Grammar in the classroom 15 3. Some myths and misunderstandings 21 4. The Principle of General Use 29 5. The Importance of the Speaker 39 6.
Time, tense, aspect, mood 47 7. The First Form of the Verb 61 9. The Second Form of the Verb 69 10. The Third form of the verb with (have) 75 11.
Forms with (be) going to 81 12. The group of Modal Auxiliaries 99 14. The individual Modal Auxiliaries 111 15. The Passive; (be) + third form y 13V 16.
Basic verb forms —A Summary 137 17. Future Time —A Summary 139 18. Some areas of misunderstanding 147 19. Some additional problems 155 20.
Simple terminology for the English Verb 159 21. Some classroom implications 163 22. Immediate improvements 177 Some questions discussed in this book Do all uses of the present simple —those referring to Now (I swear it wasn’t me) and always (Wood Boats on water) —have something important in common? Yes Are I lived there for 30 years and I was living there for 30 years both possible, correct English? Yes Is there a future tense in English? No Is it possible to use will with reference to past time? Yes Is there a general, easy-to-understand difference between shall and will in modem English? Yes Is it possible to use the past simple with reference to the present? Yes Is the present perfect used for actions in the “recent” past? No Is the auxiliary verb (do) an irregularity in English? No Is would the conditional in English? No Does every passive sentence have a natural active equivalent? No Is the central structure and meaning of the English verb relatively simple and very regular? Fes All of these and many other similar questions are asked and answered in this book. So, too, are many questions about teaching the English verb.
Is grammar an important part of language teaching? Yes Do simplified grammar rules help? No Is grammar difficult? No Is grammar hard work or fun? Both! Should teachers explain more or less? Less 1. Introduction This is not a conventional grammar book. It is intended mostiy for teachers who are teaching English as a foreign language, and also for students who have been confused by teachers, textbooks or other grammar books. It is not a comprehensive grammar the second part of the book discusses the basic structure of English verbs.
It examines, chapter by chapter, the important basic “building bricks” of the English verb. Again, it does not cover all possible verb forms. It does, however, discuss the important underlying ideas of English verbs in detail. The first part of the book is quite different, and different from most other grammar books.
It is about attitudes to grammar —what grammar is, what it can and cannot explain, and how it can be of use in language teaching. For many readers not only will the format of the book be unusual, but also many of the ideas which are discussed. The reader is asked to approach the book with an open mind. Some of the ideas may seem new, strange, and unhelpful.
It is important that the reader understands a complete idea before rejecting it as wrong, useless for the classroom, or before raising questions about examples which seem superficially not to fit. The basic structure of the English verb is not particularly complicated. Nor is it full of exceptions. If approached in the right way, there is only a small number of ideas which need to be understood.
These are, however, ideas which many readers will not have met before. They are “difficult” only in the sense that they may be unfamiliar to the reader. What is “a grammar of English”? The term “a grammar” is used in several different ways. The differences are important.
To a linguist (in this book this word is used to mean ‘a student of language, a language scientist’ not ‘a person who speaks several languages’) it means a description of a language. The linguist who wishes to produce “a grammar of English”, would gather together an enormous number of examples of English, and then arrange these in some way to show how the language is used. Nowadays, linguists would gather examples of both spoken and written English. Some readers will be familiar with the recent (1985) publication A Comprehensive Grammar o f the English Language.
This is a descriptive grammar. It draws on an enormous range of examples, sorts and classifies them, and then describes them. In making such a grammar, linguists are never concerned to reject examples of the language as it is really used. They are not trying to tell us how the language should be used, but to describe how it is used.
Such a grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive. A grammar of this kind will be Introduction “good”, if the examples are chosen from a very wide range of sources, and if they are clearly and correctly sorted and described. This work is a long way from the language classroom. The descriptive grammarian would include examples such as It weren’t him what did it.
If the example exists, it is included, and described. An example such as that just given, would probably be described as non-standard, uneducated, but the simple distinction between right and wrong is not helpful for the descriptive grammarian. Any good descripti ve grammar will be very large. Often the descriptions will be complicated and technical.
They will not be of much use to the average student of English as a foreign language. They are, however, often the basis for the second kind of grammar — a pedagogic, or teaching, grammar. This is the kind of book with which foreign language students are very familiar. For most students ‘a grammar’ means a reference book which can be used when they are in doubt about English usage.
The book will tell them whether a particular form is possible or not. It will also frequently include explanations of why forms are, or are not, possible. There are many differences between the two kinds of grammar — a pedagogic grammar will usually be much smaller, and easier to use. Many possible English sentences will be excluded.
The book will, to some extent, artificially simplify the language. There are, however, two more important differences. Firstly, the purpose of the descriptions in the linguist’s grammar will, as far as possible, be accuracy. A description can be long, technical, and complicated.
Such grammars can be, and usually are, as difficult to use as a technical book on any other subject. The purpose of the descriptions, explanations and “rules” in a pedagogic grammar, is very different. Here, a compromise is necessary between accuracy and accessibility. There is no point in giving descriptions to students which are perfectly accurate, but which they cannot understand.
On the other hand, if accessibility is given too great importance, students will understand, but what they understand will not be true! Unfortunately, teachers sometimes forget the important distinction made above. They treat the descriptions, explanations, and “rules” of a pedagogic grammar as if they were general, and completely accurate, descriptions of the language. This sometimes means they think certain sentences are not possible, when in fact they are quite natural English. More seriously, it means that they create in the students’ minds a catalogue of different uses of a particular form, where each example of one use is an “exception” to the others.
A teachers’ grammar of the English verb This book is not a linguists’ grammar, nor is it a students’ grammar. It is like a linguists’ grammar in that the emphasis is initially on collecting and classifying a wide range of natural examples. Whether the classification is useful for a student is, initially, a very secondary consideration. It is very important for the reader to understand the first question this book attempts to answer is how English verb forms work.
No attention at all is paid at first to how the language should be taught to students. In the early discussion of examples the reader must not think My students will never understand this — that is not the first intention of the book. The first intention is to ensure that teachers understand how the main building blocks of the English verb work. Certain parts of the book (Chapter 2 and Chapter 21) consider questions of teaching methodology, and the classroom implications of the Introduction rest of the book.
One of the main sources of confusion, however, for most students, is the fact that teachers have been so keen to worry about how to explain to their students, that they have not always given enough attention to understanding, at a very deep level, the really fundamental problems of English. This book is intended to be a teachers’grammar of the English verb. It tries to do three things: to ensure teachers understand the basic structure of the English verb to change teachers’ attitudes to (English) grammar to change teacners’ attitudes to grammar teaching. Three kinds of “grammar” A glance at any pedagogic grammar will show that it contains information of different kinds.
Unfortunately, this is often not obvious to the student, or even the teacher. We may list three different kinds of information as follows: 1. Facts The simplest kind of information contained in the grammar is straightforward factual information. A typical example from Thomson and Martinet, A Practical English Grammar is the following: Twelve nouns ending in-f or -fe, drop the -f or -fe and add -ves.
These nouns are wife, life, knife, wolf, self, calf, shelf, leaf, loaf, thief, sheaf, half. There are three points to note — this is a matter of fa c t; it is non- generative; and it attempts to be comprehensive. By fact, we mean that the information given is generally accepted by all native speakers of English (some people may want to qualify that into almost all native speakers., or qualify it with, for example, speakers o f British English.) Anyone who wishes to avoid a red mark on an essay needs to write wives, not *wifes. (It is a convention throughout this book that if an expression is preceded by * it is not a well-formed English expression.) The information is non-generative in the sense that if you know wife/ wives, it does not help you in any way to know if other words will follow the same pattern or not: safe/safes, self/selves.
However important, or unimportant, a particular piece of information may be in a particular context, each bit needs to be learnt separately. From the point of view of the historical development of English, some factual information of this kind can be explained. From the point of view of the contemporary language student, however, this kind of information is to be learnt, but there is nothing to understand. Many grammar books dealing with points of this kind aim at being comprehensive.
In the example above the authors positively state Twelve nouns. It is immediately obvious that some of the words are considerably more important to the foreign language learner than others; most students will need -selves, but few will need wolves or sheaves. The writer of such a grammar faces a difficulty — why should some examples be included, and others excluded? Usually, therefore, most writers try to be comprehensive. The difficulty then is that students learn a small amount of useful information hidden in a pile of comparatively useless material.
Introduction One of the best examples of this problem, which most teachers will recognise, is the lists of irregular verbs which occur in grammar books or textbooks. Only about a hundred are frequent in modem English. Altogether there are rather less than two hundred such verbs. It is easy to believe that many students are sure that there are thousands! Teachers need to recognise that this factual information, frequently contained in a grammar book, is in one sense mis-placed there.