CHAPTER 2

Grammar: Form,
Meaning, and Use

The concept of grammar and how to teach it includes a wide range

of perspectives. Some teaching approaches focus on formal rules of
grammar that precede language practice or performance. This
deductive approach to the teaching of grammar provides a
general rule and then gives students opportunities to practice the
language using specific examples. Other approaches provide
students with examples of language and ask them to state the
grammar rules that apply. This inductive approach expects
students to discover the grammar rule by reference to the
examples. A good deal of research has been undertaken in the
differences and effectiveness of inductive and deductive
approaches to teaching grammar (Ellis, 2002) that shows the
effectiveness of both approaches in different contexts and with
different types of grammar rules. Of course, within the
inductive/deductive dichotomy of teaching grammar, a variety of
different techniques can be used, which suggests that adopting a
single approach to grammar teaching does not account for many
relevant factors such as the various reasons and purposes for
learning English, the contexts in which it is learned, the age of
students, the class size, the relative difficulty of the grammar feature
in question, and the proficiency level of students. Thus, ensuring
that student needs are being met requires a wide range of
approaches and techniques in

5
grammar teaching. To meet these needs, a very basic question must
first be answered: what is the main purpose of grammar teaching?
The perspective adopted in this book is that grammar teaching in L2
contexts seeks to help learners gain grammar ability so that they can
use grammar accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. These
three adjectives that define grammar ability—accurate,
meaningful, and appropriate—may be quite
different from other teachers’ views of grammar. Reflection, however,
reveals that grammar knowledge does not just relate to accuracy.
Relevant components of meaning (semantics) and use (pragmatics)
are important parts of grammar knowledge. Knowing the distinctions
between these components of grammar knowledge can help
grammar teachers be more effective.

Form, Meaning, and Use

One useful way to think about grammar is through a form, meaning,
and use (FMU) perspective made popular by The
Grammar Book (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman,
2015), as well as Diane Larsen-Freeman’s book Teaching
Language: From grammar to
grammaring (2003). Each of these components are
discussed in more detail ahead.
Form refers to the structure of a phrase or clause. In a given
context, certain forms are required in English to be considered
accurate. Form describes either the required form of a word (She
likes to travel is preferred to She like to
travel ) or a required word order (I can’t tell you is
preferred to I no can tell you). Form is often described
by reference to rules that speakers follow (either consciously or
unconsciously) and is likely what most people think of when they
think of grammar.
 REFLECTIVE QUESTION
● Thinking about your own understanding of English grammar,
would you characterize your grammar knowledge as mostly
explicit, mostly implicit, or a combination of both explicit
and implicit?

Grammar ability involves not just explicitly learning or describing

rules but also using language for real communicative purposes. Of
course, rules

6 Teaching Grammar
provide helpful guidelines for understanding grammar and clearly
have their place in the grammar classroom, but being able to state a
grammar rule does not mean that one can actually use it. The
distinction between stating a grammar rule and using grammar
suggests that one type of knowledge (explicit knowledge) does not
necessarily translate into another type of knowledge (implicit
knowledge). The curriculum designer or teacher must ultimately
decide to determine the extent to which the class addresses formal
rule-learning, but all teachers and curriculum designers should be
aware that grammar does not consist entirely of formal rule-learning.
In addition to form, grammar contains a semantic (meaning)
compo nent. In fact, if people paid no attention to meaning, what
would be the point of communication? If grammar teachers only
focus on form, they quickly run into problems. For example, I
saw a movie means something very different from I am
seeing a movie. A learner may produce either structure
accurately (the forms of both sentences are accurate), but the two
sentences have very different intended meanings. Thus, learners
need to know how to use the correct structure to reach an intended
meaning.
 REFLECTIVE QUESTION
● What other examples of meaning distinctions in grammar might
cause confusion?

Moreover, certain types of grammar forms are preferable over

others, depending on the context. For example, sentences with
contractions (I’m happy to see you’re here)
are much more common in spoken language or informal types of
writing than in written academic contexts. Common distinctions such
as conversation versus writing or formal versus informal illustrate
systematic differences in how grammar is used in the two contexts.
When teachers caution their students, “Don’t talk like you write” or
“You wouldn’t say that in a formal presentation,” they are talking
about use. The relationship between grammar and context is
found in research on register variation (Biber,
1988, and Biber & Conrad, 2019). Research in this area is based on
the idea that the form of language depends on the contexts in which
it is used. Register analysis shows systematic differences between
grammar form in contexts such as conversation, academic writing,
news writing, and fiction. The Longman Grammar
of Spoken and Written English,

Grammar: Form, Meaning, and Use 7

or LGSWE (Biber et al., 1999), provides a comprehensive
description of grammar from a use perspective. The next chapter
looks at register variation in more detail.
 REFLECTIVE QUESTION
● What are some situations where you feel you use different
grammar rules?

One useful way to consider form, meaning, and use is by

examining how these different perspectives can describe a single
grammar feature. Table 2.1 provides a description of how reference
to form, meaning, and use can describe two different features of
grammar.

Table 2.1. Form, Meaning, and Use of Phrasal Verbs

and Present Progressive
Grammar Form Meaning Use
feature
A multiword verb ● Can often be ● Used most in
Phrasal that substituted with spoken
verbs ● Consists of a a single verb language;
lexical verb and (e.g., surrender) frequent in
a particle fiction; rare in
academic
(e.g., give up)
registers
● Has particle
● More common
movement
in less formal
(give up the
idea; give the contexts
idea up)

Present Different from continuous action in verbs (go, run,

progressive semi-modal: present time walk) than stative
Auxiliary verb be + ● Larry is going to see
● More frequent in verbs (know, love) or
gerund: if he can come. conversation than copular verbs (seem,
●She is reading on ● Expresses an
writing appear)
her own these ongoing or ● Used primarily with
days. dynamic

8 Teaching Grammar
As seen in Table 2.1, any given grammar feature can be
described from three perspectives. Phrasal verbs, for example,
consist of a lexical verb and a particle. They also allow for
movement of objects (particularly when the object is a pronoun) to
reside between the verb and its particle. From a meaning
perspective, phrasal verbs often have single word synonyms. From
a use perspective, they are more common in spoken, informal
contexts than in written formal contexts, but this is not to say that
formal academic writ ing does not contain phrasal verbs. The
present progressive form requires a gerund to follow the auxiliary
verb be. Progressive aspect is used to show that an action is
ongoing. Progressive verbs are also more frequent in conversation
as opposed to writing and tend to occur with specific semantic
classes of verbs. Describing grammar features as in Table 2.1 has a
number of advantages over focusing solely on form, meaning, or
use separately.
First, some teachers may have explicit knowledge of certain
pieces of a grammar feature but may not have explicit knowledge of
all three aspects. For example, a teacher may be very comfortable
explaining how to form the present progressive but may not be able
to explain how to use it in authentic discourse. Teachers with
explicit knowledge of all three aspects of a given grammar feature
are better equipped to explain a given feature to students and to
devise activities that raise students’ awareness of grammar.
Second, viewing grammar from an FMU perspective shows that
know ing grammar does not just mean knowing rules (and
exceptions to rules); it involves knowing how to use form to gain an
intended meaning in a given context. Furthermore, FMU can guide
teachers in their selection of gram mar features to teach. Consider
these two examples:

1. Speaker A: What does she like to do?

Speaker B: She like to travel.

2. Speaker A: What did you do last

night? Speaker B: I am seeing
a  movie.

In both examples 1 and 2, speaker B makes a grammar mistake. In

1B, the subject of the sentence (she) should agree with the verb
(third-person singular subjects require verbs in different forms than
other types of sub jects). By contrast, in 2B uses the incorrect tense
and aspect and expresses an incorrect meaning. So, what do these
examples illustrate? Grammar errors that result in meaning
 confusion (example 2) are likely more worthy of a teacher’s focus
than those that are purely formal (example 1). Additionally,
understanding the nature of the errors that students may make may
help

9
Grammar: Form, Meaning, and Use
teachers: a form-based error in example 1 does not affect meaning
and may be more frequent and persistent exactly for that reason; a
meaning-based error such as the one in example 2 perhaps merits
closer attention because it interferes with meaning. Of course, this
does not necessarily mean that teachers should pay no attention to
form-type errors, but it does illustrate that the FMU distinction is a
useful guide to help teachers decide the focus of their lessons as
well as how to describe and explain grammar to students.
Finally, providing such descriptions can serve as an impetus for
students to be active participants in their own learning and
understanding of gram mar. Raising awareness not only of form and
meaning aspects of grammar but also of grammar use allows
students to be active consumers of different types of grammar
knowledge and may even help them to notice how grammar is used
in different contexts and promote their active participation in their
own grammar learning. As discussed in Larsen-Freeman (2003),
engaging students in the three goals of grammar teaching—
accuracy, mean ingfulness, and appropriacy—can be achieved by
raising their awareness of the components of grammar knowledge—
form, meaning, and use—and foster dynamic involvement for
students to engage in grammar learning in some of the same ways
that students can be engaged in learning reading, writing, speaking,
and listening. In fact, Larsen-Freeman encourages this type of
participation in grammar learning by coining the term “grammar ing”
as a “fifth skill [that] is intimately interconnected with the other skills”
(Larsen-Freeman, 2003, p. 143).
 REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS
● In what ways can the goals of accuracy, meaningfulness, and
appropriateness and the components of form, meaning, and use
relate to how the learning of grammar can be seen as a skill? Is
“grammaring” a fifth skill?

10 Teaching Grammar