E-Book Overview
Heinle & Heinle ELT, 2003. – 199 c. – ISBN-10: 0838466753; ISBN-13: 978-0838466759.
A must-read for every language teaching professional, "Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring" explores the regular, predictable elements of language as well as the potential creativity of its underlying system. By combining a wide range of viewpoints with her own personal experiences and studies, Diane Larsen-Freeman challenges the static descriptive ideas of grammar, based on rules, and promotes the more fluid and dynamic notions of reason-driven grammaring, which she defines as "the ability to use grammar structures accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately". The reader is left not with an encyclopedic set of definitions, but rather with a deeper understanding of the organic nature of language and its acquisition, and a honed set of tools with which to approach language in language teaching
E-Book Content
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Teaching Language FROM
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The next step is to ask ourselves in which dimension the long-term learning chal lenge lies. Is it how to form the passive, knowing what it means, or learning when to use it? (Of course, students will have to learn all three, although we do not necessari ly have to teach all three.) Let us look at what learning challenges each wedge presents. Students will have to learn how to form the passive voice, as I have said, but this should not create too much difficulty, since the passive is formed in English with the ubiquitous be and get verbs, which students have probably learned to conjugate correctly by the time the passive is introduced. Similarly, forming the passive requires that students use a structure they will have encountered before, namely, the past participle. This is not to say that students will not struggle with the various tense and aspect combinations for the passive voice; however, the problems should not be insurmountable because the combinations are regular. The meaning of the passive should also not be difficult to learn. All languages have ways to shift the focus in an utterance, and the passive exists to do just this in English, shifting the focus from the agent of the action to the receiver. This leaves us with the use dimension. Indeed, my experience has been that the greatest challenge is usually learning to use the passive voice appropriately. Learning when to use the passive voice versus the active voice for a sentence with more or less the same meaning is a formidable challenge. For example, which is the better way to complete this mini-text, with the active voice (a) or passive voice (b)? Some of the Olympic athletes from the sm aller countries, such as Korea and Romania, were truly remarkable. In fact, (a) the Romanians won three gold medals in gymnastics. (b) three gold medals in gymnastics were won by Romanians.
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I would say that (a) is the better answer because the idea of athletes from Romania has already been introduced, and so they are known agents and thus natural subjects of the next sentence. If the first sentence, however, had been about gold medals, the Romanians would have been unknown agents and the second version would have complet ed the text better: Many medals were awarded to athletes from sm aller countries. In fact, three gold medals in gymnastics were won by the Romanians. If the challenge of the passive is indeed use, what, then, is the problem with presenting the passive to students, as it is often done, as a transformation of the active voice sentence? Romanian athletes won three gold meda