The Usefulness of Tree Diagrams in Language Teaching

In my opinion, tree diagrams are useful for language teaching because they're a simple, clear, and uncomplicated way of representing a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor. On a didactic level, tree diagrams are used to illustrate the analysis of surface structures and in grammar teaching. Tree diagrams can be useful and clear to illustrate the linguistic components. Chomsky is one of the most influential linguists of the 20^th century. He and all generativists perceive language as an innate ability. Humans are born with a set of rules in our head that generativists refer to as Universal Grammar. In addition, Chomsky's standards theory includes 4 main components: the base component which produces or generates basic syntactic structure called deep structures, the transformational component which changes/transforms their basic structures into sentences called surface structures, the phonological component which gives sentences a phonetic representation so that they can be pronounced, and the semantic component which deals with the meaning of sentences. In my opinion, I feel useful to use tree diagrams for a student because it is an easy way to understand the grammar structure and rules. But this perspective is only focused on some aspects of human language, the cognitive ability for language. So, I think it is important to explain some social or evolutionary factors of the languages because this will involve the grammatical structure of language.