What is syntax?
Why do we; as future teachers need to study syntax?
God creates us
with minds different from other creatures to differentiate between things and
to see how things actually work. We as humans it’s our nature to study things
and see how they really work. As any other study, language syntax and
linguistic must be studied to see how sentence are formed and how they are
structured.
This semester I
took the syntax course. It was a fruitful and interesting course. Rather than
only memorizing theories or books and reading novels, syntax gave us the chance
to solve applications and think in a scientific way, since it can be considered
as a scientific method and we can apply in syntax the scientific methodology
(gathering data, making generalizations, and developing hypothesis).
As a
definition, syntax is the study of the rules, principles and processes that
dominate the structure of the sentence in general, and word order specifically.
While writing these sentences the writer tends to reach a variety of reasons;
such as, fitting the situation, reaching the audience and achieving certain
purposes.
Syntax is not
only important in written language, it is also part of the components of the
oral language (as shown in the
following web - what is oral language Heinemann?)
Why do teachers
have to study syntax?
·
First
of all, the more teachers know about how language works, the more they can
effectively use language to help their students learn.
·
It’s
not necessary for students to know much about syntax if they want to learn the
language. It’s not important for them to know how to draw trees for sentence
structure, know the binding theory or the X-bar theory. It’s not essential for
students in grade one or any other grade to know all of these. However, the
teacher has to know them because the greater the teacher’s understanding of the
language the easier he/she will make good decisions on complicated topics like
spelling and grammar.
·
Teachers
must study syntax to understand how students acquire the language.
·
Studying
syntax gives us many answers for many questions we used to ask when we were in
elementary schools and no one told us the right response. As well as, it is the
answer to the students’ questions that they might ask us as future teachers.
·
Syntax
helps teachers to develop set of rules that we mainly call parameters. Some
linguists said that all languages have the same parameters which we call the
universal grammar. (Chomsky-1928)
·
The
study of syntax includes the study of the function of the words within a phrase
or a sentence. So teachers have to recognize this to help students understand
words in sentences or phrases and their corresponding positions.
In conclusion, syntax is a very important
skill that future teachers should acquire. Syntax is the study of the
principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular
languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the
construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for
producing the sentences of the language under analysis. (Noam Chomsky)
