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Understanding English Tenses: An analytic approach to the question of meaning of verb forms in English. A new program of advanced grammar for teachers, translators, and students of English
Tomasz Pilch
Paperback. CreateSpace 2011-08-15.
ISBN 9781463777166
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Publisher description
This handbook has been written by a non-native speaker for non-native speakers. It addresses the problems which are encountered by students who do not have the talent to learn a foreign language 'not knowing how' but rather those whose learning must be based on rational and precise understanding of what they study and practice. Understanding English Tenses, as the title suggests, has been tailored to suit the needs of those who want to comprehend how English works (i.e. teachers, translators, and students of English Philology), rather than those whose ambitions do not reach beyond the acquisition of communicative Pidgin. At the same time, in view of the fact that the existing national versions of English, like American English, British English, Canadian English etc., make each a specific and incomplete use of the potential of the whole grammar, this book makes no effort to be either exclusively American or British or Indian or Australian etc. but rather tries to reconstruct the system that 'lies under' all of them, controlling the mechanisms of meaning formation and determining the shape of communication in each of the unique national realizations. Understanding English Tenses is a handbook of practical grammar but of a rare kind. With only a few exceptions, the existing presentations of English grammar try to make the learning easier and more practical by focusing their study on the final forms attained by verbs in typical situations. As a result, the backbone of the popular courses of grammar are tenses, the comprehension of which provides the foundation to build the understanding of the remaining finite forms. The advantage of this approach to teaching is speed and facility in acquisition of grammatical awareness on the least demanding and elementary level. The students obtain condensed recipes of how to deal with typical situations, presented with linguistic reflection and terminology reduced to the absolute minimum. The shortcoming of this methodology is the fact that it is done at the expense of precision and, often, accuracy of understanding of the studied phenomena. It is the consequence of the fact that, to borrow the terminology from physics, the tense forms in English belong to the grammatical 'macro' reality, whereas the question of their meaning is determined in 'micro' scale. The elementary 'particles' of which the English verb system is built are phenomena called Aspects: the grammatical aspect (i.e. the Continuous and the Perfect) and the lexical aspect - the final shape of the meaning of a given verb is always determined by a combination of these three. The probable reason why, despite their significance, the aspects are so rarely talked about in the teaching process is the fact that their study is apparently believed to require reserving a part of the classroom time to discussion of grammatical terms and phenomena treated directly and, therefore, lacking any visible link to immediate usage, which, in the competitive world of the language courses is a sin unforgivable. An obvious question arises if it is at all needed to modify the method of teaching grammar particularly if it should require a detailed study abstracted from developing practical skills like 'greeting a friend, ' 'buying food, ' 'reading time tables' etc. The answer depends on the needs of the learners. If they have no use for reaching a near-native level of language competence, if they might be satisfied with merely an ability to communicate on an elementary level, in their case the answer is possibly that such an in-depth study of grammar is not needed. However, if their ambitions require a fully proficient use of the resources of the language, particularly when they have no talent to learn a foreign language 'subconsciously, ' the analytical method of studying grammar is their only hope. Only by analysing the grammar on the level of operation of aspects can one learn how it really works
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Understanding English Tenses: An analytic approach to the question of meaning of verb forms in English. A new program of advanced grammar for teachers, translators, and students of English
Book reviews » Understanding English Tenses: An analytic approach to the question of meaning of verb forms in English. A new program of advanced grammar for teachers, translators, and students of English
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