"Grammar Is A Piano I Play by Ear". Joan Didion: Topic 12
"Grammar Is A Piano I Play by Ear". Joan Didion: Topic 12
"Grammar Is A Piano I Play by Ear". Joan Didion: Topic 12
According to Howatt (1984), Greek linguists of the 5th c. were the first in
the West to be concerned with linguistic theory. Later, the Romans adopted the
grammatical system of the Greeks and applied it to Latin. In medieval Europe,
education was conducted in Latin, and Latin grammar became the foundation of
the liberal arts curriculum. Then, the “modistae”, grammarians of the mid-13th to
mid-14th c., who viewed language as a reflection of reality, looked to philosophy
for explanations of grammatical rules. They sought one “universal” grammar that
would serve as a means of understanding the nature of being. In the Middle Ages
there were also some attempts of creating prescriptive grammars of vernacular
languages in order to teach “correct” usage. After the Renaissance, however,
interest in the grammar of the world’s languages started to grow. The fruits of that
interest led to important discoveries that helped establish linguistics as a science
in the 19th century. By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been
printed. Rules of grammar usually accounted for formal, written, literary language
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TOPIC 12 Jerusalén López Urruzola
only and did not apply to all the varieties of actual, spoken language. This
prescriptive approach long dominated the schools, where the study of grammar
came to be associated with “parsing” and sentence diagramming.
As a result, scholars came to see that the study of language can be either
diachronic (its development through time) or synchronic (its state at a particular
time). The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and other descriptive linguists
began studying the spoken language. Saussure (1916) introduced a distinction
between langue (language) and parole (speech). Langue referred to the
unobservable underlying structure of language and parole was the outward
manifestation of that structure. With the publication of his Cours the Linguistique
Générale (1916), in which these distinctions were made public, a new era of
linguistic study called structuralism began.
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TOPIC 12 Jerusalén López Urruzola
The objective is that the learners should understand these various aspects of the
structure. Afterwards, the practice stage consists of a series of exercises whose
aim is to cause the learners to absorb the structure, or to transfer what they know
form short-term memory to long-term memory. We need to use a series of varied
exercises which will complement each other and together provide thorough
coverage of all aspects of the structure. Finally, learners do tests in order to
demonstrate how well they have mastered the material they have been learning,
and to provide feedback, without which neither teacher nor learner would be able
to progress (Hedge, 2000).