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Grammar provides the structure and rules that governs a language. It tells us how words function in sentences as in the category of, for example, "nouns." Syntax studies how words are combined to form those meaningful sentences (the structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences). Words have to appear in a certain order, otherwise we will not be able to communicate with each other!
Just as nouns name people, places, things, and ideas, adjectives describe those names, and verbs state the action, state of being and occurrence in a sentence, followed by adverbs that modify the verb. These belong to open-class words lexical category (refers to what we know as their part of speech). Yes, it means they can adapt to changes morphologically and syntacticly! On the other hand, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, and auxiliary verbs belong to the closed-class lexical category. These do not adopt new members easily nor often. Teaching Tips : * There are exceptions to the rules of grammatical constructions as you might expect. The challenges are quite a few for ELLs, but to name one, consider the suffix -ing, it can be used as an inflectional suffix to form the progressive tense of a verb, or used as a derivational suffix to create a gerund. Modeling and discussing each case repeatedly would allow students to learn the clues for figuring out how to identify each and develop understanding of the pattern for new cases, over time. * Linguistic scientists and experts advise and encourage educators to teach ELLs the grammar rules and syntax within the context of the academic and daily communications in their classrooms. They can connect sentence structure for example while reading a word problem in math and make a connection with other sentences they are reading in their textbooks. * Teachers would have greater success with the ELLs acquiring knowledge of grammar and syntax through meaningful experiences within the context of reading and writing discourse. It is more important for ELL students to learn how to write a meaningful paragraph about any topic using the correct word order and grammatical rules than actually memorizing those rules. Grammar becomes an integral part of their body of knowledge as they learn English language through social and academic activities with your daily guidance and instruction. |