Is there a Place for Teaching Grammar in a formal Manner?
Instructions:
Is there any place for teaching grammar in a formal manner? Give reasons for your answer and include a discussion of what you mean by “a formal manner”.
“Knowing a language is not just a matter of having ‘grammatical competence’……..We have seen that we also need to add communicative competence-that is the understanding of what language is appropriate within certain situations.”
Solution
Is there a Place for Teaching Grammar in a formal Manner?
Teachers in new languages could use either formal or informal methods of teaching. Formal manner of teaching grammar is the concentration on grammar structure in languages (Harmer, 2015). In this type of teaching, the students learn of the different grammatical structures as well as how to compose sensible sentences. The method of teaching is based on the assumption that grammatical requirements contribute greatly to the construction of correct sentences. Informal manner on the other hand focuses on the ability of the students to speak in the new language fluently. In this method therefore, the teacher informs the students of the impact of different factors in language use such as tonal variations. Formal language teaching method is an inappropriate manner of teaching new languages.
One of the reasons why there is no place for formal grammar teaching method is because the formal method leads to the student never learning how to communicate effectively through that language (Savitskaya, n.d). In the formal method, the students only understand the grammatical requirements of a language. They may therefore not understand how the placement of a word in a sentence may change the meaning of the whole sentence. They end up forming sentences based on what they think is the correct grammatical structure. Consequently, sometimes they say things that do not necessarily mean what they mean to say. It is thereby difficult for them to communicate effectively using the language.
Formal grammatical teaching further fails to consider the aspects of tonal variation (Savitskaya, n.d). Students that do not have speaking as part of the language lessons do not understand that one sentence could have different meanings depending on the tonal variation in different words and the emphasis put in those words while speaking them. Formal teaching just focuses on grammatical structure of the language, thus, students taught through the style fail to put emphasis or use the right tonal variations for their sentences to mean what they originally meant. Their audiences therefore get a different meaning from what the speaker meant. Hence, there are many cases of miscommunication and misunderstandings between the audience and the second language learner.
Formal manner of learning languages makes it difficult for the learners to understand native speakers (Savitskaya, n.d). This is especially true in a casual setup. The formal method directs the students to construct sentence for formal use alone thereby failing to equip them to engage in casual conversations. Native speakers often use phrases that disregard grammatical requirements. The language learners taught in a formal manner may therefore not understand what the native speaker is saying or completely misunderstand the speaker. The miscommunication may influence the individual to make wrong decisions based on the wrongly understood information. However, the informal manner on teaching would solve this issue by demonstrating to the learner how different setups would require a slight change in the sentence structures.
In
conclusion, the formal manner of teaching grammar should not be used in
language classes. It limits the learner from learning effective ways of
communicating using the language, makes it impossible for the learner to engage
in casual conversation as well as fails to demonstrate the use of tonal
variations and emphasis of words while speaking. The people that learn new
languages need to learn all aspects of the grammatical components in the
language for proper use and understanding.
References
Harmer, J. (2015). The practice of English Language Teaching. New York: Pearson.
Savitskaya, T. (n.d). Discussing the question of teaching formal grammar in ESL learning. Retrieved from http://www.kgau.ru/new/all/konferenc/konferenc/2014/g14.pdf