meanings it conveys, and how it is typically used.

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    Teaching Grammar Form Meaning and Use

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    Kimberley Sicat Bautista
    252 views6 pages
    This chapter discusses different perspectives on grammar and approaches to teaching it. It describes deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar rules and notes that both can be effective depending on context. The chapter advocates teaching grammar through a balanced focus on form, meaning, and use. It provides examples of how the same grammar feature, like phrasal verbs or the present progressive, can be described in terms of its form, the meanings it conveys, and how it is typically used.

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    Teaching Grammar Form Meaning and Use (1)

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    This chapter discusses different perspectives on grammar and approaches to teaching it. It describes deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar rules and notes that both can be effective depending on context. The chapter advocates teaching grammar through a balanced focus on form, meaning, and use. It provides examples of how the same grammar feature, like phrasal verbs or the present progressive, can be described in terms of its form, the meanings it conveys, and how it is typically used.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    252 views6 pages

    Teaching Grammar Form Meaning and Use

    Uploaded by

    Kimberley Sicat Bautista
    This chapter discusses different perspectives on grammar and approaches to teaching it. It describes deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar rules and notes that both can be effective depending on context. The chapter advocates teaching grammar through a balanced focus on form, meaning, and use. It provides examples of how the same grammar feature, like phrasal verbs or the present progressive, can be described in terms of its form, the meanings it conveys, and how it is typically used.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 6

    CHAPTER 2

    Grammar: Form,
    Meaning, and Use

    The concept of grammar and how to teach it includes a wide range of


    perspectives. Some teaching approaches focus on formal rules of grammar
    that precede language practice or performance. This deductive approach to
    the teaching of grammar provides a general rule and then gives students
    opportunities to practice the language using specific examples. Other
    approaches provide students with examples of language and ask them to
    state the grammar rules that apply. This inductive approach expects students
    to discover the grammar rule by reference to the examples. A good deal
    of research has been undertaken in the differences and effectiveness of
    inductive and deductive approaches to teaching grammar (Ellis, 2002) that
    shows the effectiveness of both approaches in different contexts and with
    different types of grammar rules. Of course, within the inductive/deductive
    dichotomy of teaching grammar, a variety of different techniques can be
    used, which suggests that adopting a single approach to grammar teaching
    does not account for many relevant factors such as the various reasons and
    purposes for learning English, the contexts in which it is learned, the age
    of students, the class size, the relative difficulty of the grammar feature in
    question, and the proficiency level of students. Thus, ensuring that student
    needs are being met requires a wide range of approaches and techniques in

    5
    grammar teaching. To meet these needs, a very basic question must first be
    answered: what is the main purpose of grammar teaching?
    The perspective adopted in this book is that grammar teaching in L2
    contexts seeks to help learners gain grammar ability so that they can use
    grammar accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. These three adjectives
    that define grammar ability—accurate, meaningful, and appropriate—may be
    quite different from other teachers’ views of grammar. Reflection, however,
    reveals that grammar knowledge does not just relate to accuracy. Relevant
    components of meaning (semantics) and use (pragmatics) are important
    parts of grammar knowledge. Knowing the distinctions between these
    components of grammar knowledge can help grammar teachers be more
    effective.

    Form, Meaning, and Use


    One useful way to think about grammar is through a form, meaning, and
    use (FMU) perspective made popular by The Grammar Book (Celce-Murcia
    & Larsen-Freeman, 2015), as well as Diane Larsen-Freeman’s book Teaching
    Language: From grammar to grammaring (2003). Each of these components
    are discussed in more detail ahead.
    Form refers to the structure of a phrase or clause. In a given context,
    certain forms are required in English to be considered accurate. Form
    describes either the required form of a word (She likes to travel is preferred
    to She like to travel ) or a required word order (I can’t tell you is preferred to
    I no can tell you). Form is often described by reference to rules that speakers
    follow (either consciously or unconsciously) and is likely what most people
    think of when they think of grammar.

    REFLECTIVE QUESTION
    ● Thinking about your own understanding of English grammar,
    would you characterize your grammar knowledge as mostly
    explicit, mostly implicit, or a combination of both explicit
    and implicit?

    Grammar ability involves not just explicitly learning or describing rules


    but also using language for real communicative purposes. Of course, rules

    6 Teaching Grammar
    provide helpful guidelines for understanding grammar and clearly have
    their place in the grammar classroom, but being able to state a grammar rule
    does not mean that one can actually use it. The distinction between stating
    a grammar rule and using grammar suggests that one type of knowledge
    (explicit knowledge) does not necessarily translate into another type of
    knowledge (implicit knowledge). The curriculum designer or teacher must
    ultimately decide to determine the extent to which the class addresses
    formal rule-learning, but all teachers and curriculum designers should be
    aware that grammar does not consist entirely of formal rule-learning.
    In addition to form, grammar contains a semantic (meaning) compo-
    nent. In fact, if people paid no attention to meaning, what would be the
    point of communication? If grammar teachers only focus on form, they
    quickly run into problems. For example, I saw a movie means something
    very different from I am seeing a movie. A learner may produce either
    structure accurately (the forms of both sentences are accurate), but the two
    sentences have very different intended meanings. Thus, learners need to
    know how to use the correct structure to reach an intended meaning.

    REFLECTIVE QUESTION
    ● What other examples of meaning distinctions in grammar might
    cause confusion?

    Moreover, certain types of grammar forms are preferable over others,


    depending on the context. For example, sentences with contractions (I’m
    happy to see you’re here) are much more common in spoken language or
    informal types of writing than in written academic contexts. Common
    distinctions such as conversation versus writing or formal versus informal
    illustrate systematic differences in how grammar is used in the two contexts.
    When teachers caution their students, “Don’t talk like you write” or “You
    wouldn’t say that in a formal presentation,” they are talking about use. The
    relationship between grammar and context is found in research on register
    variation (Biber, 1988, and Biber & Conrad, 2019). Research in this area
    is based on the idea that the form of language depends on the contexts in
    which it is used. Register analysis shows systematic differences between
    grammar form in contexts such as conversation, academic writing, news
    writing, and fiction. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English,

    Grammar: Form, Meaning, and Use 7


    or LGSWE (Biber et al., 1999), provides a comprehensive description of
    grammar from a use perspective. The next chapter looks at register variation
    in more detail.

    REFLECTIVE QUESTION
    ● What are some situations where you feel you use different
    grammar rules?

    One useful way to consider form, meaning, and use is by examining


    how these different perspectives can describe a single grammar feature.
    Table 2.1 provides a description of how reference to form, meaning, and use
    can describe two different features of grammar.

    Table 2.1. Form, Meaning, and Use of Phrasal Verbs


    and Present Progressive

    Grammar
    feature Form Meaning Use

    Phrasal A multiword verb ● Can often be ● Used most in


    verbs that substituted with spoken language;
    ● Consists of a a single verb frequent in fiction;
    lexical verb and (e.g., surrender) rare in academic
    a particle registers
    (e.g., give up) ● More common
    ● Has particle in less formal
    movement contexts
    (give up the idea;
    give the idea up)

    Present Auxiliary verb be + ● Expresses an ● More frequent in


    progressive gerund: ongoing or conversation than
    ● She is reading on continuous action writing
    her own these in present time ● Used primarily
    days. with dynamic
    Different from verbs (go, run,
    semi-modal: walk) than stative
    verbs (know, love)
    ● Larry is going
    or copular verbs
    to see if he can
    (seem, appear)
    come.

    8 Teaching Grammar
    As seen in Table 2.1, any given grammar feature can be described from
    three perspectives. Phrasal verbs, for example, consist of a lexical verb and
    a particle. They also allow for movement of objects (particularly when the
    object is a pronoun) to reside between the verb and its particle. From a
    meaning perspective, phrasal verbs often have single word synonyms. From
    a use perspective, they are more common in spoken, informal contexts than
    in written formal contexts, but this is not to say that formal academic writ-
    ing does not contain phrasal verbs. The present progressive form requires
    a gerund to follow the auxiliary verb be. Progressive aspect is used to show
    that an action is ongoing. Progressive verbs are also more frequent in
    conversation as opposed to writing and tend to occur with specific semantic
    classes of verbs. Describing grammar features as in Table 2.1 has a number
    of advantages over focusing solely on form, meaning, or use separately.
    First, some teachers may have explicit knowledge of certain pieces of a
    grammar feature but may not have explicit knowledge of all three aspects.
    For example, a teacher may be very comfortable explaining how to form the
    present progressive but may not be able to explain how to use it in authentic
    discourse. Teachers with explicit knowledge of all three aspects of a given
    grammar feature are better equipped to explain a given feature to students
    and to devise activities that raise students’ awareness of grammar.
    Second, viewing grammar from an FMU perspective shows that know-
    ing grammar does not just mean knowing rules (and exceptions to rules); it
    involves knowing how to use form to gain an intended meaning in a given
    context. Furthermore, FMU can guide teachers in their selection of gram-
    mar features to teach. Consider these two examples:

    1. Speaker A: What does she like to do? Speaker B: She like to travel.
    2. Speaker A: What did you do last night? Speaker B: I am seeing
    a movie.

    In both examples 1 and 2, speaker B makes a grammar mistake. In 1B,


    the subject of the sentence (she) should agree with the verb (third-person
    singular subjects require verbs in different forms than other types of sub-
    jects). By contrast, in 2B uses the incorrect tense and aspect and expresses an
    incorrect meaning. So, what do these examples illustrate? Grammar errors
    that result in meaning confusion (example 2) are likely more worthy of a
    teacher’s focus than those that are purely formal (example 1). Additionally,
    understanding the nature of the errors that students may make may help

    Grammar: Form, Meaning, and Use 9


    teachers: a form-based error in example 1 does not affect meaning and may
    be more frequent and persistent exactly for that reason; a meaning-based
    error such as the one in example 2 perhaps merits closer attention because
    it interferes with meaning. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that
    teachers should pay no attention to form-type errors, but it does illustrate
    that the FMU distinction is a useful guide to help teachers decide the focus
    of their lessons as well as how to describe and explain grammar to students.
    Finally, providing such descriptions can serve as an impetus for students
    to be active participants in their own learning and understanding of gram-
    mar. Raising awareness not only of form and meaning aspects of grammar
    but also of grammar use allows students to be active consumers of different
    types of grammar knowledge and may even help them to notice how
    grammar is used in different contexts and promote their active participation
    in their own grammar learning. As discussed in Larsen-Freeman (2003),
    engaging students in the three goals of grammar teaching—accuracy, mean-
    ingfulness, and appropriacy—can be achieved by raising their awareness
    of the components of grammar knowledge—form, meaning, and use—and
    foster dynamic involvement for students to engage in grammar learning in
    some of the same ways that students can be engaged in learning reading,
    writing, speaking, and listening. In fact, Larsen-Freeman encourages this
    type of participation in grammar learning by coining the term “grammar-
    ing” as a “fifth skill [that] is intimately interconnected with the other skills”
    (Larsen-Freeman, 2003, p. 143).

    REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS
    ● In what ways can the goals of accuracy, meaningfulness, and
    appropriateness and the components of form, meaning, and use
    relate to how the learning of grammar can be seen as a skill? Is
    “grammaring” a fifth skill?

    10 Teaching Grammar

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