Teaching Grammar Through Discourse

Abstract

The present work sets as its main purpose to bring some insights from the two areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics into the teaching of English grammar at the university, in an attempt to help learners to become conscious of the processes that operate when they use language. It addresses the issue of developing students' grammatical competence in parallel with a discourse and pragmatic consciousnessraising. A framework for teaching the three English clauses, declarative, interrogative and imperative is proposed. It consists in describing the three clauses within a model whereby discourse analysis and pragmatics interact to provide a new perspective for the elaboration of students’ communicatively-sensitive grammar. The study attends to such areas as cohesion, coherence and pragmatic acceptability in relation to grammar teaching. The assumption underlying the current enquiry is that much can be gained from the proposed framework in raising students' awareness to understand and produce the English clause formally and contextually. The trend is that teachers of grammar at the university have been preoccupied more with the sentence and its components i.e. effectively operating at or below the level of the sentence. Now, it is time we took a turn in a more discourse and pragmatic oriented direction. The suggested methodology does not dismiss students’ previous grammatical competence nor does it have them treat language as an assemblage of isolated units. It urges them to use such a competence creatively so long as it contributes to the whole area of communicative competence. So, in order to investigate the English clauses, the two areas mentioned above are brought into a symbiotic relationship. The main leading principle is that when the grammar of language is taught for communication, clauses are held as resources for the creation and interpretation of discourse in context. A characterization of clauses and sequences of clauses in combination is presented, putting much more emphasis on the functions and acts they are set to serve. Also, the present enquiry aims at helping language teachers interested in incorporating insights from the two areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics into their teaching, by suggesting some classroom tasks and activities where learners use such strategies as inferring, interpreting and predicting discourse evolving by drawing upon their grammatical potential. To meet the demands of the current methodological orientation and for the sake of validity, students are assessed, following the suggested methodology to determine how far what is learnt along the applied methodology can be deployed. A pre-test was administered before training took place. Its main aim was to have the maximum instructional data background, to diagnose students’ ability to cope with the suggested methodological model and to compare their performance before and after being trained. After a one-term formal training, a post-test was administered where students were assessed on the amount of the discourse and pragmatic awareness they have acquired along the training period. The assessment component made it clear that by incorporating discourse and pragmatic data into the teaching of grammar, students will see their awareness being raised in making appropriate choices from their formal stock of knowledge.