Syntax

This has always been a dreaded subject of mine ever since I've studied linguistics (I've had one other linguistics class in my undergraduate studies). I dreaded it mainly because I don't usually think of English being split up into these different parts. I am able to recognize verb and noun phrases rather quickly just because they help to provide much of the meaning when it comes to sentences, but simple things such as prepositional phrases and determiners always threw me off. This is because my knowledge of syntax wasn't explicitly learned. In my last linguistics class I studied a lot for the final exam and I got an A, but I didn't really try to understand these tree diagrams because they annoyed me so much.

The thing that I liked about Finegan's chapter 5 on syntax though was that it explained the tree diagram slightly more explicitly than my previous linguistics text and class had. I think that many teachers assume that native speakers have this grammatical knowledge consciously (we have it subconsciously, but rarely remember what determiners are because we already know how to use them). This assumption allowed my previous teacher to skip much of the important information about tree diagrams (although we studied syntax in general more explicitly) and this is what caused me to dislike the kinds of exercises that we we're assigned for today. Since I was able to get an A in my previous course without the knowledge of the tree diagrams I assumed that I was home free and would never have to encounter them again in my life. I guess I was wrong.

This time I decided to go through Finegan's chapter and make sure that I built some conscious knowledge upon my already existing subconscious knowledge. Once I was able to do this the exercises became relatively easy and straight forward, whereas before they almost seemed like a complicated math problem. I think that these were good exercises because not only does it make sure that we know much of this syntactic knowledge consciously so that we can make our ESL/EFL students aware of it, but I think for those of us who don't pay much attention to grammar (usually native speakers) this exercise allows us to empathize with our potential students because the language must look like a complicated math problem or a puzzle at times and this can become frustrating. It is our job as teachers to give them the tools to be able to unlock and understand the language at many different levels and once this happens I think that students become heavily engaged with language learning because they now are beginning to learn the coding of the language.