Tag Archives: grammar

The learning of grammar

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Lengalia, José Delgado
Lengalia, José Delgado
Teacher & Founder at Lengalia
In 1990, José Delgado founded Vita Lingua in Hamburg, a language school specializing in Spanish language and culture. Thanks to his continuous hard work and enthusiasm over the years, he has gained a deep understanding of how to effectively teach Spanish. What does the student know right now? Where does he/she want to go? How do we achieve this goal? Questions such as these have helped him develop a truly efficient method, supported by clear and structured materials, that guarantees success in learning. All these materials are under continuous review, ensuring his students have access to the most effective and up-to-date learning experience possible.

This unique combination of effort, knowledge and experience constitutes what Lengalia is today, a portal specialized in helping you learn Spanish online.
Lengalia, José Delgado
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The learning of grammar

Grammar plays an important role in linguistic debates as well as in theories of language teaching, and it will never lose its topicality. Over the years, the view of grammar has gone through various stages: Over many centuries, it was the most important aspect in learning of foreign languages, until it was sometime completely ignored and forgotten. This chapter has been followed by the renaissance of grammar, as a result of which the grammar has received the value which it never should have lost.

Many pupils think that the learning of a language only depends on the comprehension of the grammar rules, but new theories of language teaching say that grammar represents in fact a basic competence, but it is not the only one. Grammar is therefore rightly one of the so-called linguistic competences.

The main objective of language acquisition is communication. Concerning this matter, grammar plays a very important role. It makes sure that the communication is of good quality and not only communication for communications sake and without formal importance. The following is interesting: Over the time mentioned above, in which grammar played no role in language teaching, the pupils fell into a certain ignorance. That has proved that the assumption that grammar is not important, was wrong. The pupils want to have a fixed constant to which they  can orientate in speaking and which offers them security and gives them support.

As for Spanish, grammar is what frightens the pupils the most. Although there are little complex subjects like gender and number which are very regular, there are others which are very complicated. To the second group belongs, for example, the high number of past tenses, which do not exist in this amount in various other languages (see the difference between “pretérito indefinido” and “pretérito imperfecto”). The subjuntivo should also be mentioned. In other languages in which it even exists, it is not as often used as in Spanish. Other complex subjects are the pronouns, the difference between “ser” and “estar” as well as the indirect speech. In this cases, it is important to focus the communication and not only the learning by heart, because grammar does not consist of  mathematic formulas. The learned rules are to be internalized by systematic exercises.

We give answers to grammatical questions and help, if someone has problems. Regarding this, we also orientate toward the levels of the European Framework of Reference for Languages. That can also be interesting for native speakers. We find it extremely important to give useful, clarifying and interesting assistance to the reader.

Words, words and still more words!

Posted on by
4
Lengalia, José Delgado
Lengalia, José Delgado
Teacher & Founder at Lengalia
In 1990, José Delgado founded Vita Lingua in Hamburg, a language school specializing in Spanish language and culture. Thanks to his continuous hard work and enthusiasm over the years, he has gained a deep understanding of how to effectively teach Spanish. What does the student know right now? Where does he/she want to go? How do we achieve this goal? Questions such as these have helped him develop a truly efficient method, supported by clear and structured materials, that guarantees success in learning. All these materials are under continuous review, ensuring his students have access to the most effective and up-to-date learning experience possible.

This unique combination of effort, knowledge and experience constitutes what Lengalia is today, a portal specialized in helping you learn Spanish online.
Lengalia, José Delgado
Latest posts by Lengalia, José Delgado (see all)
Vocabulary

Words, words and still more words!

Numerous are the words which make up the lexis of our language, but that should not frighten us, because they enable us to understand the sense of the messages which we formulate and receive every day. They form groups, distinguish from each other, change, form syntagms, speeches, statements, texts, speech acts, literature and art. They do whatever they want (, which is like this, of course, not true, because we decide in the end which words we use and what we want to express). For this reason, we will, in this category of the blog, talk about the lexis of the Spanish language as well as about its oddities and peculiarities in this. We will also specifically talk about how to learn the lexis.

Many people think that the grammar is the basis of the language and of the learning process, but that is not true. Like studies about the so-called “lexical approach”, founded by Lewis in the 90’s, prove, language can rather be seen as “lexis structured in grammar“ than “grammar structured in words”. That means that a person who approaches a text of a does not have to know exactly the grammar. The comprehension depends rather on the number of the words which the person understands. Concerning this matter, it should also be noted that in a speech, there are many more lexical than grammatical elements.

It is not that important for the communication (and here the reading comprehension) to know the rules which determine, how the speech is composed of the words.

If you comply with the “lexical approach”, the learning has to base on an attractive input which should consist of oral and written tasks and which is adapted to the different learning levels. In this way, the pupil discovers the language which he is to learn, but especially much new vocabulary. The latter helps him in a particular way to learn the foreign language and to add it to his linguistic knowledge.

Which is the best way to achieve that? – The enlargement of your vocabulary with the help of much, much new words. The learning of new vocabulary can be simplified by classifying certain words into word families or interesting, attractive subjects for the pupil. In this way, you can form a network of connections between the new words, which helps the pupil to internalize with minimal effort words, words and still more words. This process will be the subject of the next chapter.