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13LEARNER SELF-DISCOVERY AND KNOWLEDGE Fayazova D.S.
Fayazova Dilfuza Sadullayevna - teacher of English language, DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES, BUKHARA ENGINEERING-TECHNOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, BUKHARA CITY, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: this article deals with how to learn grammar through patterns, structures, and repetition,
consciousness-raising activities and self-discovery.
Keywords: unquestioningly, consciousness-raising, inductive processes.
According to Little, "As we attempt to move from atomistic to more complex meaning we are inevitably involved in grammatical relationships [so]... for this reason grammar is as important to the communicative as to any other approach to language teaching." [1. P, 102]
Unfortunately, "many teachers believe that there must be only one 'right' way of describing something. Secondly, many teachers unquestioningly accept the rules as holy writ, even in the face of conflicting evidence. [and thirdly] for teachers who take a rather structuralist approach. they do not particularly expect grammatical rules to make sense." [2. P, 31]
Therefore, learners that are restricted to a study of language presented by teachers or text materials may miss important aspects of the language not mentioned by material writers because "concocted texts exemplify the grammar not as it is but as the course writer believes it to be." Moreover, it appears that learners do not merely assimilate rules but instead make hypotheses about the language to which they are given exposure. In fact, there is "no evidence to support the notion, for example that grammatical constructs are 'learned' as one would learn (i.e. commit to memory) a collection of facts in some academic discipline." Consequently, if learners are to learn grammar through self-discovery they will need plenty of authentic data from which to make hypotheses to prevent learning that omits important areas of language or incidentally covers the topic. Two authentic text approaches that may promote self-discovery and knowledge are consciousness-raising and schema-based.
Consciousness-Raising
The problem of missed or concocted aspects of language from either teachers or text syllabuses may be overcome by "an approach to grammar that is compatible with how one views SLA [Second Language Acquisition]." The approach would focus on learning grammar through consciousness-raising (awareness of a grammar feature) rather than presentational teaching or practice. That is to say, consciousness-raising embodies a "means to attainment of grammatical competence in another language (i.e. necessary but not sufficient, and the learner contributes), whereas 'grammar teaching' typically represents an attempt to instill that competence directly (i.e. necessary and sufficient, and the learner is a tabula rasa)" [3, P. 24].
Consciousness-raising grammar activities may provide learners the needed exposure to language to make generalizations about the language because "No one could ever learn English, for example, given a vocabulary list and sets of rules for syntax, morphology, phonology, etc., no matter how accurate or how comprehensive." Also, as every learner will have different priorities as to the language learning opportunities in a given text exposing learners to authentic text enables them to focus on language details and internalize generalizations for themselves. Consciousness-raising may also enable learners to compensate for discrepancies they encounter in new data by cultivating and extending their prior knowledge of grammatical rules or language usage. The teacher in this method of teaching, according to Willis "no longer simply presents language to the learner for the purposes of illustrating language from. Instead they encourage learners to examine their own experience of the language and make generalizations from it." Generalizations based on prior knowledge then become an important aspect of learning because learners do not simply assimilate the rules or patterns presented in coursebooks or by course-teachers they become aware of them through exposure.
In addition, rather than learning through patterns, structures, and repetition, consciousness-raising activities "seek to get a learner to understand a particular grammatical feature, how it works, what it consists of." Learners may then proceed at their own pace in language development reducing the number of learners that become unnoticed or left behind, which may happen in repetition, drilling, and structured classes [4, P. 5].
Schema-based
Barlow (1996) offers another method to overcome traditional methodology problems of omitted language usage or restricted language pattern or form studies. It is a schema based approach. The approach is "based on grammatical units, which are form-meaning pairings embedded in a discourse
context. The formal part of these grammatical units may look similar in the most productive cases to rules, but they are mostly the result of inductive processes: the accretion of categorized instances."
Barlow points out that some of the schemas may have different degrees of abstraction, but they are "ultimately based on and anchored by actual instances of usage" enabling generalizations to be based on language usage rather than on grammatical patterns. Hence, by using authentic text data, "the learner is not seen as just a passive pattern extractor, but is, in addition, a cognizer with the ability to make numerous cognitive distinctions, some of which will be able to be linked with formal distinctions made in the grammar."
References
1. Little David. 'Words and their properties: Arguments for a lexical approach to pedagogical grammar' in T. Odlin (ed.) Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar. CUP, 1994.
2. Chalker S. 'Pedagogical Grammar: Principles and Problems' in Bygate et al (eds.) Grammar and the Language Teacher. Prentice Hall International, 1994.
3. Rutherford W.E. Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching. Longman, 1987.
4. Ellis R. and Hedge. 'Second Language Acquisition research: how does it help teachers? An interview with Rod Ellis.' ELT Journal 47/1, 1993.
