GRAMMAR IN TEACHING AND LEARNING

Serba Serbi Pendidikan – Sahabat Serba Serbi Pendidikan Grammar is one of the language components. Grammar is a set of signals which language expresses the meaning or the total of structure of the language. Oxford learner’s pocket Dictionary stated that grammar is rules for forming words and making sentences.10 We need a theory of grammar or language which helps us understand how texts work. Grammar is concerned with how sentences and utterances are formed.

Grammar is also the rules of the means of language to construct the sentence and it guides people how to speak and write correctly. Grammar is one of the language component that must be learned by the students.

As teachers, we need to know how to understand and procedure text, spoken and written in various contexts for various purpose. “When we process language we are not only trying to make sense of the words and the grammar, we are also trying to infer the speaker’s or writer’s intention or to put it another way, the function of what they are saying or writing”.12

In the place of grammar instruction in the second or foreign language curriculum. “Rod Ellis points to much recent research on ESL / EFL learning and acquisition and notes that without grammar instruction learners frequently fail to achieve advanced level of grammatical competence”.13 He emphasized that research has shown that grammar instruction can improve the quality of second and foreign language learning.

The Importance of Grammar

Grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to talk about language. The types of words and word groups that make up sentences in grammar not only in English but also in any language. As human beings, we can put sentences together even as children, we can all do grammar. But to be able to talk about how sentences are built, about the types of words and word groups that make up sentences that knows about grammar. And knowing about grammar offers a window into the human mind and into our amazingly complex mental capacity. Grammar adds meaning that are not easily inferable from the immediate context.

People associate grammar with errors and correctness. But knowing about grammar also helps us understand what makes sentences and paragraphs clear and interesting and precise. Grammar can be part of literature discussions, when we and our students closely read the sentences in poetry and stories. And knowing about grammar means finding out that all languages and all dialects follow grammatical patterns.

Every human being who speaks a language knows the grammar. “Grammar is a process for making a speaker’s or writer’s meaning clear when contextual information is lacking”. When linguist wish to describe a language the attempt to describe the grammar of the language that exists in the minds of its speaker. There may of course be some differences between the knowledge that one speakers has and that of another. But there must be shared knowledge because it is this grammar that makes it possible for speakers to talk to and understand one another. “Descriptive grammar, it doesn’t tell you how you should speak; it describes your basic linguistic knowledge; it explain how it is possible for you to speak and understand, and it explain what it is you know about the sounds, words, phrases, and sentences of your language”.

Grammar not only makes a person more conscious of stylistic effects but also helps a writer in diagnosis writing problems. Apart from improving students' writing in the area of sentence construction, grammar can also supply resources for the variation of emphasis in an essay. This is usually a function

                            

Based on the explanation above, we can know that grammar is one of the important language components. The study of grammar all by itself will not necessarily make us a better writer. But by gaining a clearer understanding of how our language works, you should also gain greater control over the way you shape words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. In short, studying grammar may help you become a more effective writer or speaker. It can help us avoid making errors.

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