Reading 02/09

It's interesting how this week's MCM and HDB chapters go along the content of the English Structure and Pedagogical Grammar class.

Grammar-wise I agree with Larsen-Freeman that grammar is more a skill, than a fixed body of knowledge. You could say that it's even not a skill, but an ability to express yourself and structure your speech\communication. She also gives a three-fold scheme of grammar, with form, meaning, and use. Our texts described form and meaning, but did not say a word about use, which tends to be the most important and tricky part.

So, form is pretty obvious, it is concerned with the word forms, derivatives, suffixes, formation of tenses etc. Nothing fun here. Meaning can be a little more intricate, especially for polysemantic words (the absolute majority of English words). And finally comes the use - where and how is it appropriate to use this unit? What register and social context create the best environment for it?

This is where the corpora come into play, both in terms of grammatical structures and lexical units. On a side note, we were talking a lot in classes about using corpora, but I have been asking fellow TAs and it turns out that nobody is using it. I feel that corpora is not appreciated enough :)

Anyway, according to me, as many of our students like to put it, the extent of grammar instruction should depend on the person's goal. The more their profession is connected to English, the more grammar instruction they should get, and the more they should be taught to play with rules. On page 434 Brown gives a sample grammar exercise on Present Simple vs. Continuous. The last sentence is "The woman is very lonely because her children never (visit/are visiting)". The expected answer is kind of obvious, but actually both variants are perfectly acceptable. They would just mean different things.

The woman is very lonely because her children never visit -is a mere statement of fact.
The woman is very lonely because her children are never visiting has emotional appraisal and a negative one, I have to say. That is what grammar is all about to me. Using what you have to say what you mean. It could become a bit unclear how to determine whether the students is applying the rules in an unorthodox way or making a mistake. To me the borderline is their understanding of what exactly they are saying.

And by the way, what's with the "so-called exceptions to rules" on page 425? They are no exceptions anymore? Mans and womans decided to cancel this obsolete stuff?

Vocabulary teaching is also very unstraight forward. In ENG583 we recently read an article by Lewis, where he advocated for teaching vocabulary in chunks, as either semantic fields of words or collocations\institutionalized phrases and it makes perfect sense to me.

MCM describes various methods for tackling unfamiliar, and probably the most popular one among both students and teachers is guessing the meaning from the context or associating one word to another. I remember reading a text about alternative energy sources, where it talked about solar energy as one of the most promising alternatives. As I was 12 or so years old at the moment, I had no idea of what "solar" means. So I guessed that it is a type of fuel and associated it with a Russian word that actually means diesel oil (solyarka, солярка). You can imagine how close my comprehension was. Since then I am a bit skeptical about the whole guessing thing, although i have been successful with it except for this one instance.