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Azimov A.Kh. teacher
Karshi State University Uzbekistan, Karshi Murodov Sh.D. teacher
Karshi State University Uzbekistan, Karshi
THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING
Annotation:Explaining method and implementing interactive methods of teaching grammar in teaching process There is no doubt that English has become a universal language. Nowadays, English is used by at least one billion people around the world, either as a first or as a second language. Therefore, it is very much considerable to me to be a professional teacher who is aware of the modern methods of teaching English language as a foreign language. No one can ignore the need and the value of methods for teaching English as a foreign language or even as a second language. Students are different in their needs. Some students learn visually, others orally; others have shorter attention skills and all come from different backgrounds. To meet all their needs, it is necessary to use a wide range of methods. Some methods teacher may do with the help of different resources or create them by alone based at teaching experience. Teaching English as a Foreign Language is vital especially in the developing countries in which English is considered to be a foreign language.
Key words: foreign language, methods of teaching English, interactive methods, teaching experience, teaching, recent methods, taught grammar.
It is clear that people need better opportunities that they can only get with a good group of English. In other countries people who want to learn English have a great number of abilities to know this language. For teachers very important to listening good spoken English at your level of understanding will improve all aspects of your speaking, since we normally learn our first language by first listening and hearing it spoken by others. Recent years have seen a reawakening of interest in the role of grammar in English language teaching. Grammar is usually a necessary or desirable part of classroom language learning, especially in elementary level. In Bangladesh, teachers teach grammar based on the rules and typical examples where it is expected that students will memorize all these. On the other hand, developed countries do not follow this technique. They follow different creative techniques by entertaining and relaxing the learners while they are learning or practicing a linguistic structure, which eliminates students' negative attitude towards learning.
However, recent methods and theories of language teaching reveal that the traditional techniques of teaching grammar are ineffective. According to these
methods and theories grammar should be taught inductively that demands grammar items to be presented creatively. There are many ways of teaching grammar creatively at elementary level like introducing the grammar through anecdote, describing pictures, playing songs etc. As part of my undergraduate degree in English, I had to do an internship where I worked as an elementary level language teacher in an English medium school. This gave me the opportunity to implement the language teaching theories and methods that I learned in class. When I applied different theories and teaching techniques in the classroom to teach grammar, I used authentic materials and taught grammar through real context that made the grammar points more understandable and easier. Then I realized the importance of presenting grammatical items creatively in front of students. Moreover, as I was a student of Bengali medium school and went through the typical ways of learning grammar where creative presentation of grammar did not take place, I can compare the style of teaching grammar between Bengali medium and English medium school. Furthermore, when I found an adult student of Bengali medium struggling with grammar while producing a single grammatically correct sentence, I once more realized the importance of grammar in language learning. All these motivated me to write this report on this topic.
English is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-European languages include several major branches: Latin and the modern Romance languages French, Spanish), the Germanic languages (German, English), the Indo-Iranian languages (Hindi, Sanskrit), the Slavic languages (Polish, Czech), the Baltic languages (Latvian), the Celtic languages (Irish, Welsh) and Greek.
Considering these branches of the Indo-European languages, there are two of them which are worth focusing on the development of English: The Germanic and the Romance. English is a member of the Germanic group and it is further classified as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo - European family. There is evidence that this group began as a common language in the Elbe River about 3,000 years ago. This Common Germanic language split into three sub-groups:
1. East Germanic spoken in south-eastern Europe.
2. North Germanic spoken in northern Europe (Scandinavian languages).
3. West Germanic considered as the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Frisian, Flemish and English.
As we can see the early history of English language is fatally tied up with the early history of the Germanic languages which further developed into other languages as German, English, Scandinavian languages, Dutch, also Yiddish and Afrikaans. As a consequence, English belongs to the subgroup of Germanic languages containing many common features inside of this language group, and many differences which set them apart from other Indo-European languages.
Old English (449-1066 Ad). The emergence of English language dates back to 449 AD which is the period of Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon). The Celts families had been living in England and in 43 AD the Romans came. They left
England in 410 AD and the Germanic tribes, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, came.8
By the arriving Anglo-Saxon, the language spoken in England was influenced by Celtic, but more evidently by Latin language. It is believed that the Germanic tribes had used Latin words on the continent of Europe before they invaded Britain.
According to Hladky, in Old English there was one characteristic feature -inflection. Like other Germanic languages, Old English was inflected, i.e. the words had endings indicating functions of those words in the sentence in order to understand the meaning of the utterances. Thus, word order was not very important comparing to Modern English, in which word order is crucial. 9
The syntax of Old English was more flexible than Modern English. Although general word order was subject - verb - object, it varied more, mostly in the placing of the end of the sentence, typically a subordinate clause.
Middle English (1066-1500 Ad). David Crystal states that "a fundamental change in the structure of English took place during the 11th and 12th centuries -one without precedent in the history of the language, and without parallel thereafter".10
He further points out that grammatical relationship in Old English was expressed chiefly by the use of inflections. In Middle English, they were expressed (as they are today) mainly by word order.
The year 1066 was the beginning of a new social and linguistic period in Britain. William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England. The language introduced to Britain by the invader was French, or to be more specific, Norman French. It was a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman.
The Normans were of Germanic origin ("Norman"came from "Norseman"-a man coming from the North) and Anglo-Norman was a French dialect with Germanic influence and Latin roots.
Early Modern English (1500-1800 Ad). After introducing the printing press in English in 1476 by William Caxton and becoming the East Midland dialect as the literature standard of English, there can be stated that a new period of the history of English language began. The period of the Early Modern English was affected by the printing revolution. According to Crystal, "the new invention (printing press) gave an unprecedented impetus to the formation of a standard language and the study of its properties" (Crystal 2004:56).11
The thousands words were added to English as writers created new words by using Greek and Latin prefixes and affixes. Scholars dealt with such areas of language as grammar, vocabulary, writing system and style. First English dictionary was published by Henry Cockrum in 1623.
8 Thornbury, S. (2007). How to Teach Grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
9 Hladky, J. (1998). An Old English, Middle English and early-New English Reader.Brno: Vydavatelstvi Masarykovy University
10 Alexander, L.G. (1991). Longman English Grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
11 Asher, J. (1997). Learning Another Language through Actions: The completete. Teacher's Guide Book. Los Gatos, Calif.: Skz Oaks Oroductions.
The influence of Shakespeare and printed King James Bible had a very important impact on English language during the Renaissance.
Suggestopedia is a language teaching method developed by a Bulgerian psychiatrist-educator
Georgi Lozanov. This method of language teaching highly supports the use of audio-visual aids in teaching language. The most conspicuous characteristics of Suggestopedia are the decoration, furniture and arrangement of the classroom, the use of music and the authoritative behavior of the teacher (Richards & Rodgers, 1986, p. 100). Usually, the classroom in Suggestopedia is arranged with different colorful posters so that there is a relaxing learning environment for the learners. The main purpose of this type of classroom arrangement is to remove the anxiety of the learners and ensure a friendly and comfortable classroom setting. It is generally believed if the learners are free of anxiety and are comfortable, it becomes easier for them to learn a new language. Besides, different smooth music are used in the classroom to make the learners relaxed and more attentive in the learning process. The classroom setting is arranged in a way so that it creates an image of target language settings.
The challenge for the teacher is to create a classroom environment which is bright and cheerful. This was accomplished in the classroom we visited where the walls were decorated with scenes from the country where the target language is spoken.
These conditions are not always possible. However, the teacher should try to provide as positive an environment as possiblestudents to notice how the concept works from these examples12. No explanation of the concept is given beforehand, and the expectation is that students learn to recognize the rules of grammar in a more natural way during their own reading and writing. The main goal of the inductive teaching method is the retention of grammar concepts, with teachers using techniques that are known to work cognitively and make an impression on students' contextual memory.
After the lesson, students are expected to practice what they have just been shown in a mechanical way, through worksheets and exercises. This type of teaching, though common, has many people—including teachers—rethinking such methods, as more post-secondary level students are revealing sub-par literacy skills in adulthood. As one former teacher states, deductive teaching methods drive many students away from writing because of the tediousness of rote learning and teacher-centered approaches.
Interactive Teaching. Another method of teaching grammar is to incorporate interactivity into lessons. Using games to teach grammar not only engages students but also helps them to remember what they've learned. This method allows teachers to tailor their lessons to the different learning styles of students. For instance, each student can be given a large flashcard with a word on it, and the students must physically arrange themselves into a proper sentence.
12 https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/eefective-methods-in-teaching-grammar-4
Over the years, many methods have been developed for teaching grammar and have been built upon, abandoned, or combined, all with the same goal in mind— teaching students how to communicate effectively and understand how to use the English language. Regardless of how grammar is taught, a well-rounded understanding of English grammar is the most important factor in improving the literacy of students
Teaching students' grammar rules without giving the students an opportunity to use these rules will not help them use English in real life. Language teachers and language learners in many non-native countries are often frustrated by the disconnect between knowing the rules of grammar and being able to apply those rules automatically in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This disconnect reflects a separation between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge.
Native English speakers learn grammar rules from hearing and listening from the real situations.13 In many English classrooms, teachers often set aside a particular time slot that is dedicated to the study of grammar. Such periods often focus on different points of grammar, such as tense, active and passive voice, or reported speech.
Grammar is something that runs through just about every aspect of language. Even the simplest sentences have grammar. Our curriculum may require us to teach stand-alone grammar lessons, and it's important to introduce various grammar points and topics so that the students have a richer understanding of the mechanisms of language. In English classes we often include music of English feature. These highlight the structure of grammar and stress patterns of the key everyday expressions that are presented.
For conclusion, I want to argue that it will be worth to teach grammar by interesting interactive grammar activities, which are designed for pre-grammar, while-grammar and post-grammar stages. In pre-grammar stage, we can use declarative approach to explain all features of certain grammar function with helping interactive methods. In while-grammar stage, we can gain and fix of new grammatical combination and in post-grammar stage, students are led to follow grammar accuracy in speaking with using some interactive methods.
Grammar operates at the sentence level and governs the syntax or word orders that are permissible in the language. It also works at the sub sentence level to govern such things as number and person agreement between subject and verb in a sentence. To grammar learning, some students may have a more analytical learning style than others, but if one hope to use English language accurately and fluently, it is necessary for him to receive grammar rules instruction. Grammar is not different from anything else, it is likely that students will learn at different rates.
References:
1. Asher, J. (1997). Learning Another Language through Actions: The completete. Teacher's Guide Book. Los Gatos, Calif.: Skz Oaks Oroductions
13 [Электронный ресурс]. Режим доступа: https://www.inklyo.com/methods-of-teaching-grammar/ (дата обращения: 02.07.2018).
2. Thornbury, S. (2007). How to Teach Grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
3. Hladky, J. (1998). An Old English, Middle English and early-New English Reader.Brno: Vydavatelstvi Masarykovy University
4. Alexander, L.G. (1991). Longman English Grammar. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
5. Macmillan English dictionary. - L. 2004.
6. Merriam-Webster[dictionary app.],Merriam-Webster Inc,2011
7. Reverse Context[dictionary app.],Reverso Technologies Inc,2014
8. Internet resources.
