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This paper discusses the significance of detailed grammatical explanations of language construction in teaching. Since recent trends in language teaching incline to the oral approach, learners tend to misunderstand the necessity of learning grammar. To acquire practical language use, however, requires grammatical knowledge of constructions which are employed in the target language. As is pointed out by O'Dowd (1998), there is a gap between linguistic theory and language teaching. A great deal of linguistic theories which could be useful in language teaching are not well known in general. By taking up the secondary predicate construction, which is often discussed in the linguistics world but is poorly focused on in language teaching, I argue that learners should not just memorize a number of idiomatic expressions with a particular construction, but should be given a grammatical or even theoretical explanation of the structure. Learning by rote has limitations as a learning method. To facilitate both comprehension and retention, I suggest using TV drama as an audiovisual aide since these programs contain a wide variety of naturalistic examples. |
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