Teaching English

When we know much about language, it will make us to be successful in teaching of a second language. However, the gap between a child acquiring his first language and a child learning a second language, at a time when he already possesses language, is likely to be so big that any direct application of our knowledge is difficult, the more so because our knowledge in the first place is still extremely shaky.

Most recent studies of the acquisition of syntax have been concerned with the linguistic competence of the children at different stages of their linguistic development and an effort has been made to write generative grammars for these stages. The investigators have been interested in the obtained data only to the extent that they throw light on the child’s system of internalized rules for generating language. A distinction is made between performance – the actual utterances – and the underlying competence on which performance is based.

Linguistic theory should provide an adequate characterization of the native speaker’s knowledge of his language, i.e. the native speaker’s intuition of what is grammatical in his language should be capable of being described in a logically consistent way. Even if it were possible, to give a descriptively adequate account of an adult native speaker’s linguistic competence, an adequate description of a child’s competence is very much more difficult, both because the child’s intuition of what is grammatical is not available and also because the child’s competence is continually developing.

The sentence singled out for closer scrutiny were interrogative and negative sentences of the kind that in adult language require a do-transformation. These are of particular interest because the comparable sentences in Norwegian are made by inversion of subject noun phrase and verb.

Only negative and interrogative sentences have been singled out in the study for analysis. However, some examples of declarative sentences were included for comparative purposes. Being semantically empty it does not appear as a morpheme in deep structure and the task of the learner of English is to discover the particular function of do as a tense carrier. This might help to explain the reason why do-transformations constitute a particular difficulty for foreign learners of English. In this respect do has not the same status as the modal auxiliaries, which behave, along with have and be, roughly in the same way as the equivalent auxiliaries in Norwegian.

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