The Logic of English Sentence Structure

 

 

Nana S. Yahya

 

 

 

Grammar is a kind of ‘sentence-making machine’ (Thornbury, 2002, p. 15). Knowing grammar knowledge equips students with patterns or rules for creating limitless number of new sentences. Furthermore, for EFL students it allows them to recognize and to produce well-formed sentences. It will avoid them from performing non-standard English which occasionally confirms regional and cultural features.

 

Considering the significance, grammar should be part of learning English. On the contrary, teaching grammar for EFL student is occasionally considered a problem. First, Quoting Nunan in the book “Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages” (2002, p.87), it is believed that first language (L1) has an important influence on second language (L2) acquisition, resulting in contrastive analysis. When L1 and L2 are in conflict, it is likely to create errors which is the result of ‘interference’ between L1 and L2. This is the reason why students often come up with a string of English words in native construction like the

sentence below:

 

- She must can do it*

- I go walk every afternoon*

- I school at SMAN 1 Banjarmasin*

 

Then, of the ten claims about grammar myths from “the Educational Resources Information Center” (ERIC) Digest, two of them are declared; grammar is a collection of meaningless forms, and grammar consists of arbitrary rules. It is explained there that grammar is not undimensional and not meaningless; it embodies the three dimensions of morphosyntax (form), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (use). These dimensions are interdependent; a change in one results in others. As we shall see, grammar is very complex. Among parts of grammar, what should be best developed respectively for EFL student? Consider this analogy: “If someone gives you plans for building a specific house and you follow those plans, you’ll be able to build that specific house; however, if you are given plans for building houses in general, you’ll be able to build whatever kind of house you choose.”

 

(Tips for International Speakers of English) It infers that teachers should find rules which are able to generalize the English sentence pattern so that student will be able to produce any kinds of sentence and not depend only in certain patterns for certain problems. The idea of this paper is to show how English sentence structure can be logically learned by deploying ‘contrastive analysis’ habit among EFL students. With a little help from students knowledge in addition-subtraction in Maths and magnet

laws in Physics, students will analyze themselves the sentence transformation from “she bought some vegetables” into “did she buy vegetables?”; or a sentence “his mother wakes up early” into “does his mother wake up early?”; as well as why it isn’t correct to make a sentence “I will can go to your house this evening.”

 

 

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Yahya, N. S. (2005, March). The logic of English sentence structure. Paper presented at LIA International Conference, Jakarta.

 

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