ANALYZING ENGLISH GRAMMAR
EXERCISES FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS
Bente Hannisdal and Gard Buen Jenset
Analyzing English Grammar
Bente Hannisdal and Gard Buen Jenset
Analyzing English Grammar
Exercises for Advanced Students
Copyright © 2012 by Fagbokforlaget Vigmostad & Bjørke AS
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ISBN: 978-82-450-1275-0
2. opplag 2016
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Introduction
A term like “English grammar” is clearly in need of a definition. It can, depending on the circumstances, refer to teaching learners of English basic insights about how to use the language, to teaching university undergraduate students how to get to grips with the finer grammatical details of the language, or to subtle and highly technical analyses of grammar closely tied to a specific theoretical framework. In this book we aim for the second conceptualization.
The fundamental perspective we adopt in this book takes language to be a functionally motivated communicative system. Such a perspective should not be taken to imply that we reject language as a social or cognitive system; however, for the purposes of teaching English grammar to undergraduate students, we believe that our choice of perspective has some merit. That language is multi-faceted and multilayered should not, in our opinion, preclude highlighting certain aspects of it whenever it is appropriate.
Our reason for writing this book was a shared sense of need for a set of grammar exercises that were sufficiently advanced to be appropriate in higher education without making too strong theoretical commitments, but which nevertheless addressed the typical problems facing Norwegian undergraduate students of English. To achieve this, we have deliberately designed the exercises with varying degrees of difficulty and various types of
usage – or theory orientation. We have striven to create a sense of progression throughout each chapter, so that – very generally –the earlier exercises are more usage oriented than the later ones, although this does not hold for all chapters. Particularly challenging tasks are labelled with Critical thinking : in our view it is imperative that the students should not only solve grammar problems and find the right answer; they also need to be challenged to think critically about language, grammar, and linguistic analysis. Since many of the intended users of this book will be pre-service teachers studying English in a teacher training institution, we have also included a few exercises which take a comparative Norwegian–English perspective.
When preparing this book we have tried to use generally accepted grammatical terms without too much theoretical baggage. Nevertheless, the book is certainly coloured by its intended use as a companion to two English grammars currently in use in higher education in Norway: Bækken (2006) and Dypedahl, Hasselgård, and Løken (2006). Since Bækken (2006) has a considerably wider coverage, it uses terms that are not employed in Dypedahl et al. But overall, the terminological differences are minor, and the term list provides a convenient overview of the cases where the two books use different terms for the same phenomenon. Although we kept these two grammar books in mind when preparing the exercises, this does not in any way preclude their use with other functional grammar books such as Leech and Svartvik (2003). Some exercises are inspired by cognitive functional approaches to English grammar, specifically Radden and Dirven (2007), which in our opinion nicely illustrates that the conceptualization of language as a “cognitive” vs. “functional” system is not an either−or situation, but a continuum.
A fundamental premise of the exercises in this book is that the examples should be real life, authentic usage events. We are
sceptical toward fabricated textbook examples, not only because they often sound somewhat contrived, but because they face a very real risk of not capturing the vast variation found in authentic language use. Although simple, concocted sentences might be easier on students early on in their studies, they are a poor preparation for dealing with real life usage either in teaching or research. For this reason, virtually all texts or sentences in the book are authentic examples taken from newspapers, magazines, the Web, or from online corpora such as The BYU-British National Corpus, or BYU-BNC (Davies 2004) and The Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA (Davies 2008). Nevertheless, despite our aspirations, we have at times made certain modifications to the texts and sentences, mainly to weed out complexity that we deemed unrelated to the task at hand. Thus, although some examples might seem unusual or even ungrammatical to some, they attest to the wide variation that English grammar allows, and which we believe students can only benefit from being exposed to.
The authors would like to thank Kristin Eliassen at Fagbokforlaget for her support and Øystein Heggelund at Telemark University College for his helpful comments. Both have provided us with encouragement and helped to improve the book, of course without shouldering any of the authors’ responsibility for whatever errors or inconsistencies might remain.
Bergen, October 2011
References
Bækken, Bjørg. 2006. English grammar: an introduction for students of English as a foreign language. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.
Davies, Mark. 2004. BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. Brigham Young University. http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc.
2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 410+ million words, 1990–present. Brigham Young University. http://www.americancorpus.org/.
Dypedahl, Magne, Hilde Hasselgård, and Berit Løken. 2006. Introducing English grammar. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.
Leech, Geoffrey, and Jan Svartvik. 2003. A Communicative Grammar of English. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
Radden, Günter, and René Dirven. 2007. Cognitive English grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chapter 9
Pronouns vs. determiners
Chapter 10
Indefinite pronouns and determiners
Chapter 11 Relative pronouns
Chapter 13
Verbal categories
Chapter
Exercise
Chapter 17
Chapter 20
Dependent clauses
Exercise
Notes on terminology
AnalyzingEnglishGrammar:ExercisesforAdvanced Studentsoffers a wealth of exercises aimed at Norwegian university and college students of English. Packed with authentic material drawn from corpora, the Web, newspapers and magazines, it covers the main topics taught in undergraduate grammar courses and provides realistic exercises adapted for the undergraduate level.
ISBN 978-82-450-1275-0