Unlocking Grammar: Rules, Reasons, and Effective Language Learning

Understanding Grammar: Rules and Their Rationale

Grammar and rules are undoubtedly synonymous in the minds of learners and teachers. The association between them is powerful because the partnership has been fruitful. Rules have served language learning by capturing generalizations about morphosyntactic regularities in a language. Rules also allow material developers to work with "right-sized" chunks of language, helping students deal in an orderly and systematic way with the grammar of the target language. Most language teachers work with rules in some way, even if the rules are not stated in formal metalinguistic terms.

The Rationale Behind Grammar Rules

It is important for learners not only to know the rules, but also to understand why they exist. Rules address the "how," reasons address the "why." Understanding the "why" underlying the "how" reveals how much more rational grammar is than it is often perceived to be. This knowledge empowers learners, making language acquisition less rote and mechanical. Rules often generalize about language form, but grammatical forms also have meanings and uses that students need to learn. If second language students know the reasons why a rule exists, they may also know when it is possible to violate it in the service of meaning or use.

For example: A rule of English grammar prohibits using the progressive with stative verbs. The reason for this rule is the semantic incompatibility between processes depicted by the progressive (which typically involve change) and the unchanging states embodied in stative verbs.

Knowing the reason for a rule also gives language students an understanding of the logic that speakers of another language use.

Limitations of a Rules-Only Approach

Rules are static descriptions of language forms, when in fact, grammar is anything but static. Grammar is flexible, allowing for the expression of new meanings—a vital quality because humans are meaning-making beings.

Integrating Reasons into Language Teaching

Helping students understand why things are the way they are is as important a part of teaching grammar as showing them how things are done. Reasons have their place in language instruction at all levels, even if they only inform the choices a teacher makes.

Addressing Perceived Arbitrariness in Grammar

Another limitation of rules, alluded to earlier, is their apparent arbitrariness. To remove the burden of rote learning from students, we want them to know "why." There is, after all, a great deal of systematicity to grammar.

Reasons: Broader Than Individual Rules

Because of the systematicity of grammar, reasons are broader-based than rules. They apply to more phenomena than single syntactic structures.