Teaching Grammars

Lecture six
 Teaching Grammars
• Descriptive grammar describes internalized language rules of native speakers, while
teaching grammar helps learners acquire another language or dialect, often focusing
on standard varieties for social and economic benefits.
• Teaching grammars are used in schools and foreign language classes, providing
vocabulary, pronunciation, and explicit rules, especially when different from the
learners' native language.
• Adults often struggle to learn a second language without formal instruction, despite
living in a country where the language is spoken, making teaching grammars
essential for second language acquisition.
• Teaching grammars facilitate learning by comparing the target language's grammar
with the learner's native language, using glosses to provide word meanings in the
learner's first language.
• The effectiveness of teaching grammars relies on learners' understanding of the
glosses, enabling them to grasp the meanings of words in the target language.
• Sounds of the target language that do not occur in the native language are often
described by reference to known sounds. Thus the student might be aided in
producing the French sound u in the word tu by instructions such as “Round your
lips while producing the vowel sound in tea.”
• Teaching grammars help learners form grammatical sentences in a new language by
relating rules to their native language's structure, such as word order and articles.
• These grammars assume learners' familiarity with their native grammar, using
comparisons to highlight differences, like Zulu's absence of indefinite and definite
articles.
• Although teaching grammars may seem prescriptive, their primary purpose is to
support language acquisition rather than changing rules or usage of a language the
learner already knows.
 Language Universals
• There are rules of particular languages, such as English, Swahili, and Zulu,
that form part of the individual grammars of these languages, and then
there are rules that hold in all languages. Those rules representing the
universal properties that all languages share constitute a universal grammar.
• Johann Heinrich Alsted's "general grammar": In the 17th century, Alsted
introduced the term "general grammar" to differentiate it from special
grammar. He believed general grammar should identify features common to
all languages and encouraged linguists to investigate this idea.
• Robert Kilwardby's universal grammar: Three centuries before Alsted,
Kilwardby argued for the importance of understanding the nature of
language in general. He believed that individual language characteristics were
irrelevant to the study of grammar, likening the idea to geometry's focus on
measurements rather than physical attributes.
• Historical development of universal grammar: The passage traces the early
history of universal grammar, highlighting Alsted's and Kilwardby's
contrasting views on its relationship with individual language properties.
• Universal Grammar (UG): As part of the human language faculty, UG serves as a blueprint
for all languages, outlining grammar components, rule construction, and interactions.
• Linguistic theory's goal: The primary aim is to uncover the nature of UG and reveal the
universal laws of human language, much like physicists seek to understand the physical
universe.
• Comparative language study: Comparing different languages is crucial for advancing the
understanding of UG and language universals.
• Scientific theories' evolution: As new data and discoveries emerge, linguistic theories,
including UG, grow and change, much like Einstein's theories revolutionized physics.
 The Development of Grammar
• Linguistic theory aims to describe an adult speaker's language knowledge and
explain how it is acquired, with children demonstrating remarkable language
learning abilities despite minimal explicit instruction.
• Regardless of external factors, children universally pass through similar linguistic
development stages, acquiring any language they're exposed to with ease.
• Children's language progression includes a babbling stage, formation of simple
sentences, and gradual development of adult-like competence around age five.
• Children's rapid language mastery without explicit guidance, despite personal
circumstances, supports the idea of an innate component to language development.
• Chomsky proposed that humans possess an innate Universal Grammar, enabling
children to quickly acquire language by focusing on rules specific to their language
while relying on universal properties.
• Linguistic theory aims to uncover the universal principles that characterize all
human languages and the innate component of language that facilitates acquisition.
Sign Languages:
Evidence for the
Innateness of
Language
• The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to support the
notion that humans are born with the ability to acquire language, and that all languages are
governed by the same universal properties.
• Because deaf children are unable to hear speech, they do not acquire spoken languages as
hearing children do. However, deaf children who are exposed to sign languages acquire
them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages. Sign languages do not use sounds to
express meanings. Instead, they are visual-gestural systems that use hand, body, and facial
gestures as the forms used to represent words and grammatical rules. Sign languages are
fully developed languages, and signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of new
sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages do.
• The more we learn about the human linguistic knowledge, the clearer it becomes that
language acquisition and use are not dependent on the ability to produce and hear sounds,
but on a far more abstract cognitive capacity.
 American Sign Language
• The major language of the deaf community in the United States is American
Sign Language (ASL). ASL is an outgrowth of the sign language used in
France and brought to the United States in 1817 by the great educator
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.
• Like all languages, ASL has its own grammar with phonological,
morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules, and a mental lexicon of signs,
all of which is encoded through a system of gestures, and is otherwise
equivalent to spoken languages.
• Signers communicate ideas at a rate comparable to spoken communication. Moreover,
language arts are not lost to the deaf community. Poetry is composed in sign language, and
stage plays such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic have been translated into sign
language and acted by the National Theatre of the Deaf.
• In the United States there are several signing systems that educators have created in an
attempt to represent spoken and/or written English.
• Unlike ASL, these languages are artificial, consisting essentially in the replacement of each
spoken English word (and grammatical elements such as the -s ending for plurals and the -
ed ending for past tense) by a sign. So the syntax and semantics of these manual codes for
English are approximately the same as those of spoken English.