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KEY CONCEPTS IN ELT
Grammar
Graham Burton
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Most English language teachers are probably comfortable using the word
‘grammar’. There is an established grammatical tradition within ELT, and
terms such as ‘tense’, ‘conditional form’, or ‘defining relative clause’ are
likely to be familiar even to relatively inexperienced teachers. Grammar is
often thought of as something reliable and predictable, but although the
term is a keyword in the ELT profession, it is somewhat under-examined.
A look at the word’s history reveals a perhaps surprising amount of
variation and inconsistency.
The word ‘grammar’ comes originally from Ancient Greek grammatike
(‘pertaining to letters/written language’). Grammar was one of the ‘liberal
arts’ taught in Ancient Greece, and in Rome from around the fifth century
BC, although at this time it was a wider area of study than today, including
textual and aesthetic criticism and literary history. Its study continued
in Europe in medieval times and beyond, with grammar being taught at
schools alongside logic and rhetoric in what was known as the ‘trivium’.
The tradition of studying the grammar of English in British schools did not
emerge until the 16th century (Howatt with Widdowson 2004: 77)—until
then, studying grammar at school meant studying Latin or Ancient Greek,
not vernacular languages. Indeed, the first grammar of English, Bullokar’s
Pamphlet for Grammar (1586), is said to have been written to demonstrate
that the English language was in fact rule-based and could be analysed
in the same way as Latin (Linn 2006: 74). Grammar has lost its status as
a distinct subject in the school curriculum but the word has continued
(since 1530 according to the Oxford English Dictionary) to be used as a
countable noun meaning ‘a book describing the grammar of a language’.
‘Grammar’ has, of course, also come to refer to the actual ‘structure of a
language and the way in which linguistic units such as words and phrases
are combined to produce sentences in the language’ (Richards and
Schmidt 2002: 230), not just to a description of these properties. Yet, even
today, the word means different things to different people. One common
division is that made between descriptive and prescriptive grammar,
with the former describing usage, and the latter attempting to influence
it. Within linguistics, there are many approaches to the analysis of the
grammar of a language, including Noam Chomsky’s transformational
ELT Journal Volume 74/2 April 2020; doi:10.1093/elt/ccaa004 198
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Advance Access publication 16 March 2020
grammar and Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. Mentalists
in the Chomskyan tradition strive to explain the internal rule-based system
by means of which speakers produce grammatical sentences, whereas
Hallidayans, by contrast, look to external, social factors and explore how
these shape the choices speakers make. Nevertheless, within ELT, there
tends to be quite a strong agreement on what the grammar of English
consists of; a brief examination of the contents pages of coursebooks and
well-known learner grammars (e.g. Murphy 2012; Azar and Hagen 2016;
Swan 2016) reveals coverage of the same familiar areas, such as tenses,
articles, relative clauses, and modal verbs.
The sum of these areas can be said to constitute a pedagogical grammar for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/74/2/198/5805512 by guest on 21 September 2022
English, that is to say, a description of language devised specifically for those
learning English as a second or foreign language. Pedagogical grammar
does not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the structure of a
language; instead it focuses specifically on areas of language deemed likely
to be most useful to learners. Here it is worth highlighting Williams’s
(1994) distinction between ‘constitutive’ and ‘communicative’ grammar
rules. For example, word order in affirmative and interrogative sentences or
the -s present simple third-person verb endings are examples of ‘constitutive
grammar’; these are structures or forms that learners must simply learn
as such. By contrast, an example of a ‘communicative’ grammar rule is
the choice between ‘I went to’ and ‘I’ve been to’: these are both formally
correct, and a learner needs to know when to use one rather than the other.
Both types of rule are important for foreign language learners, but older
grammars tended to favour the former and neglect the latter.
Our contemporary pedagogical grammar of English is therefore one of
many possible ‘grammars’ of English, reflecting a consensus that started
to evolve in the 20th century, driven by a burst of activity in the first
half of the century, with individual, often non-native speaker teacher-
1
authors around the world deciding which areas of grammar should be
prioritized. What seems now an obvious point—that learners of English
need grammatical explanations written specifically for them—was once
an innovation; thus, W. Stannard Allen, in the introduction to the seminal
Living English Structure, laments that ‘a large number of [grammar books]
that are intended for foreigners have not managed to free themselves
entirely from the purely analytical point of view’ of traditional school
grammars (Allen 1947/1959: vii). In this period, many well-known content
points in ELT grammar emerged, e.g. much-expanded coverage of future
forms (giving going to and present continuous equal importance to will
and shall), and the three-way conditional system (first found in Allen’s
grammar). The consensus on ELT grammar content that emerged,
especially in materials produced by UK publishers, was added to as the
century progressed, under the influence, in particular, of functional
and notional descriptions (e.g. Wilkins 1976), discourse analysis (e.g.
Halliday and Hasan 1976), and, to a more limited extent, spoken grammar
(e.g. Carter and McCarthy 1995). Arguably, however, the foundations
established in the first half of the century remained unshaken, and
publishers and teachers appear reluctant to deviate from the well-
established consensus (O’Keeffe and Mark 2017; Burton 2019).
Grammar 199
While ELT pedagogical grammar might be argued to be robust in the
sense that it is tried and tested, its contents do not appear to have been
arrived at in a systematic way. The current consensus is strong and thus
difficult to challenge; however, recent research, including that using
learner corpora, has begun to call into question both the choice and
treatment of grammar points (see, for example, Barbieri and Eckhardt
2007; Jones and Waller 2011; McCarthy 2015), and the levels (beginner,
intermediate, advanced, etc.) to which they are assigned (Mark and
O’Keeffe 2016; Burton 2019). Can we be sure that the tradition we have
inherited truly reflects what learners need to know? Will, or indeed
should, the consensus be updated to take account of different features Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eltj/article/74/2/198/5805512 by guest on 21 September 2022
that have been identified in grammars of World Englishes (Davis 2006)
and English as a lingua franca (Ranta 2017)? And, finally, to what extent
and how—if at all—will emerging notions of grammar as a complex,
‘perpetually dynamic’ system (Larsen-Freeman 2012: 76) characterized
by temporal as well as spatial variation come to challenge the received
notions that have, so far, stood the test of time in ELT?
Final version received January 2020
Note (eds.). The Handbook of World Englishes, 509–25.
1 Including, in the first half of the 20th century, Oxford: Blackwell.
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), Etsko Kruisinga Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. 1976. Cohesion in
(1875–1924), Harold E. Palmer (1877–1949), English. London: Routledge.
A. S. Hornby (1898–1978) and W. Stannard Allen Howatt, A. P. R. with Widdowson, H. G. 2004. A
(1913–1996?). History of English Language Teaching (Second edition).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Grammar 201
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