Autor: prof. Bogdan Georgiana
Sursă imagine: https://eltnews.gr/teaching-tips/teaching-speaking/engaging-the-teenage-mind-interactive-strategies-for-language-learning/
Many students seem to learn better if they are asked to think about the language they are coming into contact with. For example, we could get students to repeat a sentence such as „If I hadn’t overslept, I wouldn’t have missed the bus” and they might well understand it. But they might forget how it was constructed unless we allowed them to think about the arrangement of sentence elements and verb tenses. Thinking about the sentence allows students to employ their considerable intellects. Of course, different students respond differently to such analysis ( and we will be less likely to use it with younger learners), but common sense tells us that if we look carefully at something, we see it better than if we just glance at it.
We can go further and say that if students have to make decisions about the words and grammar they are studying – that is if their encounter with the language has some ‘ cognitive depth’ – they are far more likely to understand and remember that language than if they meet the new language passively. Indeed, one school of thought which is widely accepted by language teachers is that the development of our conceptual understanding and cognitive skills ( in this case by thinking about and making decisions about language) is a main objective of all education, even more important than the acquisition of factual information ( Williams and Burden 1997: 24). Such conceptual understanding is arrived at not through ‘ blind learning’, but through a process of exploration which leads to genuine understanding ( Lewis 1986:165).
The practical implications of this view are quite clear: instead of explicitly teaching the present perfect tense, for example, we could expose students to examples of it and then allow them, under our guidance, to work out for themselves how it is used. Instead of telling students which words collocate with crime, we can get them to look at a dictionary or a computer concordance of the word and discover the collocations on their own. Instead of telling them about spoken grammar, we can get them to look at transcripts and come to their own conclusions about how it differs from written grammar.
All in all, grammar is essential to our linguistic understanding. Why? Individual words carry the meaning of the sentence, but it is grammar that puts the words in relation to each other and in their proper place. In the statement „That the dog the rabbit push,” where only the basic form of the words is used, we might guess that the dog pushed the rabbit. Only when we apply grammatical rules and form the sentence „The dog that the rabbit pushed” from the same words, it becomes clear, exactly the opposite is the case.
Works cited:
Harmer, Jeremy, 2007 The Practice of English Language Teaching. Pearson Education Limited
Williams, M and Burden, R 1997 Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press.
