Stage 2 guidelines for reading: Grammar

Here are some grammar objectives for Stage 2 learners when reading:

• To recognize irregular forms of verbs or nouns
• To recognize classes of words that are followed by particular prepositions or cases
• To recognize morphophonemic variations in words

• To recognize more subtle variations in meaning in the language coded in the grammar.

  The specific variations will depend on the language you are learning, but here are some possibilities:

  • Subjective or optative mood of verbs
  • Aspect: perfective versus imperfective
  • Derivational morphology
  • Irregular forms of verbs or nouns

Here are some grammar strategies for Stage 2 guidelines for reading:

• Advance organization

  Read as much as possible about the grammatical system of the language you are learning. Read about grammatical features common in the family of languages to which the language belongs. A book on linguistic typology will help you understand what types of grammatical features tend to occur together.

• Analysis

  Analyze the order of elements in different grammatical structures and how they fit into a system.

  See:	The Linguistics Workshop for more information on grammatical analysis

• Inference

  Read lots of material you can understand to help you acquire grammatical structures without conscious analysis.

Here are some grammar techniques for Stage 2 guidelines for reading:

The Text Portfolio technique

• The Bilingual Reading technique
• The Familiar Stories technique
• The Text Analysis technique

Here is a grammar activity for Stage 2 guidelines for reading:

Read as much as possible of a variety of different types of written materials. Different genres of writing will have different kinds of grammatical structures, so making sure you read different types of writing will give you a fuller exposure to grammatical structures.

• Generic module: Stage 2 guidelines for reading: Grammar
• In overview module: Stage 2: Reading modules
• In modular book: Guidelines for a Language and Culture Learning Program, by Carol J. Orwig
• In document collection: Other Resources
• In bookshelf: Language Learning

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 3.5, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 8 December 1998

© 1999 SIL International