types of grammar

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Permalink Reply by Marielle Lange on November 8, 2007 at 4:22am

I am no ESL teacher. I have been an ESL student though. I am also a psycholinguist (somebody interested in understanding how language takes place within our cognitive system).

Immediate Constituent analysis: Constituents - smaller forms into which a larger form (construction) may be analyzed e.g. poor John analyzable into the constituents “poor” and “John” - immediate constituents. Compare “lost the watch” (Source: Sentence types ). Detailed information on sentence consistuents or grammatical categories can be found in this course handout (pdf).

Universal Grammar, that's a theory that all languages of the world share some type of basic defining principles thought to be innate. It's not much relevant to ESL teaching in my opinion. At best, you can try to talk your pupils into the idea that they should find easy to learn another language because they already have some language capacity. Some information on Universal Grammar, written for a public of language teachers, can be found in this course handout (pdf).

The term of Rhetorical is usually used in reference to the identification of the purpose of the sentence. You will find explanations and examples on this page at: The Purpose of a Sentence

Never heard of Pedagogical grammar. However google gives me a link to a page that seems to provide an explanation of this term. What is a reference grammar?. This seems to be about a grammar "designed to teach someone *how* to use a language." An on-line pdf document, on A Pedagogical Grammar of the Modal Auxiliaries proposes that "Pedagogical grammars may be defined as either: (i) The whole set of teaching materials used to develop a native-like ability to recognise and produce sentences in an L2 (pedagogical grammars are coextensive with textbooks), or (ii) practical grammars extracted from formal or scientific grammars as the basis for teaching materials." This seems to be a concept useful for the teacher to know, but of little relevance to the pupil.

Discourse types refer to the type of discourse (narrative, descriptive, etc.... the style of writing on a forum would be different than in a CV) or the genre of discourse (slightly different ways of expressing yourselves in the media, science, business worlds). In a ESL context, this has to do with the notion that English can vary depending on the context in which it is used or with specialist English.

Note that a very useful resource for ESL teachers is the ESL café. You will find there forums, resources, links to useful websites, and much more.

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Permalink Reply by amanda garcia on November 9, 2007 at 4:16am

thanks so much for a very wonderful reply, the links and info's u gave is very useful to me,,
again,, thanks so much Ms. Marielle Lange, thanks fo your patience.

lot of thanks
mandy

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