Towards a Discourse Grammar in Language Teaching

Abstract

Language is often simply defined as a means of communication. However, communication is a highly complex and intricate process that involves an adequate mastery of a number of linguistic and non-linguistic components. Knowing a language that can effectively be used for successful communication includes, among other things, attaining a functional knowledge of the various language systems including the syntactic system, or the grammar of the language in the narrow sense of the term. The scope of traditional grammar has been confined to sentence structure. That is probably why this approach to grammar has been referred to as sentence-based grammar. However, teaching this form of grammar contributes to the development of learners’ grammatical competence rather than to their communicative ability. This paper argues for integrating discourse grammar in language teaching, and provides evidence to support the role that discourse grammar plays in developing foreign language learners’ communicative competence. Specifically, this paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) What does it mean to know a language? (2) What are the differences between sentence-based grammar and discourse grammar? (3) Why do foreign language teachers, curriculum designers and textbook writers accord more prominence to sentence-based grammar than to discourse grammar in teaching foreign languages? (4) What extra linguistic aspects does discourse grammar offer to language teaching that sentence-based grammar does not? In other words, what are the justifications for incorporating discourse grammar in foreign language teaching?.