[心情] What will be left if we strip gramma …

看板CS_TEACHER作者maximus1523 (麥西幕士)時間15年前 (2009/07/21 17:53)推噓3(3推 0噓 59→)

留言62則, 5人參與討論串1/1

Not having taken English as my college major, I became an English teacher two years ago unexpectedly, which automatically established a strong reminder of just how important English grammar really is to me whenever I am in session of an English class. I have to confess that an English class without teaching anything related to grammar would save me a lot of troubles. However, what would an English class without teaching grammar look like? Or to be more specific, what is the point to learn grammar? In what follows, I will try to answer these two questions, and I hope the process of my explanation will at least reiterate the importance why the connection between learning English and acquiring grammar are so inextricably bound. Yesterday, I found myself painfully confused by a message posted on Bulletin Board System in cram teacher section. The message irresponsibly propagandized the following "High school students in Taiwan don't require as much grammar as some of us expect it should". Yes, in term of its goal, the statement is absolutely logic and making sense. But is it really true that learning English is all about memorizing as many vocabularies as possible? I think not. English as a language requires vocabularies and grammar to bestow itself simultaneously, and a lack of either would be futile for anyone who tries to master the language. Metaphorically, grammar serves as language's root whereas vocabularies serve as its branches and leaves; they are each in charge of different duties which involve a regulation to categorize human beings' needs to express, and the abstract and concrete references to various concepts. Simply imagine, without either of them, what could happen in our daily exchange of words with well educated foreigners? Initially, you probably won't encounter too many troubles in your fluency to engage in a normal chat because your vocabularies may be ample enough for you to blur focus of the topics you are talking about and allow you to escape from original topic to hide your superficiality and your intellectual inertia to systematically organize expressions. However, what if all of a sudden, the foreigner decides to further the topic and hope that you could share some of your own reflection toward the topic in depth, wouldn't it be awkward for anyone to keep rambling on and on with tons of synonyms that one knows that are almost identical in their semantic? On the other hand, the sole mastery of grammar alone also often results in a similar embarrassment; let us suppose that the foreigners know that you understand the grammar and presuppose that you are able to decipher the complication embedded within his/her hypothetical sentences with which he/she wishes to establish a regrettable tone of what he could have achieved in the past; limited by insufficient vocabularies, you don't know what appropriate words to be used to respond to his or her regret; to me that is like a man full of knowledge in finance who sadly lacks capital to actualize and substantiate his financial knowledge. But the biggest problem is that too many of us acquiesce a convenient way of treating English as a simple word-puzzle game, which later leads to an inconvenient consequence to frustrate us in reading and writing when we are actually asked to use these skills academically or vocationally. So, as an English teacher(at least that's what I'm doing now), I think that the reason to learn grammar has never meant to fulfill our need to win in tests but to truthfully and logically express thoughts in writing and to perceive other's feeling by reading them. -- ※ 發ꬊXH站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 211.20.146.172 ※ 編輯: maximus1523 來自: 218.170.138.73 (07/21 23:12) ※ 編輯: maximus1523 來自: 218.170.138.73 (07/21 23:15) ※ 編輯: maximus1523 來自: 218.170.138.73 (07/21 23:24)

→