Augury

hi, my name is aneta and i’m a student in University of Bedfordshire in England. i write a dissertation about “effective ways of teaching grammar in relation to native grammar”.I am Polish. I just have a question if you could direct me which aspects I should write about. I haven’t started to write anything yet and the thing is that I don’t know exactly what to write about. I am sure i need to mention acquisition vs. learning and Polish grammar rules and compare them with English but the rest of things I need to write about is simply magic for me. could you direct me a little bit please?
thank you.
aneta

I’m honored that you feel I’m up to the task of advising on this matter, but I’m afraid that my teaching experience is very limited, so I’m wary about giving you any real, substantial suggestions.

However, one thing that I have found very useful in tackling the problem of the “weirdness” of some foreign language (e.g. consider teaching someone about the basics of a polysynthetic language if they speak only English), is to find some small nugget of similarity and use that to bridge the gap. Using the polysynthesis example, I find it very useful to start people off by pointing out little things about English verbs, such as subject agreement, and then suggest that we might expand agreement to include a full person-number system (like Romance languages). And if we can do that, we can also do object agreement, because, well, why not? And look, English sometimes has verbs that denote manner, or direction, so why not allow some sort of generic affix system to do this for all verbs? And look at verbs like “flame-broil” or “arc-weld”, they have tool-incorporation, so why not allow that in a general sense too?

And so on, and through these small little analogies, saying “see, English does this, so we can just allow it more so, nothing magical”, I find that the idea of polysynthesis can be conveyed relatively easily. The same is true for other parts of foreign grammars. Finding a native analog, and saying “its exactly the same as so-and-so, but with some minor, really inconsequential differences” is a great way to make foreign grammars easier to grasp.

Also, assuming you’re talking about teaching theory of grammar and are applying it to a foreign language, you might want to take a look at how various introductory syntax books approach foreign languages. Admittedly, they’re not in-depth explorations of those grammars, but they do introduce the reader, who is presumably a novice, to fragments of a foreign language’s grammar, and usually it’s not too difficult. This is surely because the reader is approaching it with a sort of mechanical perspective, something like “Ok, I know these rules, how can I apply them to this sentence, pretending its just like English?” From that perspective, it doesn’t matter that the grammar is different, really. All that matters is that the reader just takes the rules they know and applies them unwaveringly.

I hope that helps. You might want to email some of the guys over at Language Log and see if they have any insights — they have many years (collectively probably over a century) of teaching experience, and could probably answer your question better than I have.

…im shiella, a student from the philippines,Thanks for the info. you’ve shared in this website….it rellay helps me a lot… thanks..

This is a great series. Formal grammar can be very confusing because there are so many theories around. Your summaries help clear that up, especially the diagram in this post. Thanks for doing this, I hope you keep it up and I can’t wait for your takke on Lexical-Functional Grammar and on the phrase-structure grammars.

I’m more of a theoretical phonologist, but this series is wonderful.

As for the prehistory, I’m curious to know what mathematicians influenced Chomsky’s early formal language theory. I guess a bibliography of key writings or a further reading section might help the articles.

Indeed. I’ll try to write up a post with some further readings and so forth. Ever since grad school started for me I’ve slowed posting stuff unfortunately (ok it’s not entirely because of that but …)

As for what mathematics influence, I’m not sure if there was much, if any. Prior to Chomsky, there wasn’t, as far as I know, any real investigation of formal languages at all.

thank you very much you have a wonderful work that have made me pass my examination keep it up