TLGV2 Revised

TLGV 2

What are the main differences between spoken and written English grammar? To what extent and in what circumstances is it appropriate to teach ‘spoken grammar’? Make use of relevant literature in your answer.

Introduction

Spoken grammar provides learners with grammatical choices to create utterances which can provide a deeper interactive and interpersonal use of language. (McCarthy & Carter, 1997).It is spontaneous and transient. However, it is still struggling under the burden of grammatical metalanguage inherited from writing, leading to a notable loss of its natural and informal qualities. Meanwhile, the development of technology forces us to consider conversation and spoken grammar deeply. Nowadays thanks to the advent of computer software and some sound recording technologies, spoken grammar can be analyzed and transcribed faithfully as a corpus. Corpus is a principled collection of texts stored in a computer and is always transcribed and stored for purposes and specific types such as businesses (Carter, 2003). However, there were a hundred million written grammar words for storing only ten million words of spoken grammar. Issues affecting the development of corpus include the difficulty of finding participants and transcribing content. In their research, Goh (2009) and Shin (2007) independently identify the evolution of the English language as another issue. Although the corpus data exists in its inequality, this essay stresses the importance of spoken grammar in the following sections. Based on this short introduction and the following historical foundation, the main purposes can better explore the differences between spoken and written grammar and discuss the implications and appropriate circumstances to teach spoken grammar from both students’ and teachers’ perspectives.

Background of Spoken Grammar

Spoken grammar has experienced a long period from decline to the revival. Firstly, It has originated from the demand of people want to speak. Then it has developed prosperously in the travel around Europe in late 17th to early 19th, and this travel is called Grand Tour. Many young British people communicated with gentlemen around the world in Latin to learn about different cultures. At that time, what they learned in school is spoken Latin, which is the spoken grammar. For example, Vulgaria is the Latin they learned in school. It means common and ordinary things as opposed to classic literature. (McCarthy & Carter 2017). Students spoken Latin for their ‘real-life’ and suggested students spoken Latin on school premises. (McCarthy & Carter 2017, Pendergast 2006:72). In Playing the lord: Tudor Vulgaria and the rehearsal of ambition described the atmosphere in the classroom rehearsals the self-advancement and the entertainment of learning Latin. These records the situation that people raised high awareness of using spoken grammar and enjoyed it. However, spoken grammar was probably influenced by some grammarians like Lowth and Harris. According to McCarthy & Carter (2017), spoken grammar was possibly targeted by the later formed trend towards prescriptivism and explicit proscriptions (they formed an explicit rule that people should not use spoken grammar) because spoken grammar is not in a correct and elegant expression. Prescriptivism refers to the practices where correct and incorrect use of language or specific linguistic items are laid down by rules externally imposed on the user of the language. Explicit proscriptions are also based on creating rules on forbidden use of items or certain formulas in language. According to Lowth (1762/1799:103), he stated that the familiar styles of speaking grammar such as ellipsis and fronting can prevail in common conversation but cannot be suitable to the solemn style because it omitted the relatives and over-focused on the familiar styles. Prescriptivism has seriously influenced the development of grammar in the following centuries. The authority of grammar is almost always along with written conventions, although it has always been mentioned in speaking. 

Then the status of spoken grammar has changed. The development, such as the broadcasting and recording technology and the international commerce in the 20th century, along with the thinking of language study, spoken grammar has been re-asserted because of its importance in description and pedagogy. Many grammarians re-stressed the spoken grammar. Henry Sweet (1899) stated that teaching language should be in accordance with the principles ‘starting from the spoken rather than the literacy language.’ He pointed out the importance of chunk and clusters because it has characteristics like ellipsis and disconnections; however, they are always neglected in pedagogy because they are difficult to bring in the conventional grammar system. (Sweet 1899:121-169). In the latter 20th century, the advent of corpora such as London-Lund Corpus of spoken English and other corpora developed and collected a majority of spoken data for different purposes like business. These data resulted in an explosion of publications demonstrating the features of spoken grammar, especially for daily conversation. The corpus investigations into various chunks in the daily spoken language provided a large amount of data basis for the research of spoken grammar and forced people to re-think the spoken grammar of ordinary people as opposed to the written grammar of writers. In Chapter 2, the essay provides a relatively complete background of spoken grammar. With a preliminary understanding of spoken grammar, the essay will focus on analyzing the differences between spoken and written grammar (chapter 3).

The Main Differences between Spoken Grammar and Written Grammar

Many grammarians have provided definitions of spoken and written grammar. One of the definitions is that, according to Horowitz and Samuel (1987), written grammar is typically associated with materials such as course books, some prose, and classic literature. It is formal and academic. This section will discuss several differences that will influence the teaching approaches and the purposes in the teaching process.

3.1 The Functional Difference 

The fundamental difference between spoken grammar and written grammar is that spoken grammar focuses on fluency. However, written grammar focuses on accuracy. Written grammar consists of grammar rules for writing academic styles, such as punctuation and verb tenses. In many written grammar book such as Essential Grammar in Use provided a variety of written grammar to teach. Written grammar is prepared for demonstrating accuracy and preciseness. Meanwhile the fluency spoken grammar stresses on is the consistency of conversation which means people can communicate with each other smoothly. They use spoken grammar to understand what people say and provide appropriate response. It is not like monologue or a speech. However, usually, testing the speaker’s fluency, schools, or teachers will provide some oral exams or allow the speaker to talk about a topic for one or two minutes. The typical examples like PTE, IELTS, and TEFOL, provide a topic for students to test their oral speaking. In fact, this can hardly show the consistency of conversation because people seldom communicate with each other. Take PTE as an example, learners speak towards a computer without any feedback. All they do is more like a monologue which lasts about 2 hours. When learners participate in IELTS, they always need to speak for 3-4 minutes until examiners interrupt them. Most of time, the examiners are listening and giving scores while the interviewees are speaking, however they won’t judge their oral speaking directly and provide real help. According to McCarthy (1995), this kind of oral test cannot represent how natural conversation is demonstrated in our daily lives. People in these tests possibly might not perform like they talk in their daily life because of several reasons such as the topic he/she does not interested in, the person he/she does not familiar with, anxiety or other emotions. The fluency of spoken grammar is expressing the same meaning of the word flow, which comes from the word fluo ray in Latin. Fluency means to speak like flowing on a river. It means to have a conversation smoothly. People can talk with other people with spoken grammar. However nowadays many oral tests always test the ability of monologue like presentations instead of communicating with others fluently. And this concept is based on McCarthy (1995), he claimed that it is a fundamental element of fluency to show the ability to bridge the conversation by understanding what the topic discusses and hooking the subordinate clause onto the previous speaker.

Meanwhile, the functional difference should be taken into consideration when syllabus designers select the content for language teaching. On the one hand, a syllabus for oral class should naturally be composed of spoken grammar, which improves learners’ ability to speak fluently and confidently in the target language. For example, setting typically daily communication scenarios for students to complete dialogue in English. It should be emphasized on students’ ability to naturally and emotionally express themselves in real conversations with appropriate words accompanied by facial expression as native speakers always do in their conversations. On the other hand, for written grammar, the materials and syllabus should be chosen for improving writing skills, which should consist of grammatical rules such as tense. In accordance with the functions of spoken grammar and written grammar, the courses should contain different materials and methods to meet the purposes in the class.

3.2 The Difference in Lexical Selection

Some grammarians discussed in the literature the differences between spoken and written grammar. Carter and McCarthy (1995) stated that many words are frequently used in speaking; however, they are either absent from writing or less commonly used in writing. For example, according to Shin (2007), he collected around 10,000,000 running words from the British National Corpus. What he found is that the most frequent two words phrase is you know in speaking in English. This means that about twelve thousand examples of you know in a corpus of five million words.

However, according to his findings, based on several written corpus including the Brown corpus, the Wellington Written (WWC), and the British National Corpus, the frequency of you know in written language is about only 0.03 times as often as the spoken grammar. Which means you know is used in only 3 sentences out of 10,000 written sentences. Therefore, the lexical choice of spoken and written grammar is quite different. you know is quite often used in spoken grammar, but is not as frequent as used in written grammar. Another example is that people change the word say in spoken grammar to other words like declare, confirm and state because many course books such as Cambridge grammar of English suggested learners to use these words in academic styles to show their preciseness and authority. Therefore, in teaching spoken grammar, the materials should be selected, like mainly containing spoken grammar since it is always served for listening class to comprehend the context because it is more effective for learners to process the information in a shorter time. On the contrary, a larger proportion of grammatical items in the listening materials may allow students to prepare for a relatively long time to read the context. Therefore, the difference in lexical selection provides thinking of audio materials when teachers teach language.

3.3 The Difference in Syntactic Structure

Another difference between spoken and written grammar is the syntactic structure. In the field of written grammar, the articles should basically contain complete sentences in the academic style. However, in real conversation, the distinct characteristic of spoken grammar is incomplete syntactic structures and short clauses. Which is often called conversational sentence structure. According to Yan (2014), people cannot understand ellipsis (short clauses) like some more? Another one? She said that it still needs environmental clues to let people know easily. When people sitting around table, someone pass you the bread and said some more? The main reason is that the immediate social and interpersonal situation often influences spoken language. Besides, it must be occurred in real-time and tends to be unplanned. According to Carter & McCarthy (2006), it is called situational ellipsis (short clauses). For example, some short sentences like Some more? Ready yet? Hammer, please. When someone is concentrating on his own job, he might speak like hammer please to other person. The person will give the hammer to the speaker. The whole process is called situational ellipsis because all the conversations take place in their situations. People usually say what they need to say, nevertheless, it will be pedantic (people will think it is unrealistic and unnatural). Ellipsis, in the traditional meaning, is leaving out or omitting things that should be there. (Carter & McCarthy 2006). Although hammer please cannot be viewed as a complete sentence, it does not express a different meaning from the original message or confuse other people. Because the ellipsis (short clauses, incomplete sentences) happened in the situation, people elaborate meanings for the ellipsis and complete the whole conversation according to the present situation. This is the incomplete syntactic structure in which written grammar does not involve. When people write texts, they elaborate and complement the sentences to understand no matter where they are or when they read. Therefore, written texts need complete sentences to support the authors’ meaning. This is also one of the main difference.

The circumstances and reasons of teaching spoken grammar

In this section, this essay will, based on English learning situation in China, provide two circumstances of teaching and learning spoken grammar and theoretical reasons for teaching spoken grammar which can show its value and significance in language teaching.

4.1 Circumstance 1 and Its Reasons to Teach Spoken Grammar

4.1.1 Circumstance 1

Learners have mastered written grammar and usually have the ability to write in academic style, however, they might possibly be weak in everyday communication. Because many of them might not use English to communicate in their daily life. According to Goh (2009), a research in a high senior school in China showed that many students always complain that they have difficulty to communicate in English, however, their listening, reading and writing skills are not as weak as speaking. Based on this situation, Spoken grammar might be appropriately taught through combing different communicative tasks such as cultural access tasks, noticing tasks, language discussion tasks to help learners understand and interact with spoken grammar. For example, the cultural access task provides some context of the target language. Teachers can ask learners about the advantages and disadvantages of living in the place. Such task aims to help learners relate the texts of the target language to their own culture.

There are three main reasons for teaching spoken grammar under this circumstance. Firstly, teaching spoken grammar is providing an environment for students to speak in English. Based on the functional difference between spoken grammar and written grammar(chapter 3), students might cannot only study written grammar and unconsciously improve their spoken grammar. When participating communicative tasks, students improve the ability to communicate with others in English and discuss different topics. It will let students understand the purpose of teaching spoken grammar which is to communicate smoothly. Conversation in class is not like a monologue. Learners should complete both listen and provide response.

Secondly, it is also important to let learners understand how to use spoken grammar by learning the features of spoken grammar. Like learning written grammar, learners will know how to speak fluently when they have the lesson. Then they will understand the feature of spoken grammar result in communicating smoothly. For example, there is a feature of spoken grammar called co-construction. It is based on the article written by McCarthy (cited in Clancy & McCarthy 2015 and Tao & McCarthy 2001), and it means doing things together. It is very common for learners to complete a long sentence naturally by several people in a conversation because someone will complementary your words and let the sentences become more meaningfully. For example, student A said: Chinese people have many customs to celebrate their spring festival. student B replied: because it’s one of the most important festivals in a year. Student C said: Yeah, such as giving red pocket. The whole conversation includes some complete sentences which have some main clauses and subordinate clauses like which clauses. Meanwhile, they are created by three students, and it is prevalent in spoken language. According to (McCarthy 2001), co-construction means that spoken language facilitates interpersonal bonding because it is a social action that will unconsciously help one person bond with another. Moreover, it enables the negotiation of meanings. In (Clancy & McCarthy 2015), the negotiation meaning is that human has to search out what the speaker talking about and try to respond by negotiating. It shows the fluency in the whole conversation; namely, people can connect their clauses to the previous speaker. Based on the learning of co-construction, Learners might can complement with each other in a conversation.

Thirdly, it can also arouse the interest of students to talk in English. For students who are in China and other Asian countries have rare opportunity to speak in English because they might do not have the language environment. When they go home, the dominant language is still Chinese. According to Timmis (2005), spoken grammar teaching will be more reasonable in the natural conversation and engage students’ interest. Therefore, we need to create more opportunity for learners to use English and help them arouse interests on it.

4.1.2 Circumstances 2

Apart from students who are weak at speaking in English, another situation is students cannot speak out confidently without over-thinking the sentence structures. According to Goh (2009), L2 learners are bound to sound bookish without using spoken grammar features. Some students even consider that the way of speaking sounds ridiculous because it is like a TV announcer. According to the research of Goh (2009), many teachers found a misconception among Chinese learners, which should construct perfect sentences modeled after written language. They may always over-think the sentence structure, which prevents the communicating process. Based on this circumstance, teaching spoken grammar is appropriate to teach. Here are some reasons. Firstly, learning spoken grammar can provide a space for people to think and organize the sentences. This also will help them communicate naturally not like a TV announcer. For learners who might be easy to feel stressful when they have to communicate with people in English, they need to learn spoken grammar to let them pause a few minutes for thinking and continue the topic. For example they always use you know as fillers to pause a few seconds to think and continue speak. In Shin (2007), you know is one of the most common hesitation forms. It can push the topic for the next thought. If there are no fillers, what can fill the moment of silence? It is a possibly essential element for pushing the conversation without embarrassment. Meanwhile it is quite common to see people do some fillers when people are in an oral test. Recent research at Columbia University (Timmis & Bienvenu 2011) has found a number of data showed that foreign speakers use fillers to pauses when in the IELTS and TOEFL. To investigate the idea, they counted and compared the number of filler words used by various speakers. Then they found the conclusion that fillers such as you know, well, I was wondering can help cope with the time limitation for searching the words. Take my classmates as examples, my classmates always pause the topic by ummm… well… to organize the sentences in their minds and speak confidently.

Secondly, learning spoken grammar possibly can learn how to express their meaning more politely instead of performing like a machine without any emotions. There is another feature of spoken grammar which is its tense-aspect system. The choice of tense refers to time, which mainly is four tense: present, past, present continuous, and past continuous tense. Learners can communicate more naturally when they learned the tense-aspect of spoken grammar. It is based on the theory of McCarthy (1995). An example of a tense-aspect system is the usage of say. In the section of reported speech in many course books, there are lots of practice like Tony says we are going for a picnic. Furthermore, learners should change it like: Tony said they were going for a picnic. According to Carter & McCarthy (2006), the corpus records that what people use hundreds of times are not Tony said, but Tony was saying. This means they use past continuous form to report people to say. Another example of the tense-aspect system of spoken grammar is that I was wanting to book a room. From the perspective of many native speakers I wanted to book a room does not exist any grammar mistakes. According to the grammar book Essential Grammar in Use (2016), pointed out that was doing can express a sense of distance by demonstrating the politeness which done cannot express. This can also show the importance of spoken grammar to demonstrate speakers’ politeness and relations. If learners can use right tense, they might speak more native and politely.

Finally, here is a report to show the support of teaching spoken grammar in China. Many teachers in China has gradually raised higher awareness to teach spoken grammar. According to another research of Goh (2000), in China, 87% of Chinese teachers consider that learning spoken grammar is useful and essential because the characteristics of spoken grammar can meet the learning purpose of most language learners, which is to communicate as fluently as a native speaker.

Therefore, it is appropriate to teach spoken grammar with various communicative tasks to learners who lack ability to communicate in target language. A teacher interviewed in Goh (2009) stated that spoken grammar reveals an authentic picture of language use to students, a world full of incomplete sentences, phrases, vague language, discourse markers, etc. It also proves that spoken grammar should be taught in more familiar way. Moreover, teaching spoken grammar for L2 learners are useful and essential. Although there are some concerns about how to teach spoken grammar have not been solved based on different teaching situations, the next section will provide some suggestions to teach spoken grammar.

4.2 Suggestions of Teaching Spoken Grammar

There are some suggestions from the perspectives of teachers and learners. On one side, to maximize the benefits of spoken grammar, teachers should attempt their teaching of spoken grammar under the linguistic and social environment. According to Timmis (2005), native speakers are habitual users of English for all communicative purposes like negotiating and learning. However, learners can use proper methodologies to improve their spoken English as native speakers by staying in a native speaker environment. On the other side, the learner should practice more by communicating in English to reinforcing the features and create better interaction with other people. Besides, they should distinguish what is for spoken and what is for writing.

Conclusion

This essay has mainly provided some main differences between written and spoken grammar: Spoken grammar focuses on fluency while written grammar stresses accuracy. Spoken grammar is prone to use different lexis from written grammar. It is plausible for spoken grammar to occur incomplete sentences which are not allowed to appear in written grammar. This essay has stressed the significance of teaching spoken grammar and provided the relevant connections between the features and the implications of learning spoken grammar such as co-construction, tense-aspect system and fillers. The fluency concept can help learners speak more naturally; meanwhile, fillers reduce anxiety and encourage learners to speak in English. Besides, the essay has suggested teaching by some task-based approaches, for example, culture across tasks for learners to consider and understand the target language’s culture. However, the main problem should not be neglected, for teachers, the use of methodologies which should be carefully applied to an appropriate linguistic and social environment. Besides, learners should practice more to familiarize themselves with spoken grammar features to communicate in English.

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