Importance Of Prescriptive Grammar

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This article is about the necessity of teaching spoken grammar in EFL context. Al Wossabi, Sami states that descriptive grammar is given a little attention in EFL context depending on teacher’s knowledge of the descriptive nature of grammar. To support this, he cites Bodine (1975, p.129) who explains that “descriptive grammar is more dominant among theorists, but descriptive grammar is taught in the school and exercises a range of social effects”.
In prescriptive grammar it is recommended the use of formal language approaches. On the contrary, descriptivist grammarians call for teaching grammar rules in the same way they are used in everyday life contexts. They seek to explain the use of the language regardless of the schooling. An example …show more content…

The evidence found reveals a linguistic discrepancy between the language that is used in real contexts and the language that is taught. Barbieri & Eckhardt(2007) needs to be considered because they include some structures that are linguistically complicated for EFL learners.
The rest of the paper is a comparative analysis of reported speech in OPEG and Longman Grammar of Spoken and written English (LGSWE). Al Wossabi, Sami adds that based on this analysis prescriptive and descriptive grammar approaches are not greatly incompatible to each other, since both pretend to get the message across. In addition, learners are usually confused when they are introduced to a new grammar rule. It is, therefore, more reasonable and practical to introduce EFL learners to descriptive rules for oral purposes and prescriptive rules for written …show more content…

We should be interested in the everyday oral use of the language and not to overwhelm the learner with so many structures that they are able to learn within a context. They should have a pleasant learning experience that allows them to interact with others without thinking about what the rules claim. Nevertheless, the fact that prescriptive grammar helps with the preservation of the formal written language is enough to make us think about the importance of teaching some grammar rules in a very formal

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