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Back to structure and Function Conclusion Last but not least, I hope that these notes on assigned school textbooks in general are of some importance to our dear colleagues and our students who study English literature, especially those who are very much interested in curriculums and who would like to be familiar with clauses and phrases in English and some idiosyncratic properties of the English language. Of course, I cannot go further into the minutest details of all English clauses and phrases. Besides, I do not want teachers to complicate matters to their students, but at least, I have just wanted them to form a good idea about these grammatical notions that may enrich their scope of the course they are teaching. Believe or not, even lazy students have the ability to distinguish the distinguished teachers from the incompetent ones. To be a competent teacher entails that you should be aware of most of the branches of linguistics and applied linguistics (syntax, semantics, phonetics psycho-linguistics, socio-linguistics, applied linguistics… etc.). This will enable you to explain your lessons with much more confidence without getting your students involved into superficial complications they do not need. As a matter of fact, I have written these notes, especially to our students of English, to the caring teachers, to the devoted teachers, to the ones who like to read extensively, to those who like to be good listeners and good readers, to the teachers who want to enjoy a sharp mentality in grammar, to those who do not mock the mentality of their students, whether they are brilliant or lazy ones. I delivered a three-hour lecture in the Teachers’ Training Service Center in Syria on some of these notions and ideas. That was in 1997. Today, I call upon all the teachers and all students of English everywhere to hold symposiums in which constructive discussions can be fruitful for all. We always say that the teacher is the master of the class and I say s/he should be, first and foremost, the master of the language in order to be able to master his class. So, I suggest a seminar be held once or twice a year for the teachers of this country in which topics such as grammar, applied linguistics, methodology can be discussed on a wide scale. In applied linguistics, teachers will be acquainted with concepts like mistakes, errors, the types of errors, the difference between errors and mistakes and their causes. This can be performed empirically when analyzing the errors of our students. There are still so many unanswered questions related to syntax and methodology in the minds of a great number of teachers and a limited number of brilliant students. Some of these questions are the following: Is subject always the subject of the sentence? Why do we omit the s in phrases like a fifteen-day holiday and a three-year course? Since both present participles and gerunds have the same form (v+ing), what are the criteria we can base on to distinguish between them? How do we recognize that “to” is a part of the infinitive and not a preposition? What is a noun clause? And what are its syntactic functions? What is a cognate object? When are commas used or not used between adjectives? And on presenting such new grammatical concepts to our dear students of English, what approaches should the teacher adopt? Should he/she be behaviouristic or communicative? Or should he follow the cognitive approach? Written by ( Msallam Kombaz) References:
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