Rule and Meaning in the Teaching of Grammar

Introduction It is now possible to employ a fully communicative approach to language teaching while at the same time attending to grammatical structure, but only if one can decisively abandon a mindset in which structure consists of rules governing form only and fully adopt instead a view that structure consists of forms that encode meanings, which speakers choose in order to communicate messages. Across a wide range of linguistic theoretical frameworks, the construct of the rule (i.e., a manipulation of purely formal properties of language) has been rejected as a device of grammatical description. This change includes both the most formal of traditions, principally the The field of second-language acquisition (SLA) has followed suit to some extent. Terrell (1991) envisioned language acquisition without rules in this sense—what we will refer to subsequently as 'f-rules.' Larsen-Freeman (2003) retains f-rules only as statistical artifacts of communication, the fallout of speakers' choices of meaningful form. The importance of this notion of rule has declined as work in theoretical, particularly functional, linguistics finds its way into applications in language education (e. The construct that stands foremost to replace the f-rule as a device to account for the distribution of forms is that of linguistic meaning. The construct of linguistic meaning, however, is also theoretically heterodox and prone to confusion with other conceptualizations of meaning. 2 While the terms rule and meaning are not—and perhaps need not be—used identically in linguistics and in language teaching, clarity about both would further dialogue, understanding, and practice. This article illustrates, with authentic examples and a variety of grammatical domains, how grammar always involves meaningful form, sometimes transparently, sometimes less so. It examines the variety of uses of the terms rule and meaning in linguistics and in SLA, as well as their relation to form and briefly reviews the history of the concept of the form-meaning connection (FMC) in linguistics and SLA and offer a needed extension for SLA. Finally, it offers practical steps that teacher-educators can take to base their pedagogy less on arbitrary rules and more on meaning. Towards a meaningful grammar With certain aspects of grammar, meaning is so transparently involved that it would be hard to convince anyone to ignore it. There may be complexities in usage that puzzle us, but most examples are so obvious that we readily imagine meaning being involved even in the hard cases that we may not be able easily …