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Meeting 1 - Genre and Grammar.pptx
- 1. GENRE AND GRAMMAR, TEXT, AND CONTEXT Meeting 1 Functional Grammar
- 2. LEARNING OBJECTIVE Student will know what Grammar is Student will analyze the reason why we need to learn Grammar Student will identify the characteristics of Grammar Student will recognize the way people talk about Grammar
- 3. GRAMMAR What do you think when you hear the word grammar? As a student in school, you may have thought of it as a set of exercises to get right in English class. Now, as a person who is studying language in some depth, you will find that grammar is much more.
- 4. WHAT IS GRAMMAR? Grammar is a theory of language, of how language is put together and how it works. More particularly, it is the study of wordings. What is meant by wording? Consider the following for a moment: Times flies like an arrow. This string of language means something; the meaning is accessible through the wording, that is, the words and their orders; and the wording in turn, is realized or expressed through sound or letters.
- 5. CONT. In some theories of grammar, lexicogrammar is called syntax, which is studied independently of semantics. In other theories of grammar, wordings are characterized such that they can explain meaning.
- 6. WHY GRAMMAR? Why do we need to know about grammar? We need a theory of grammar or language which helps us understand how texts work. As teachers we need to know how texts work so we can explicitly help learners learn how to understand and produce texts spoken and written in various contexts for various purposes.
- 7. EXAMPLE Several years ago, one of us overhead a conversation between a Year 9 student and his geography teacher. The student was asking the teacher why he had received a low mark for his project. The teacher responded that the work just didnt hang together. The boy asked, But how do I make it hang together? the teacher responded by suggestingthat the student make the work cohere.
- 8. CONT. This example is not to criticize students or teachers. The student would have made the text hang together in the first place had he known how. And the teacher would have explained in good faith had he known explicitly how texts, especially geography texts, worked. Systemic-functional grammar, perhaps more than any other theory of language, explains how texts, including texts read and written in schools, work.
- 9. CHARACTERIZING LANGUAGE This is where viewpoints begin to diverge. Notice that weve not used the term the grammar of English. Instead, there are several grammars which differ in how they characterize language, depending on the purposes of the user. How people have characterized wordings, that is, devised theories of grammar, depends on the kinds of questions they have asked about language,on what they want to find out about it.
- 10. EXAMPLE OF CHARACTERIZING LANGUAGE Consider for a moment the experience of six blind men meeting an elephant for the first time. One blind man felt the tail and declared that an elephant was like a rope; another felt the trunk and decided that an elephant was like a hose. Another, feeling the ear, felt an elephant was like an umbrella. Each blind man developed a theory what elephants are like.
- 11. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE (GRAMMAR) Theories of language (grammars) are a bit like the blind mens experience of the elephant. Each ended up with somewhat different perspective. And like the blind mens experience, theories of language or grammar are not inherently good or bad, right, or wrong, true, or false. Rather, grammars are validated by their usefulness in describing and explaining the phenomenon called language.
- 12. CONT. As teachers, we can further ask whether the grammar helps learners and their teachers to understand and produce texts. As discourse analysts, we can ask how the grammar sheds light on how texts make meaning. To the extent that grammar can help with these questions, it is more useful than another grammar. There are three grammars which have had a major influence on schools in the western world in this century. Traditional Grammar, Formal Grammar dan Functional Grammar
- 13. TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR Traditional grammar aims to describe the grammar of standard English by comparing with Latin. As such, it is prescriptive. Students learn the names of parts of speech (nouns, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives), analyze textbook sentences and learn to correct so-called bad grammar. Writers are taught, for example, not to start sentences with and, to make sure the subject agrees with the verb (time flies not time fly like an arrow), to say, I did it and not I done it.
- 14. FORMAL GRAMMAR Formal grammars are concerned to describe the structure of individual sentences. Such grammars view language as a set of rules which allow or disallow certain sentence structures. Knowledge of these rules is seen as being carried around inside the mind. The central question formal grammars attempt to address is: How is this sentence structured? Meaning is typically shunted off into the too-hard box.
- 15. FUNCTIONA L GRAMMAR Functional grammars view language as a resource for making meaning. These grammars attempt to describe language in actual use and so focus on texts and their contexts. They are concerned not only with the structures but also with how those structures construct meaning. Functional grammars start with the question, How do the meanings of this text realize? Traditional and formal grammars would analyze our earlier clause as follows:
- 16. SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR Systemic-functional grammar, on the other hand, labels elements of the clause in terms of the function each is playing in that clause rather than byword class. In these last two clauses, the Participant (doer) roles are realized by nouns, the Processes (doing) by verbs and the Circumstance by prepositional phrases. But flying and telling are two quite different orders of doing, and in the above clause like an arrow tells how time flies, while of a tragiccase tells what Tim was talking about.
- 17. SUMMARY Word class labels are certainly not useless, but they will only take you so far. They do not account for differences or similarities to any extent. To sum up the main differences in perspective among the above three grammars, the following table is presented. Formal (+Traditional) Functional Primary How is (should) this sentence How are the meanings concern be structured? of this text realized. Unit of analysis sentence whole texts Language syntax semantics level of concern Language = a set of rules for sentence = a resource for meaning construction making = something we know = something we do
- 18. EXERCISE 1. Each of the sentences immediately below consists of two clauses.Underline each of two clauses in each sentence. Get out of here or Ill scream. Mike plays trombone and Pete sax. She gets crabby when her back hurts. The passenger, who was wearing a seatbelt, wasnt hurt. The passenger who was wearing a seatbelt wasnt hurt, but the lady in the back got a nasty bump.
- 19. EXERCISE 2. Time flies like an arrow was segmented as follows: Time flies like an arrow. How would you segment: Fruit flies like a ripe banana
- 20. EXERCISE 3. Identify in your own words what the purpose of each text below is. Circle all the Processes the words which tell you that something isdoing something, or that something is/was. Make a list of the doingwords for each text; likewise list all the being/having words for eachtext. How does the choice of Processed used in each text reflect the purposeof the text?
- 21. TEXT 1 A man thought he was a dog, so he went to a psychiatrist. After a while, the doctor said he was cured. The man met a friend on the street. The friend asked him, How do you feel? Im fine, the man said, Just feel my nose. (Goldsweig, 1970) Birds are the only animals with feathers. These structures make up the greater part of the wing surface and act as insulation, helping them remain warm. Birds are the most active of the vertebrate animals and they consequently consume large quantities of food. (Source: Year 7 Science student) TEXT 2 EXERCISE NO. 3
- 22. EXERCISE 4. Change the wording of the following to make them less ambiguous. Caution! This door is alarmed! (K-Mart, Chatswood, New South Wales) Please excuse Lorelle; she has been under the doctor with pneumonia. (Note from parent to roll-making teacher) If fire alarm bell rings, evacuate quickly and quietly. (Official safety notices on back of toilet doors, The University of Sidney)