An Evaluation and Comparison of Present Methods for Teaching English Gammar to Speakers of Other Languages

Abstract

To learn to speak and understand a foreign language is to acquire native speaker competence in that language. How do we explain native speaker competence? The best answer to this seems to be that native speakers possess and utilize a finite number of rules to produce and interpret an infinite number of sentences, a set of rules that can be violated to produce ungrammatical or deviant sentences, rules that can be applied to produce one sentence which can be ambiguously interpreted, and rules that can produce two or more sentences with the same meaning. The ability of our students to speak and understand a foreign language, then, must in part depend upon our ability as teachers and textbook writers to provide them with the opportunity to acquire native speaker competence, that is, to provide them with the rules that will permit them to produce and interpret an infinite number of grammatical sentences they have never seen or heard in our classrooms or in the textbooks they use. Evidence seems to suggest that in the teaching of grammar to adults explication of the rules to be acquired is advantageous to the learner. Learning the rules, however, will not suffice to make the student a fluent speaker of the target language. It appears that the most efficient way of teaching the components of grammar is to provide the students with appropriate explanatory rules that account for the components of language and to follow those explanations with ample practice in using those rules-using them at first in manipulative drills but culminating the practice with the most realistic communicative experiences possible.