Learning and

Teaching Different
Types of Grammar
Grammar

Cook, V. (2016). Second Language Learning

and Language Teaching, 5th Edition.
• What is grammar?
• How do you think it is learnt?
• How would you teach it?
Different types of grammar
Prescriptive Grammar
Descriptive Grammar
Traditional Grammar
Structural grammar
Different types of grammar.

• Prescriptive Grammar: grammar that ‘prescribes’ what people should

or shouldn’t say.
• Traditional grammar: ‘school’ grammar largely concerned with
labelling sentences with parts of speech: ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ etc.
• Structural grammar: grammar concerned with how words go into
phrases, phrases into sentences.
• Grammatical (linguistic) competence: the knowledge of structures or
rules stored in a person’s mind.
Grammar as knowledge in the mind.
By ‘grammatical competence’ I mean the cognitive state that
encompasses all those aspects of form and meaning and their relation,
including underlying structures that enter into that relation, which are
properly assigned to the specific subsystem of the human mind that
relates representations of form and meaning.
(Chomsky, 1980, p. 59)

‘Alexis gusta del futbol.’

Grammar as knowledge in the mind
Example:
We know how to do something but can’t explain the action.

Communicative competence: knowledge of how language is used.

Sequences of Acquistion
 How L2 learners go from ‘girl go’ to its full form?
1. Morpheme Plural ‘-s’. ‘Girls go’.
Easiest

2. Progressive ‘-ing’. ‘Girls going’.

3. Copula forms of ‘be’. ‘Girls are here’.
4. Auxiliary form of ‘be’ with ‘-ing’ ‘Girls are going’.
5. Definite and indefinite articles ‘the’ and ‘a’. ‘The girls go’ or ‘A girl go’.
Most difficult

6. Irregular past tense as ‘came’ and ‘went’, ‘The girls went’.

7. Third person ‘-s’. ‘The girl goes’.
8. Possessive ’s’. with nouns to show possession ‘The girl’s book’.
Answer key
Interlanguage
• Learners with different L1 seem to create the same kind of grammar
for English and react in the same way to the shared experience of
learning English.
• L2 learners the same interlanguage grammar.

A Noun Phrase followed by a Verb, optionally followed by another Noun

Phrase ‘girl take bread’
A Noun Phrase followed by a copula and another NP or an adjective ‘it’s
bread’
A Verb followed by a Noun Phrase ‘pinching its’.
Early Acquisition of L2 Grammar

• Content and structure words differ in many ways including the ways
they are used in sentences and how they are pronounced.
• Grammatical morphemes (structure words and grammatical
inflections) are learnt in a particular sequence in L2 acquisition.
• L2 learners acquire the same basic grammar virtually regardless of the
first and second languages involved.
The processability Model
• Do you find problems in following certain structures in your L2,
or indeed your L1?

• Why do you think you find some structures more difficult to

follow than others?
The processability Model
• Some sentences are formed by moving elements from one position to
another.
• English questions: Move the auxiliary or the question-word to the
beginning of the sentence

• The learner starts with sentences without movement and learns how
to move the various parts of the sentence around to get the final
form.
Multidimensional Model now called Proccesability Model

• Learners acquire a second language in a sequence of six grammatical

stages.

• They relate to the learners’ growing ability to process language in

their minds.
Teachability hypothesis
‘an L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only if the learner’s
interlanguage is close to the point when this structure is acquired
in the natural setting’ (Pienemann, 1984, p. 201).

• So teachers should teach according to the stage that their

students are at.
Teachability hypothesis
Do not teach the third person ‘-s’ ending of present tense verbs
as it inevitably comes late.

In the early stages concentrate on the main word order of subject

verb object (SVO), ‘Cats like milk’.

Do not expect learners to learn the word order of questions,

‘What do cats like?’, until much later.
Implications for teachers
• Learners’ interlanguages contain rules that are different from the
native speaker’s competence.
• Students may temporarily produce sentences that deviate from native
correctness, say stage 2 ‘No me live here’.
• Many teaching techniques assume that student should produce
correct sentences from the very first lesson.
• Students are not supposed to be producing sentences like ‘No me live
here’ in the classroom.
Implications for teachers
• Tension between the pressure on students to produce well-formed
sentences and the natural stages that students go through.
• Should learners be allowed to produce these ‘mistakes’ in the
classroom, since they are inevitable? Or should the teacher try to
prevent them?
• The answers to these questions also affect when and how the
teacher will correct the student’s ‘mistakes’.
If you came from Mars,
what would you say all human
languages had in common?
What human languages have in common

Universal Grammar (UG)

Principles Parameters
• What do you think is easy grammar for a beginner?
• What do you think is the best order for teaching gramar?

a) Ignore the parts of gramar that have a particular sequence in L2

learning.
b) Follow the L2 learning sequence as close as posible.
c) Teach the last things in a learning sequence first.
d) Ignore gramar altogether.
• “The fuller implications of the L2 order of learning or difficulty
depends on the rest of teaching. Teaching must balance
grammar against language functions, vocabulary, classroom
interaction, and much else that goes on in the classroom to find
the appropriate teaching for those students in that situation.”
The Role of Explicit Grammar in Language Teaching

• Essential Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2012)

• Assumption: Conscious understanding of a rule and the ability to use
it.
• Grammatical explanation is a way of teaching facts about the
language.
• Use the language need to transform language knowledge into the
ability to use it.
• ‘teach the language not about the language’
The Role of Explicit Grammar in Language Teaching
• Language Awareness
• Example: Lead students to discover grammatical patterns themselves.

• Consciousness-raising: Activities are provided to make learners aware

of certain features in the input, without necessarily requiring them to
produce them.