Built-in grammar

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HOW I SOLVE THE MOST CONTENTIOUS GRAMMAR ISSUES IN ENGLISH

Natalia Vladimirovna Kazanskaya

Russia, Moscow, Head teacher of English at English&I Studio

Abstract. The present essay is devoted to the problem of distinguishing some particular grammatical alarm bells, which are actually contentious issues for English as a foreign language (EFL) or English as a second language (ESL) students. On the one hand the role of grammar regulations is extremely important and incorrect use of them can make the message to be misunderstood or misinterpreted. On the other hand it’s very difficult to remember all grammar rules and instructions because English grammar is complex and can be complicated for EFL/ESL students. Therefore the teacher should turn this “necessary evil” into the good by presenting grammatical concepts more logically. The goal of the paper is to illustrate approaches that help the teacher make the process of learning English grammar easier and more effective for foreign learners. The main findings and implications are reported to demonstrate the EFL students’ progress.

Key words: contentious issues, visualization, English as a foreign language (EFL), English as a second language (ESL), parent goal, child goals, imprint, built-in grammar.

Each teacher of EFL faces the difficulties students of all levels ranged from pre-primary (for very young learners) to advanced (for adults) have while doing grammar exercises. And the teachers should be hyper-aware of the methods they choose to explain grammar material to avoid making their students bored, confused, frustrated or discouraged.

We are going to deal with some vivid examples of students’ being able to feel the correct grammar structure in English. Here is represented the attempt to prove the point of view that visualization and involving students into active participation while studying grammar are the most powerful ways to motivate people to make progress in English.

Let’s start with very young learners aged of 5 or older. It goes without saying that it’s impossible to teach pre-scholars anything out of play due to their physiological and psychological characteristics. We never give them grammar rules but it doesn’t mean that teachers must entirely exclude grammar from the teaching process. We can play and polish grammar skills simultaneously by following certain models in the game.

Any “Guess who/what” game is great to provide the idea of building general questions and giving short answers without a word of explanation grammar rule. Children imbibe the grammar norm of correct usage by repeating the same pattern many times. One of the obvious advantages is the fact that little students don’t know they are studying, it’s just a game for them.

Personally, I use “My first guess who” game to show the difference between two variants of questions and answers with “have”. The rules of the game are very simple. First you divide the disguise pieces (blond and brown hair, beards, and moustaches; big noses and glasses). The teacher elicits the question “Can I have a..?” from the children every time they ask for a piece of disguise.

Next you choose the image as a disguise, then you ask each other yes/no questions and answer them to guess your opponent’s disguise.

We start the game with the structure “have got”. There are two teams and the children ask such questions as “Have you got a big nose/blond hair/grey glasses/etc.?” and the opponents reply “Yes, we have. / No, we haven’t.” After a while we change the question into “Has your man got a big nose/blond hair/grey glasses/etc.?” and answer with “Yes/No, he hasn’t.” After that we work with the patterns “Do you have..?” – “Yes, we do. / No, we don’t.” Last we deal with “Does your man have..?” – “Yes, he does. / No, he doesn’t”. Finally the little ones realize that the question which starts with “have/has”, demands the answer with the same auxiliary verb “have/has”, whereas the question starting with “do/does” has the response with “do/does”. This game helps the children find out the difference between the questions which contain “have”: Can…have a..? vs Do/Does…have a..? vs Have/Has…got a..?

Sometimes young EFL students may begin to mix the forms of the verb “to be” with “have/has”, “do/does” and even “can”. It happens because they know a lot of different verb forms however they can’t seize which variant is appropriate in one or another speech situation. Again “Guess who/what” game can help. For instance, a very popular game “Guess what I am” gives the opportunity to sort it out. You have a picture taped to your forehead or you put a mask on so that you can’t see what the picture shows. And you have to guess what you are by asking yes/no questions: Am I an animal/person? Can I swim? Have I got wings? Do I help people? etc. This game helps to develop the feeling for choosing the exact verb and the right word order.

There is a sample list of general questions you can ask playing this game. They all start with Am / Can / Have or Do:

Am / Is / Are

• Am I a human being?

• Am I a sea animal?

• Am I a farm animal? Yes, you are.

• Am I a wild animal? No, you aren’t

• Am I big?

• Am I medium size?

• Am I brown / orange /pink/green/ black / ...?

Have

• Have I got a uniform?

• Have I got fur?

• Have I got feathers?

• Have I got fins? Yes, you have.

• Have I got hooves? No, you haven’t.

• Have I got tentacles?

• Have I got horns?

• Have I got a shell?

Can

• Can I walk?

• Can I climb trees?

• Can I fly? Yes, you can.

• Can I talk? No, you can’t.

• Can I eat other animals?

• Can I live in water?

• Can I live in a house (as a pet)?

Do

• Do I play sports?

• Do I help people?

• Do I live in the jungle? Yes, you do.

• Do I live in the grassland? No, you don’t.

• Do I like singing?

• Do I like dancing?

• Do I like performing in public?

Young learners aged of 8 or older and adult students at levels A1 and A2 mix auxiliaries as well. So they need to have the auxiliary verbs visualized. I’m strongly sure that it’s more effective to use attractive design (schemes, diagrams or tables instead of texts) during the presentation of learning grammar materials. Thus all Simple tenses can be represented in one chart by dividing them into affirmatives, negatives and interrogatives on the one side and taking place before or after now on the other side (Chart 1). Each tense has its own helper (auxiliary) installed into a smile, because it’s always delighted to help. We start filling the chart with its central box and attract the students’ attention to the fact that the 3-rd form singular has a specialty – it ends in –s, while the form of the verb doesn’t differ (it’s the 1-st form in the list of irregular verbs). Although Present Simple has an auxiliary “do” or “does” in the 3-rd form singular, we can see that as usual there isn’t a helper in affirmative. Similarly, the auxiliary of Past Simple “did” is omitted in positive sentences. The Past Simple box we should actually pay attention to as it’s the only one with the 2-nd form of the verb represented. Future Simple always gets a helper “will”.

While working with the chart the main goal is to imprint all the components of Simple tenses into the students’ memory. Firstly, we build sentences putting the verb into the right form and find out which box of the chart we need. At this stage the students can look at the chart. Sometimes we translate sentences from mother tongue into English and place them in the relevant column of the chart.

Secondly, we do the same work with the imaginary chart. The students actually can’t see the chart, but they can imagine that it’s hanging in the air just ahead of them. Eventually the concept of Simple Tenses starts functioning automatically both in written and spoken English.

BEFORE AFTER

Chart 1.

The built-in grammar framework goal can be referred to as a parent goal and separate Tense block goals as child goals. The last ones are very important when we distinguish contentious issues of grammar tense choice. For example, EFL students often confuse The Present Simple with The Present Continuous; The Present Continuous for future plans with The Future Simple; The Past Simple with The Present Perfect; etc. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to review the ways of correcting such grammar mistakes. Besides, there is a huge amount of grammar exercises, which are all linguistic analogs of Math drills. And there are two Grammars by Raymond Murphy to solve these problems.

I use Essential Grammar in Use at A1 and A2 levels whereas at levels B1 and B2 I appeal to English Grammar in Use. I adore R. Murphy and possess all his four editions. I met Raymond in Moscow in 2016 at the autograph-session and the author autographed my book, I'll say thanks.

Getting back to the point, it was mentioned that one of the blocks in the chart differs from the rest. And this is not the only problem. The other headache is to learn irregular verbs by rote. I offer to swot all the three forms of irregular verbs even though you haven’t studied past participle yet. It’ll enable to avoid doing double work. All the irregular groups can be divided into five groups for learning them easier:

1. All three forms are the same

2. First (Infinitive) and second (Simple Past) forms are the same

3. First (Infinitive) and third (Past Participle) forms are the same

4. Second (Simple Past) and third (Past Participle) forms are the same

5. All three forms are different

We can make two long stripes from paper A4, fold left and right sides and write the first verb form in the central part, the second and the third verb forms in the left and the right parts respectively for visualization: each group needs its own colour. (One stripe goes with one verb in three forms.)

Not only does the choice of verb forms cause difficulties, but the use of articles sometimes seems to be complicated and not logical at all. I don’t mean the typical mistakes concerning the students’ pick for “an” before words that start with the sound [j] instead of “a”, or vice versa, “a” instead of “an” before the words with the initial silent “h”. For example, one can put the article “an” before the word “university” because the initial letter is associated with a vowel or one sees “h” at the beginning of the word “hour”, which is always a consonant, and chooses the article “a”. All we need here is to call attention of students to the fact that the alternative depends on the first sounds rather than the first letters. Therefore the correct variants are: a university, an hour. It’s very simple to follow this scheme.

The problem arises of using the definite article with the places. Why is the article required before one places and omitted before others? E. g.: He was at the doctor. / He was in hospital. And more than that, in the last sentence “the” will appear if we are focusing on the building. Thus, “He was in hospital” means that he was kept there as a patient whereas “He was in the hospital” means that he visited somebody who’s ill. The teacher can explain all the shades of meanings, but the attempts to remember all these aspects can mess with the students’ minds.

Only one rule, all my students know, allows them to avoid learning any other rules. It’s quite logical: if the destination is the place we are in/at or go to only due to our real wish, “the” is needed. In this case we can choose the day of visiting the place or we can change our plans and refuse to go there. However, if we have to go anywhere, even though we don’t want to, the article is omitted. One never decides whether to go to school this season or not. If your absence at work is unexcused, you’ll be fired. The criminal can’t tell the magistrate that he’d rather stay at home than go to prison. And a long time ago rural dwellers went to church every Saturday otherwise their neighbours could take them for witches with all that that implies. The nouns given below are most commonly used in the pattern (Chart 2).

Chart 2

The Mercedes-rule will facilitate understanding of functions of the quantifiers many, much, a lot of when they are used with nouns as determiners. (Chart 3). The main idea of given Mercedes logo scheme is to introduce its components in use. We usually use much and many with questions (?) and negatives (−):

Was there much snow at New Year?

You can’t see much through these sunglasses.

How many pills should I take to sleep well?

There really aren’t many female pilots.

We use much with uncountable nouns and many with countable nouns.

We can see a lot of both before countable and uncountable nouns in affirmatives (+), negatives (-), and interrogatives (?). However in positive sentences (+) we almost always use a lot of whilst in negative sentences or questions many and much are preferable.

countableuncountable

Chart 3

The parent goal of this simple scheme gives students the opportunity to remember basic rules of use many, much, a lot of in the quickest way. The child goals concern each component separately and are not considered here.

Thus we can conclude with a very good reason that the use of visual aids can powerfully help the effectiveness of teaching English grammar. They vary in kind, but they bring similar benefits to education. The visualization adds supplementary evidence that is displayed to the auditory and can be considered as a tool of imprinting. The subject is exhausted.

REFERENCES

1. Barinova K., “Game as an Efficient Strategy in Foreign Language Teaching at the Primary Level”, Moscow, “Innovations and Experiments in Education”, 3’2015.

2. Milenski Iv. Development and supervision of games in mentally retarded children. Special education, 2004 № 1. (p. 21-27) 3. Murphy Raymond. Essential Grammar in Use with Answers. Third edition Cambridge University Press, 2007. 4. Ronald Carter, Michael McCarthy, Geraldine Mark, and Anne O’Keeffe English Grammar Today An A–Z of Spoken and Written Grammar, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

5. Quirk R., Greenbaum S., Leech J., Svartvik I. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London: Longman, 1972.