Despite the many advances in English language teaching, spawned primarily by the Chomskyan theory of generative grammar, (prescriptive) grammar rules remain largely unchanged in Taiwanese schools. These rules, which are considered the gospel truth by teachers and learners alike, contain flaws that would make the people who pay allegiance to this system shudder if it [the system] was placed under a semantic microscope.
Many English-language teachers have readily available answers to the many troublesome questions regarding English grammar. This confidence about the credibility of the prescribed rules stems from the fact that these rules were engraved in stone by the language scholars of the late 19th century. The grammar textbook is akin to a holy book and therefore cannot and should not be challenged.
Prescribed grammar rules do have some merit, but they can be misleading and confusing, not because they are complex or complicated, but because they are structure-derived rather than semantic-generated. In fact, when we teach language, devising rules often puts us in a quagmire rather than on a straight path to language acquisition.
This allegiance to the grammar textbook and the flaws it harbors is further exacerbated by the fact that these rules are taught in the mother language, which detaches language from what is supposed to be.
Allowing formal schemata (linguistic knowledge) in general to dictate content schemata (semantic knowledge) can seriously hinder the learning of the target language and teaching grammar rules that are not generated by real-life situations is like providing a builder with so many bricks, but not enough cement and tools to put the bricks together. Of course, departing from a system that has been working and yielding” satisfactory” results for decades would be met by resistance.
Further, it would be inconceivable to try and reverse the tide of grammar textbooks that flood the market, but we should invest time to dissect them and rethink how we teach grammar to our students, whom we expect to understand and properly use the target language when they are faced with the real life situations.
The trend to turn language into a pure commodity is something nobody can stem, but if we rethink how grammar is taught, we can do that language and its learners a great favor by re-appraising the evaluation system, especially at the college level, where teachers have academic freedom. Helping students put archaic English grammar rules under a magnifying glass should be one of the tasks entrusted to us as educators.
Mo Reddad is a lecturer at I-Shou University’s department of applied English.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs