Grammar Dilemma: Teaching Grammar as a Resource for Making Meaning

Adopting a functional perspective that views grammar as a rich resource for making contextualized meanings in a culture- and language-specific way, the article reconsiders the role of explicit grammar instruction in developing communicative abilities of second language learners. It draws on two distinct but complementary research frameworks, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, and on their conceptualization of grammar as a semiotic tool that serves the functions it is called on to perform in a speech community and is shaped by a variety of historical, social, and biological factors. The article delineates pedagogical principles of functionally based grammar instruction and illustrates them by providing suggestions on how to teach two notoriously complex phenomena in German: clausal dative case and past tenses. It advocates presenting grammatical phenomena in the context of an entire text and creating a metalinguistic awareness that enables learners to make situationally appropriate linguistic choices consistent with those of native speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[1]  Hossein Nassaji,et al.  6. CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR , 2004, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

[2]  Heidi Byrnes,et al.  Emergent L2 German writing ability in a curricular context: A longitudinal study of grammatical metaphor , 2009 .

[3]  D. Schiffrin.  Tense variation in narrative , 1981 .

[4]  Chapter 3. ‘I Feel Clumsy Speaking Russian’: L2 Influence on L1 in Narratives of Russian L2 Users of English , 2003 .

[5]  Birgit Harley,et al.  Functional Grammar in French Immersion: A Classroom Experiment1 , 1989 .

[6]  Heidi Byrnes,et al.  Nonnative Teachers Teaching at the Advanced Level: Challenges and Opportunities. , 2002 .

[7]  M. Carroll,,et al.  THE RELEVANCE OF INFORMATION ORGANIZATION TO SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION STUDIES , 2000, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[8]  Teresa Cadierno.  Expressing Motion Events in a Second Language: a Cognitive Typological Perspective , 2004 .

[9]  B. Vanpatten.  Attending to Form and Content in the Input , 1990, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[10]  J. Lantolf.  Knowledge of Language in Foreign Language Teacher Education , 2009 .

[11]  Christiane von Stutterheim,et al.  Narrative and description: temporal reference in second language acquisition , 1991 .

[12]  B. Mohan,et al.  Assessing the Integration of Language and Content in a Mandarin as a Foreign Language Classroom , 2002 .

[13]  S. Csábi.  A Cognitive Linguistic View of Polysemy in English and its Implications for Teaching , 2004 .

[14]  Kazuhiro Teruya,et al.  Grammar as a Gateway into Discourse: A Systemic Functional Approach to Subject, Theme, and Logic. , 2009 .

[15]  Marianna Ryshina–Pankova.  Toward Mastering the Discourses of Reasoning: Use of Grammatical Metaphor at Advanced Levels of Foreign Language Acquisition. , 2010 .

[16]  Ronald W. Langacker,et al.  Assessing the cognitive linguistic enterprise , 1999 .

[17]  M. Carroll,.  Language and conceptualization: Changing place in English and German: language-specific preferences in the conceptualization of spatial relations , 1997 .

[18]  Mark L. Johnson.  The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning , 1987 .

[19]  Heidi Byrnes,et al.  Reconsidering Graduate Students’ Education as Teachers: “It Takes a Department!”. , 2001 .