Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
SEVEN CASE STUDIES
Pedagogical grammar
A pedagogic (or pedagogical) grammar we can define as a grammatical description of a language which is intended for pedagogical purposes, such as language teaching, syllabus design, or the preparation of teaching materials. A pedagogic grammar might be based on:
1. a grammatical analysis and description of the language;
2. a particular grammatical theory; and
3. the study of the grammatical problems of learners or on a combination of approaches.
Pedagogical grammars can be distinguished from analytical grammars. A pedagogical grammar is a grammatical description of a language specifically designed as an aid to teaching that language, such as the grammar textbooks used in foreign-language classes or the grammar instruction offered to trainee teachers. An analytical grammar attempts to account formally and logically for the structure of a language without reference to pedagogy, sequencing, levels of difficulty, or ease of explanation.
Few analytical grammars are suitable for pedagogy but developments in generative grammar, including case grammar, generative semantic models of language and accounts of linguistic discourse, indicate a renewal of interest in language as it is actually used in human interaction. Such grammars are therefore much more relevant to language learning and language teaching because they are less abstract than previous generative grammars. However, even these less abstract, more communicative grammars are still not intended to be pedagogic in the sense in which we are using the term, since the purpose of a pedagogic arrangement for a grammar is to afford the students tightly controlled practice in writing sentences and thereby to locate the source of their own writing errors. The successful textbook employing a pedagogical grammar approach will ensure that the items and exercises are arranged so as to promote understanding of the ways in which different grammatical devices combine with context so as to allow the writer (and speaker) to express the variety of intended meanings.
A pedagogical grammar therefore needs to be distinguished both from an analytic grammar and from other types of textbook. It differs from an analytic grammar in terms of purpose, which is to teach the language rather than about the language.
It differs from other types of textbook in terms of organization, in that it is arranged on pedagogical principles.
Using the technique of pedagogical grammar in response to a language problem facing him in designing communicative language teaching materials, Keith Mitchell (1990) describes his attempt to produce a description which anticipates learners’ communicative needs ‘by adopting meaning and use – semantics and pragmatics rather than grammatical structure as its main principle of classification’ (1990: 52).
Mitchell explains why Jespersen’s analysis of the English comparative was in adequate (while praising him for his far-sighted approach to language teaching, anticipating communicative ideas sixty years before they became fashionable). In doing so he demonstrates why the classic analysis which claimed that the following two sentences are equivalent in meaning was wrong:
1. Mary is as tall as her father.
2. Mary and her father are identical in height.
Mitchell points out that they are not equivalent because (1) means that Mary is either equal to her father in height or taller, while (2) means only that she is equal to her father in height.
Mitchell’s analysis ranges from the logic of comparative structure through semantics and pragmatics to the lexicogrammatical possibilities inherent in the English language. In general terms his argument concerns the different ways in which the same concept may be expressed and at the same time the different but related concepts that are expressed in similar ways.
Mitchell concludes that:
‘identity of degree’, together with ‘the average degree’ and ‘the ideal degree’ are concepts that language users have not hitherto had much occasion to express, witness the relative grammatical and/or lexical complexity of the devices that have to be resorted to if one does want to express them. These can hardly be concepts that play any great part in the everyday categorization of human experience, otherwise speakers would have made it their business over the ages to ensure, as it were, that language provided a straightforward means for giving expression to them. It seems that when it comes to making comparisons quantifying properties of things in the world around us we tend to perceive these primarily in terms of differences, and even when we do perceive similarities we appear to like to leave room for the possibility of difference … It seems therefore that everyday language operates with a much looser and more ambivalent concept of ‘equality’ than does mathematics. (1990: 70)
Let us remind ourselves of Mitchell’s purpose in dealing with this language problem, namely the design of a communicative-pedagogical description of English which would meet the needs of the syllabus designer and the materials writer. What he has reported on is clearly a small part of a larger task. In other words the ‘problem’ of how to teach learners how to express comparisons in English is only a very small part of the larger ‘problem’ of how to enable learners to access the resources of the English language.
But in this small-scale reporting what Mitchell succeeds in doing is to show how questions of this kind require the applied linguist to bring together recurring practical demands (how best to teach the language) with major theoretical issues (how the language deploys itself in order to permit meanings to be expressed). This particular engagement of theory and practice draws, it should be noted, more heavily on linguistic theory than my first two examples of program evaluation and schooled literacy. The outcome of such an engagement is three-fold: it offers a resource to the syllabus designer and textbook writer; it informs our understanding of the ways in which pedagogy reflects learning and so assists with the theorizing of applied linguistics; and it informs our understanding of the grammatical resource of the language and so has the potential to impact on linguistic theory itself.
