「是」字句和「是……的」句的教學語法: 以九套國際學校中文教材為例

Due to the economic growth in East and Southeast Asia, the global interest in teaching and learning Asian languages has been continually increasing in the past two decades. More and more international schools are offering Asian languages as elective second/foreign languages to adolescent learners, such as Arabic, modern Chinese (Cantonese/Mandarin), Japanese, and Malay. Since 2008, the most common grammatical mistake, shi (literally to be) had been highlighted by the Cambridge Assessment every single year in the IGCSE Mandarin (0547) examiner reports. This paper reviews the literature of the functions and the error patterns of copula verb shi and “shi…de” construction, then investigates how the textbooks describe the grammatical usages and sequence the different functions of shi for young learners. Based on the qualitative research findings, this study proposes suggestions for improving the description of grammar items in Mandarin textbooks, and illustrates the classroom activities and teaching strategies for parts of speech in the international school context. This research has implications for second language acquisition, pedagogical grammar, and teacher education for IGCSE Mandarin.

‘Are you going to go?’ Putting a pedagogical grammar rule under the corpus spotlight

A rule stating that we tend to avoid using go and come after the future marker going to appears again and again in many coursebooks and grammars used in English Language Teaching, and has done for decades. This article attempts to show, using empirical evidence from corpora, why the rule is inaccurate, and different ways that this might be established. As the rule under consideration is typically framed as a tendency (like many other pedagogical grammar rules), an additional aim of the work is to outline the kinds of corpus analyses researchers and materials designers can potentially use in order to investigate the question of (claimed) linguistic tendencies. The article concludes by discussing why a rule that is apparently inaccurate nevertheless appears again and again in print, arguing that the existence of a well-established and widely-accepted ‘canon’ of ELT grammar means that such inaccuracies in descriptions of grammar can be easily perpetuated

Students' Grammatical Errors in Essay Writing: A Pedagogical Grammar Reflection

Students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are expected to master the fundamental of grammar so they can produce good essays. However, despite having learnt English at secondary or university level, students tend to make many grammatical errors in their writing. This study presents the grammatical errors made by college EFL students in their essays and the pedagogical implications viewed from those errors. This is a descriptive research with 30 second-year students who enrolled Essay Writing class as participants. Thirty written essays produced by the students were analyzed for the grammatical errors. The findings revealed that there were 368 grammatical errors found in the students’ essays. The most common one was in verb use (48%). Besides, the errors were also found in nouns (12%), prepositions (8%), determiners (8%), pronouns (8%), adverbials (6), adjectives (5%), and conjunctions (5%). If teachers do not assist students to comprehend the concept of parts of speech, and essential and nonessential clauses, these students will continue to make errors in their more advanced writing. The findings may have useful pedagogical implications for English language teachers, syllabus designers, and test developers. Understanding students’ difficulties and providing appropriate grammar instructions are the keys to teach grammar.

The Role of Metonymy in Teaching the Spanish Verbal System to L2/FL Learners of Spanish

This paper explores the application of conceptual metonymy (Lakoff, 1987; Ruiz de Mendoza, 2000; Langacker, 2009; Panther, Thornburg and Barcelona, 2009; Barcelona, 2013) in the development of pedagogical resources for the teaching of the Spanish verbal system to L2/FL learners. To this end, a description is given of the advantages of introducing inferential reasoning using metonymy based on certain principles taken from the Cognitive Grammar model (Langacker, 1987, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009) in grammar teaching materials — both descriptions and activities. We focus on tense uses that involve metonymic processes, particularly, the meaning extensions in two Spanish past tenses: (1) the actional meaning of stative verbs when conveyed in pretérito indefinido (preterit), as in Pudimos comprar la casa 'We could buy the house', metonymically extended to Compramos la casa 'We bought the house'; and (2) the distancing use (uso citativo) of pretérito imperfecto (imperfect) when referring to current facts, as in ¿Cómo te llamabas? (How PRO.REFL.2SG call.IPFV.PST.2SG?) 'What was your name again?', which is metonymically extended to (Se me ha dicho/No recuerdo/No he oído) cómo te llamas [('I have been told/I can't recall/I couldn't hear') how PRO.REFL.2SG call.PRES.2SG]. In order to discuss the kind of contribution that this conceptual standpoint can make to the teaching of the Spanish verbal system, the pedagogical potential of some techniques and resources is explored in terms of (a) metonymic and metaphorical reasoning in pedagogical grammar descriptions, (b) consciousness-raising paraphrase exercises focused on meaning indeterminacy, and (c) network building and the use of (dynamic) images to show variable construals in grammatical meaning

Enseñar gramática en el aula de ELE, Grammar Didactics and Pedagogical Grammar Some New Proposals

This article critically reviews the contributions gathered in Enseñar gramática en el aula de ELE (2018), a collection of essays which provide teachers with an up-to-date view on research and teaching proposals. Despite the differences in terms of theoretical approaches, perspectives and objectives, all the authors agree on placing meaning at the very core of teaching and on building bridges between research and classroom teaching practice.