Grammatical Meaning Uncovered:\u00a0 The Present<\/h2>\n
Achievement of communicative competence has long been understood as the overriding goal of language learning and teaching. Since the 1990s at the latest, \u201call\u201d an L2 learner (of English) needs to learn to do is understand what she reads and hears and be understood when she speaks and writes.\u00a0 Given this directive and given that vocabulary is the main carrier of meaning, the role of grammar would thus seem relegated to a distant second priority:\u00a0 nice, but\u2026 how necessary? As Penny Ur (1992, 4) put it, \u201cyou cannot use words unless you know how to put them together.\u201d\u00a0 The question then, is not whether grammar matters, but how it can become meaningful to the L2 learner.<\/p>\n
Here in Germany, students are required to start learning English at the age of nine or ten.\u00a0\u00a0 I doubt that there are many students who reach puberty before they have learned this age-old mnemonic device:<\/p>\n
He\/she\/it,<\/p>\n
das ‘s’ muss mit<\/p>\n
This little rhyme is about a grammar rule and it serves as a reminder to add an \u201cs\u201d to verbs in the simple present when the subject is a 3rd person singular noun. Having known<\/em> this rule for over a decade, a large number of the twenty-year-old students who have entered my university classrooms since I started teaching at this level in Germany in 2006 do not regularly apply it. Why not? Apart from a<\/em> valid and the<\/em> most obvious answer, namely lack of practice, I suspect that the purely deductive approach is also to blame: the attempted direct route from form<\/em> to use<\/em> bypasses meaning<\/em>. They do not know why<\/em> they should use it and so they are waylaid at the missing meaning on the way from theory to practice.<\/p>\n To remedy this, in recent semesters I have, at certain junctures when the error has been made multiple times, written something akin to<\/p>\n Jane love Tarzan<\/p>\n on the board and asked what is missing.\u00a0 Everyone knows<\/em>, it is:<\/p>\n Jane loves Tarzan<\/p>\n I ask them why. There is more than one possibly correct answer to this question and then some interesting theories- including that the sentence can be understood anyway and hence there is no real reason to apply this rule.\u00a0 This is a theory that should be tested. I start writing more examples down until one turns up such as<\/p>\n Jane hit Tarzan<\/p>\n When we add the third person singular \u201cs\u201d to this example, we have<\/p>\n Jane hits Tarzan<\/p>\n and also the difference between a one time incident and ongoing domestic violence. The real world consequences for the attentive listener are as disparate as suggesting a marriage counselor or calling the police.<\/p>\n Admittedly, \u201cIrregular Verbs that Maintain the Same Form in the Simple Past and Past Participle\u201d is not a very large set, but as put<\/em>, let, cost<\/em> and other very frequently used words in the English language belong to it, inclusion or omission of the third person singular \u201cs\u201d can have a significant impact on meaning.<\/p>\n More significantly, having uncovered the \u201cmeaning potency\u201d of the third person singular \u201cs\u201d by drawing conclusions from the examples (inductive learning), the rule is now more significant and salient and the students have more immediate access to it while speaking and writing. If students are given sufficient output and coaching opportunities (that they also choose to take advantage of!) within authentic contexts, I contend that this rule will no longer be isolated in the realm of theoretical knowledge, but incorporated into their actual competence.<\/p>\n At the TESOL convention in Philadelphia in April of 2012, I attended a lecture and, impressed, purchased a book by Keith Folse, a teacher trainer at the University of Michigan. In it he writes \u201cthe present perfect is probably the single most difficult verb tense in English because this one verb tense can be used for at least three different times\u201d (Folse 2009, 281) and because \u201cmost languages do not have a tense that works like present perfect in English\u201d (Folse 2009, 282). My experience confirms these assertions. The use of the German Perfekt<\/em> form is in no way limited to meanings 1 and 2 in Table 1 below.<\/p>\n Table 1. Meaning and Use for the Present Perfect Form (Folse, K. S. 2009. Keys to Teaching Grammar to English Language Learners. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, p. 281. Used with permission).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Explaining meaning 3 above to German learners is the most difficult.\u00a0 In my dedication to the future careers of students of International Business Administration over the last year and a half, I have begun providing examples of real and simulated job interviews and asking the students to identify the present perfect form and to theorize about the reason for the usage.<\/p>\n In the interviews, the applicants very frequently use the present perfect to refer to their past work experience. Since they are trying to get a job, they obviously, as in meaning 3 above, want to link the actions of the past to the present to show that this experience is relevant now:\u00a0 If they are hired, they will be able to use this experience to the benefit of their new employers. This meaning distinction seems relevant to those students who have an interest in someday securing gainful employment in a globalized business world where English is the lingua franca<\/em> or trade language. We return to this notion in the course of the semester and conduct simulated interviews in pair and group work in order to use the rule that has now been inductively earned.<\/p>\n In this article, \u201cinductive learning\u201d was explained as a process from examples of form (as read or heard) to meaning to rule to use (written or spoken), the word \u201cmeaning\u201d was used to refers to ideas, nuances and associations triggered by form; and \u201cauthentic context\u201d was seen as generated by communicative language teaching approaches as described by Richards and Rodgers (2012, 151- 241). Two concrete examples of success in my teaching practice involving the inductive discovery of \u201cgrammatical meaning\u201d and the application of \u201cearned rules\u201c in authentic contexts were provided.<\/p>\n More evidence is needed to determine the effectiveness of this approach in equipping students to use grammar rules accurately and autonomously. This brings me to last semester\u2019s digital exam.\u00a0\u00a0 In general, as the goal of language teaching and learning is communicative competence, I limit the explicit testing of grammar. At the end of the Winter Semester 2016\/17, I included a mere five explicit questions relevant to our classroom endeavors to recognize grammatical meaning, all of which yielded favorable results. For instance, as seen in Figures 1 and 2 below, 48 out of 60 of the students who took this exam (or 80%) were able to distinguish accurately between the simple past and the present perfect.<\/p>\nInductive Learning in Authentic Context:\u00a0 The Present Perfect<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/verkkolehdet.jamk.fi\/languageteachingtomorrow\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/17\/files\/2017\/04\/table1_W.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nConclusion and Measurability<\/h2>\n