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• Margarito Escalante

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UNIVERSIDAD AUTONOMA DE CHIAPAS

MARGARITO ESCALANTE CRUZ DIDÁCTICA DE LA GRAMÁTICA Y LOS ELEMENTOS LÉXICOS LEARNING GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY ASESOR MTRA. ANGÉLICA PATRICIA CÓRDOBA MEZA JANUARY 23rd 2021

TEACHING GRAMMAR IN CONTEXT The linear approach to language learning is based in the premise that learners acquire one grammatical item at a time. The language wall is built with one linguistic “brick” at a time. The task for the learner is to get the linguistic bricks in the right order, if the bricks are not in the right order, the wall will surely collapse. However, in practice we observe that learners as they go along through the learning process of a second language, they do not acquire language in the step-by-step. Learners acquire numerous stuff at the same time, even imperfectly. Metaphorically speaking, it is more like growing a garden than building a wall. Usually in coursebooks, grammar is presented out of context, in the form of isolated sentences, so they are unable to use them in real context. Our duty as teachers is to help learners that real communication involves harmony between functional interpretation and formal appropriacy. If learners are not given opportunities to explore grammar in context, they will fail in learning how and why alternative forms exist to express different communicative meanings. Form-focused exercises are needed with an approach that dramatizes for learners the fact that different forms enable them to express different meanings. The organic approach offers opportunities for teachers and students to look at language in a new way as a vehicle for taking voyages of pedagogical exploration in the classroom, by:     

Teaching language as a set of choices. Providing opportunities for learners to explore grammatical and discoursal relationships in authentic data. Teaching language in ways that make form-function relationships transparent. Encouraging learners to become active explorers of language. Encouraging learners to explore relationships between grammar and discourse.

HOW WORDS ARE LEARNED? Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed, such is the importance of vocabulary in language learning. Vocabulary has been seen as a mere collection of items, however two key developments challenged the hegemony of grammar, one was the lexical syllabus, based on those words that appear with a high degree of frequency in spoken and written language, the other was the recognition of the role of lexical chunks, in achieving fluency, this has raised the awareness as to the key role vocabulary

development plays in language learning. Now is being given more attention to the grammar of words, collocation and to word frequency. At the most basic level, knowing a word involves knowing its form and its meaning. We tend to understand more words than we utter, first we get them before we can use them at speaking. Our way to organize our word knowledge is through a complex organized and interconnected fashion what is called the mental lexicon, and we can think of this as an overlapping system In which words are stored as “double entries” one containing information about meaning and the other on form, because of the enormity on processing time, several pathways will be activated at the same time across the network, this is known as “spreading activation” linked to this system, there are areas of cognition and memory and knowing a word is the sum total at all these connections semantic, syntactic, phonological, orthographic, morphological, cognitive, cultural and autobiographical. The first things children learn in their mother tongue basically is for labelling, and in order to acquire a vocabulary requires not only labelling but categorizing skills. And then a process of network building -constructing a complex web of words that are interconnected, perhaps when learning a second language, the fact that learners already have a first language, so they have the conceptual system those words encode and the complex network of associations that link these words, and they would have to learn a brand-new conceptual system and construct a new vocabulary network -a second mental lexicon. But then, when learning a new word, the second language learner is likely to short-cut the process of constructing a network of associations and map the word onto the mother tongue equivalent. Many cross-language errors are due to what are known as false friends because meanings do not correspond, also they share words known as cognates, strangers and acquaintances. A further major difference between first and second language vocabulary learning is in the potential size of the lexicon in each case.