Tense

Every verb consists of two characteristics: tense and aspect. Tense is time: when an action, event or state of being took place. In English there are three tenses: past, present and future: I go, I went, I will go.

Modality

Thornbury: “A grammatical means by which interpersonal meaning can be conveyed.” Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (The Grammar Book, 1999) describe it as a facet of “register” (along with field and tenor), referring to “the channel of communication.” It can be written or spoken language. If spoken, it can be face-to-face or distant communication.

Aspect

Aspect describes “characteristics of the activity or state represented by a verb.” (Peter Master, Systems in English Grammar, 1996) In English, functionally we have three: simple, perfect and continuous. Each can be used with the past, present or future tense.

Simple represents either an action that is completed (I finished my homework), or one that occurs repeatedly (I do my homework).

The continuous (or progressive) aspect, according to Michael Swan (Practical English Usage, 2009), “does not simply show the time of an event. It also shows how the speaker sees the event — generally as ongoing and temporary, not completed or permanent.” We form this aspect by using the verb “to be” and adding a verb’s present participle (-ing): I have been going to school for two months.”

The perfect aspect is harder to understand theoretically. Practically,  Harmer (How To Teach English, 2008) describes it as: “…made with ‘have/had’ + the past participle (or ‘been’ + the ‘-ing’ form) for the verb…” The perfect form can be present, past or future, and it can be simple or continuous; respectively, “My friend Anna has visited me” and “My friend Anna has been visiting me.”

Ahhhh: I finally found a good, simple description (Essentials of English, Hopper et. al., 2000): “A perfect tense is used to talk about an action that occurs at one time but is seen in relation to another time.” The future perfect, for example, describes an action that began in the past and will be completed by a definite time in the future: “By the time I finish studying, I will have learned a lot.” [Question: How do you explain the difference between that and “By the time I finish studying, I will know a lot.”?

For all of these, it helps to visualize a continuum on which an action or state exists.

Descriptive Grammar

An outlook on grammatical aspects of linguistics that seeks to examine, without subjective judgment, how a language functions. As the foundation for a teaching method, it recognizes the validity of each speaker’s form of language, and uses that as a foundation for teaching of grammar. It looks at language from the top down. Deductive and discovery learning are consistent with this view.

Prescriptive Grammar

A set of rules based on the idea of the one “right way” of using grammar. In teaching it manifests as sentence diagrams and conjugations, etc., in a bottom-up approach. It is closely tied to inductive and rule-driven learning.

Function, Form

Function is the communicative role that a word or construction plays in a text. Form relates to the construction of the utterance. In teaching, they can be seen as a continuum, with accuracy being at one end and fluency at the other. Teaching in the fifties and sixties focused more on form — the drilling of “proper” grammar — and then the pendulum swung more toward the usage side. Now we realize the importance of both, and the need not to sacrifice one for the other. Thornbury talks about the importance of “paying attention to form” versus “focusing on form.”

Rules of Use and Rules of Form

There is a distinction in pedagogy between rules of use and rules of form. Thornbury talks about these two terms as separate aspects to or phases of a lesson. The former could be “The simple past tense is used to indicate past actions or states.” The latter: “To form the past simple of regular verbs, add –ed to the infinitive.

Interestingly, I struggled in this exercise with defining the verb aspects, and now realize that I was finding the rule of form easier to grasp, but only because I didn’t really understand the rule of use. I still don’t. It’s proof that knowledge is incomplete without both, for me.

Thornbury says that rules of form are easier to formulate and less controversial. Rules of use are harder because they’re heavily dependent on contextual factors and are seldom “black or white.” Again, the example above reinforces that.

Diane Larsen-Freeman’s model of the “interconnected dimensions of grammar” explore the idea of teaching grammar always with three interconnected factors in mind: Function, Form and Meaning. One cannot truly be understood without the other.

Learnability and Teachability

Thornbury talks about three factors in grading a syllabus. By that he means where and when and in what order to teach a particular item. Complexity is the first factor, and relates to how many elements a grammar point consists of, which a learner must understand. Learnability is the second factor. He distinguishes it from complexity. It is more related to Krashen’s “natural order” idea: that humans tend to acquire grammatical structures in a predictable sequence. The idea is still controversial but appears to have some validity. The third factor “that might influence the selection and ordering of items on a grammatical syllabus” is its teachability. How easy is it to demonstrate? We often teach the present simple early in a curriculum even though it’s a relatively low-frequency form. And the articles, though used constantly, are formally presented later in a sequence because of their complexity.

Pedagogical Rule

A principle, based on research and evaluation in the field of learning, for effective teaching of language. It is practical, in contrast to a linguistic rule which is theoretical. Thornbury also talks about an explanation’s “truthfulness” (linguistic completeness) and “worth” (value as a teaching tool), and the need to strike a balance. He discusses such rules as those of economy, relevance, appropriacy and others: criteria that guide the teaching and allow for some objective ascertainment of effectiveness.