This work reviews some important issues about English langauge. It also exposes teaching strategies based on the reviewed topics.

1. LANGUAGE FORMS AND FUNCTIONS
Collaborative Work 1
ALFONSO ROJAS
DAIRO MADARIAGA
MARIA ORTEGA
Tutor
CAMILO CENDALES HERRERA
OPEN AND DISTANCE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION SCIENCES
BACHELOR IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
2015

2. When it comes to the teaching and learning of English as a foreign
language, it is necessary to think about the complex processes of
language. Language can be understood in terms of grammar,
phonetics, phonology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics.
Language is interactive, is the tool from which human beings
communicate; language is a distinctive feature of humans. If we think
about language, in the educative contexts, it is important to point out,
teachers must offer the best possibilities for learners to construct and
create knowledge meaningfully.
This work reviews some of the conceptualizations found in the study
materials of the Language forms and functions course. Individual as
well as group work was crucial for the development of this activity.
Reflections and strategies for the teaching and learning of English will
be exposed here. The topics all the members have chose, will be
exposed here: special emphasis on the three most difficult of them
will be made in this work.

3.  The Nature of Language and Linguistics.
 The Internal Structure of Words and
Processes of Word Formation in English.
 Grammatial categories and Word Classes.

4. All humans have fundamental beliefs about language. Fundamental
beliefs tend to be wrong but, How language can be defined? From
linguistics point of view, language is seen as a system of arbitrary vocal
signs; language is rule-governed, creative, universal, innate, and learned,
all at the same time. When we begin to study language, bring some
misconceptions:
 As literate beings, we tend to equate language with writing. But there
are significant differences, not only between oral sounds and written
symbols, but also between spoken and written syntax or vocabulary.
 We assume that there is some necessary, inevitable, or motivated
connection between a word and the thing it names. Names tell us
something about the bearer of that name.
 A foreign language is somehow perverse and idiotic, while our own
language is natural and sensible.
 There is an inevitable connection between a word and the thing it
represents, the word is very powerful, names are extremely important
and the possession of language can be very dangerous.

5. On the other hand, linguistics sustain language consists of sings, which
are defined as things that stand for or represent something else.
Linguistics sings involve:
Sequences of sounds which represent concrete objects and events as well
as abstractions. Signs may be related to the
things they represent in a number of ways. The philosopher C. S. Peirce
recognized three types of sings:
 Iconic, which resemble the things they represent as do, for example,
photographs, diagrams, star charts, or chemical models.
 Indexical, which point to or have a necessary connection with the
things they represent as do for example, smoke to fire, a symptom to
an illness, or a smile to happiness.
 Symbolic, which are only conventionally related to the thing they
represent, as do for example a flag to a nation, a rose to love, a
wedding ring to marriage.

6.  Functioning to give expression to our thoughts: language is a
vehicle for thought.
 To transmit information: the communicative function.
 To provide the raw material for works of literature: the narrative
function.
 To maintain social intercourse as greetings or talk about the
weather: the “phatic” function.

7. As well as having a number of misconceptions about the nature of
language, lay people often have a different definition of the term
grammar than linguists do. Grammar can be defined as the rules of
principles by which a language works: it systems of structure.
Linguistics points out there are two types of grammar.
 Prescriptive: The prescriptive grammar involves attempts to
establish and maintain a standard of correctness in the language, to
“prescribe” (dictate) and “proscribe” (forbid) certain ways of speaking.
Prescriptive grammar involves value judgments based on factors
external to language-such as, social class or level of education.
 Descriptive grammar: Looks at the way language is used by its
speakers and then attempts to analyze it and formulate rules about
the structure. Descriptive grammar does not deal with what is good
or bad language use; forms and structures that might not be used by
speakers of Standard English would be regarded as valid and
included.

8.  Phonology
 Morphology
 Syntax
 Semantics
 Pragmatics

9.  Phonology, sound, voice: Phonetics it is the study of the speech sounds of
human language in general, either from the perspective of their production
(articulatory phonetics), their perception (auditory phonetics), or their physical
properties (acoustic phonetics). Other aspects of phonetics are:
-Types of sounds: consonants, vowels and semivowels.
- Features of sound: stress and pitch.
 Morphology: It is the study of the structure or forms of words and of their
classification. Considers principles of word formation in a language: how
sounds combine into meaningful units such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots;
and what processes of word formation a language characteristically uses.

10.  Pragmatics: It is the study of the functions of language and its use in
context. Language, in addition to serving to communicate information,
actually has a variety of functions, including the expression of emotion, the
maintenance of social ties, and even the performance of action.
 Semantics: Is the study of how meaning is conveyed, focusing either on
meanings related to the outside world (lexical meaning) or meanings related
to the grammar of the sentence (grammatical meaning).
 Syntax: is the study of the order and arrangement of words into larger units,
as well as the relationships holding between elements in these hierarchical
units. It is an extensive and complex area of language. Syntax studies:
-The structure and types of sentences: questions or commands.
-The clauses: relative or adverbial clauses.
-The phrases: as prepositional or verbal classes.

11.  We have exposed conceptual elements about language and grammar.
As this work is based on collaborative interaction, it is important to justify
the reason for choosing this topic, why grammar has chosen to be
studied here? The main reason is that as ESL students, we need to have
the knowledge about the language because this is important for having
good language domain and perform adequately in the communicative
context. Grammar is complex; we need to acknowledge studying
grammar can be difficult. For this reason we’ve chosen to learn about
grammar: to comprehend, expose and investigate about how grammar is
organized, defined and what are its constituent elements

12.  We are concerned with the study of grammar. In our professional field
grammar plays a crucial role: we are preparing and getting the necessary
tools for teaching not only grammar, but also all the communicative
components of language, and allow our students to globally domain the
target language. Grammar is a set of rules. These rules are often difficult
for students to learn, especially if they’re not native speakers. When
students come in contact with grammar they’re sometimes unmotivated
and that obstructs their learning experience. For this reason we have
decided to study grammar: to prepare ourselves to get the tools that are
needed to involve students in a meaningful learning process where they
can construct their own knowledge. The group has developed a learning
strategy that makes emphasis on the teaching and learning of grammar
from a didactic approach.

13. An alternative for teaching grammar and allowing students to learn
grammar meaningfully is by the incorporation of didactic
methodologies and student-centered approaches. A lesson plan based
on grammar should be according to student’s level but also it should
be challenging enough to allow learning to take place. The
collaborative group has come to the conclusion that teaching grammar
should be an interactive not a static process. We have created the
following strategy and it is aimed to young learners. Young students
are explorers, and teachers need to take advantage of that.

14. Strategy: Teacher enters the classroom; she introduces the topic to
students. She presents a short story written by herself which make emphasis
on a grammar that is informal and natural for students. With the short story,
student’s imagination and writing skills will be fostered. Also they’ll learn about
grammar in a funnier context.
Materials and sources: Worksheets, paper, cardboards, colors and markers.
Students and setting: This is a private school; English is practiced 45
minutes lessons every day. The grade is 4 and there are 28 students in the
classroom.
Teacher asks questions, she explains students how grammar is used for
communicating ideas.
 She presents the short story and making emphasis on the verbal
categories chooses one student to perform that verb.

15.  She explains students verbs are actions. E.g. if one student got assigned the word “dance”
she/he must perform that action so the rest of classmates can guess what action is.
 After a student has performed the action, and the whole class has guessed what is, teacher
is going to introduce the verbs that were studied by taking into account their different form.
E.g “dance”, teacher introduces:
I like to dance
I danced yesterday
I’m dancing… and so on.
 After this, teacher is going to introduce a song. She plays the song. She selects the easiest
verbs of the song and she performs them: e.g. “to read” teacher picks up a book from her
desk and students are required to guess what she is doing. Again, teacher introduces verbs
in their different forms:
I love to read.
I read a good book yesterday.
I am reading…and so on.
At the end of the activity, teacher will assign students a worksheet to be developed as
homework.

16. We all have an intuitive feel for the words of the language and we think immediately of
the written word, but even non-literate speakers can divide the speech chain into
words. Thus, there must be some formal criteria for word-hood which all speakers use.
These might be of various kinds:
 Orthographic: a word is what occurs between spaces in writing.
 Semantic: a word has semantic coherence; it expresses a unified semantic
concept.
 Phonological:
potential pause: a word occurs between potential pauses in speaking. Though in
normal speech, we generally do not pause, we may potentially pause between words,
but not in the middle of words.
 stress: a word spoken in isolation has one and only one primary stress.

17.  Morphological: a word has an internal cohesion and is indivisible by
other units; a word may be modified only externally by the addition of
suffixes and prefixes.
 Grammatical: words fall into particular classes.
 Syntactic: a word has external distribution or mobility; it is moved as a
unit, not in parts.
When trying to understand what words are, we need to take into account the
conceptualizations of morphology. Morphology is the study of word
structure.

18. We begin the study of morphology by taking words as given and examining
their internal structure.
Morpheme versus morph:
We must start by identifying the morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit in a
language; the morpheme is not necessarily equivalent to a word, but may be
a smaller unit. Like the phoneme, the morpheme refers to either a class of
forms or an abstraction from the concrete forms of language. A morpheme is
internally indivisible; it cannot be further subdivided or analyzed into smaller
meaningful units. Morphemes are represented within curly braces { } using
capital letters for lexemes or descriptive designations for other types of
morphemes.

19. There are a number of types of morphemes:
Lexical morphemes express lexical, or dictionary, meaning. They can be categorized
into the major lexical categories, or word classes: noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. They
constitute open categories, to which new members can be added. Lexical morphemes
are generally independent words (free roots) or parts of words (derivational affixes
and bound roots).

20. Grammatical morphemes express a limited number of very common
meanings or express relations within the sentence. They do
not constitute open categories; they can be exhaustively listed. Their
occurrence is (entirely) predictable by the grammar of the sentence because
certain grammatical meanings are associated with certain lexical categories,
for example, tense and voice with the verb, and number and gender with the
noun.
In the case of the morpheme —which is an abstraction —we must also
recognize the level of the morph, the concrete realization of a morpheme, or
the actual segment of a word. Morphs are represented by word forms or
phonetic forms. We say that a morpheme is “realized” as a morph.

22. Free morphemes: These are called bound roots. Bound roots are
often foreign borrowings that were free in the source language, but not free
in English.
Bound morphemes: Morphemes that can only be attached to another part
of a word (cannot stand alone) are called bound morphemes.
Morphemic Analysis versus Morphological Analysis:
The importance of the distinction between morph and morpheme is
that there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between
morph and morpheme, and morphemes can combine or be realized
in a number of different ways. We can thus analyze words in two
different ways: in morphological analysis, words are analyzed into
morphs following formal divisions, while in morphemic analysis,
words are analyzed into morphemes, recognizing the abstract units
of meaning present.

23. Allomorphs and Morphemic Rules
Let us turn now to a further aspect of morphemes. Just as phonemes have
predictable variants, called allophones, morphemes have predictable variants
called allomorphs. Allomorphs are the members of the class, morpheme, or the
phonetic realizations of the abstraction, morpheme. Allomorphs are semantically
similar and in complementary distribution. They needn’t be phonologically similar,
however. Allomorphs are predicted, or “conditioned”, in one of three ways:
 Phonologically conditioned: the appearance of a particular allomorph is
predictable from the phonetic environment.
 Grammatically conditioned: the appearance is unpredictable phonologically
but is determined by the grammar of the language or;
 In free variation: allomorphs may be used interchangeably in a particular
environment.

24. English has a number of means by which morphs combine or are altered to
form new words:
The addition of a derivational affix (a prefix, a suffix, and, in some languages,
an infix) is called derivation. The addition of a derivational affix to a root produces
a new word with one or more of the following changes:
 Phonological change (including stress change): reduce - reduction,
photograph -photography, relate – relation.
 An orthographic change to the root: pity - pitiful, deny- denial, happy-
happiness.
 A semantic change, which may be fairly complex: husband -husbandry, event
– eventual.
 A change in word class. In English, derivational affixes are either prefixes or
suffixes. They may be native (deriving from Old English) or foreign (borrowed
along with a word from a foreign language, especially French).

25. Is a process similar to derivation, in which the initial syllable or the entire word
is doubled, exactly or with a slight phonological change. Reduplication is not a
regular process of word formation in English. In English, reduplication is often
used in children’s language (e.g., boo-boo, putt-putt) or for humorous or ironic
effect (e.g., goody-goody, rah-rah, pooh-pooh). Three different kinds of
reduplication can be identified:
 Exact reduplication: papa, mama, goody-goody, so-so, hush-hush, never-
never.
Ablaut reduplication: in which the vowel alternates while the consonants
are identical: crisscross, zig-zag, Ping-Pong, tick-tock, flip-flop.
 Rhyme reduplication: in which the consonants change while the vowel
remains the same: Helter-skelter, hodge-podge, fuddy-duddy, razzle-
dazzle, boogie-woogie, nitty-gritty, roly-poly.
Reduplication

26. Compounds: compound is the combination of two or more free roots (plus
associated affixes). Both phrases (such as kick the bucket, hit the road, sit
tight, run the gamut, under the weather) and compounds consist of more than
one free root and may be semantically opaque.
Blends: blend involves two processes of word formation, compounding and
clipping. Two free words are combined and blended, usually by clipping of the
end of the first word and the beginning of the second word, although
sometimes one or the other morpheme is left intact.

27. We have chosen the processes of word formation to be exposed here
because knowing how words are classified is important in both our
professional and informal context. When we studying English grammatical
aspects, we need to have understanding of how words are used to convey
meaning and act as the principal element of the communicative act. Words are
signs, and words are classified according to different categories. We can
teach words from a semantic approach as well as pragmatic. We choose this
topic, because as learners of English as a foreign language, we sometimes
struggle in finding the exact words to express the things we want. But studying
what words are, and how are formed, gave us a strong understanding of that.
Now, we are concerned in teaching our students to understand the
morphological aspects of English. If we teach morphology, students will know
about the nature of language, also they will acquire more vocabulary and their
writing skills will improve too.

28.  Students: This is a 9th grade classroom (about 30 students) the lesson
plan is for teenagers (between 13 and 15 years). They’ve been receiving
instruction in the language since the early ages of their school life. Their
English level is B1.
 Settings: This is a public school, where the teacher has the same
students daily. English is practiced in 30-45 minutes lessons every day.
She can build vocabulary from day to day with English lessons and
activities. The chairs and desks are lightweight and easily moved around
to different configurations for whole-class or pair/group work.

29.  Lesson background: This lesson introduces a new subject for the first time:
morphology and morphemes. Students are going to use flash cards, prints and
other materials. This will help them to learn the contents didactically.
 Learning objectives: Students will work with the guidance of teacher. They will
be able of identifying basic aspects of morphology, morphemes and word
formation as a result of the lesson. Continued practice in later lessons will help
them to acquire the language and be able to remember the formation of words.
 Materials and sources: Scissors, pencils, paper, and markers will be used in
the lesson. Worksheets and flashcards will be used too. Teacher made the
printed worksheet and flashcards.

30. Procedures and timing

36. A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that express meanings
from the same conceptual domain, occur in contrast to each other, and are
typically expressed in the same fashion.
Grammatical morphemes may be either free roots (function words) or bound
affixes (inflectional suffixes). Semantically, grammatical morphemes express
grammatical notions such as number or tense, what are called grammatical
categories. Itn synthetic languages such as Classic Latin or Greek, the
grammatical categories are expressed almost exclusively by inflectional
endings, whereas in analytic languages such as present-day English, the
grammatical categories are expressed primarily by word order, and by
function words.
The following list of grammatical categories will be exposed through the
nominal categories (number, gender, person, case, degree, definitiness)
and then the verbal categories (tense, aspect, mood, and voice).

37. Number: This first category is relatively simple. There are two terms of this
category in English: singular (the concept of one) and plural (the concept of
more than one). Number is expressed by inflection, generally by –s.
 In count nouns (dog/dogs)
 In demonstratives (this/these, that/those)
 In the 1st and 3rd p of personal pronouns (I/we), possessive determiners
(my/our), possessive pronouns (mine/ours), and reflexive pronouns
(myself/ourselves), but not in the 2nd person. Number is also expressed by
distinct forms of certain pronouns and adjectives:
 Singular: every, each, someone, anybody, a/an
 Plural: all, many, few, several, most

38. Gender: English has a rather straightforward system of gender
called natural gender, as opposed to the seemingly less
motivated system called grammatical gender. Grammatical
gender, the system found in earlier stages of English.
Person: The category of person is quite simple. Three terms are
recognized:
 1st person: the speaker, person speaking;
 2nd person: the addressee/hearer, person spoken to; and
 3rd person: the person or thing spoken about.
Person distinctions are expressed by the inflected forms of the
pronouns, for example:
Personal pronouns: I You He, they
Personal possesive
determiners:
my your His, their
Personal possesive
pronouns:
mine yours His, theirs
Personal reflexive
pronouns:
Myself Yourself Himself, themselves

39. Case: is one of the more difficult categories. It may be defined rather simply as
an indication of the function of a noun phrase, or the relationship of a noun
phrase to a verb or to other noun phrases in the sentence.
 Case is most fully expressed in the personal and interrogative/relative
pronouns, which distinguish nominative case (the function of subject).
 Genitive case (the function of possessor), and
 Objective case (the function of object).
Degree: is a category that relates to adjectives and adverbs. It has three terms,
positive, comparative, and superlative.
 Superlative degree expresses greatest degree or intensity of the quality in
one of three or more items..
 Comparative and superlative degrees are expressed either by inflection or
by periphrasis (using more, most):

40. Definiteness: The concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness are intuitively quite
simple:
 Definite denotes a referent (a thing in the real world denoted by a noun) which is
known, familiar, or identified to the speaker and hearer.
 Indefinite denotes a referent which is novel, unfamiliar, or not known.
Verbal categories.
Tense is a linguistic category, it has two different forms:
a). I saw a movie last night
b). I wish you would go.
Past tense expresses past time in (a),but it expresses future time in (b). We see that
the present time expresses a timeless habit in (a) and a future time in (b), neither
expressing an action ocurring at the present moment.

41.  Aspect: is a category applicable to English since the so-called “compound
tenses”, the perfect and the progressive, are better treated as expressions
of the aspect. Aspect can be defined as the view taken of an event, or the
“aspect” under which it is considered, basically whether it is seen as
complete and whole (perfective aspect) or as incomplete and ongoing
(imperfective aspect).
 Mood: is an indication of the speaker’s attitude towards what he or she is
talking about, wether the event is considered fact or non fact. The
indicative is the mood of fact; it is expressed by the simple and compound
tenses of the verb. Nonfact enompasses a number of different degrees of
reality, including whises, desires, requests, warnings, prohibitions,
commands, predictions possibilities, and contrary to-fact occurrences.
 Voice: The category of voice, though usually considered a category of the
verb, is actually relevant to the entire sentence. Voice is an indication of
whether the subject is performing action of the verb or being something
(active voice) or whether the subject is being affected by the action or
being acted upon (passive voice).

42.  Verb: A group of words cannot be described as a sentence or a clause
unless at least one of the words is a verb. In some ways, we can describe
it as the most important part of speech because it is the 'action' word that
tells the listener or reader what is happening in the sentence.
 An adjective: gives the reader or speaker extra information about a noun
or delimits it in some way.
 Prepositions allow us to talk about the way in which two parts of a
sentence are related to each other. They include words like in, on, under,
beside, through, inside, before, opposite.
 Conjunctions: serve to connect two or more clauses, phrases or words
together to make longer constructions.
 An interjection: is a word used to express a particular emotion or
sentiment on the part of the speaker.

43. It is known that learning the grammar of another language can be a complex-
difficult process. In the case of English, grammar is formed by a variety of
elements. What happens if students don’t have sufficient knowledge of the
language grammar? They won’t be able mastering the target language
adequately. For this reason we have chosen grammatical categories as one of
the most difficult topics for a student to learn. We are going to expose a
different strategy for teaching grammar. When students have knowledge of
grammar, they can perform better by making use of the three English skills
(writing, listening, speaking and reading). Grammar knowledge will allow
students to communicate better and master the language as native speakers
do. Grammar is important; it facilitates the communicative process. If students
master English grammar, they will be able of acquiring the language with
fluency.

44. The following is an activity that emphasizes on the teaching of grammatical
case. It is prepared for middle school students. The activity is based on a
previous lesson
Materials and sources: Post-Its and large easel paper or newsprint.
Teacher divide students into groups, she gives them paper. On each
paper teacher writes the following sentences:
 Aisha meowed, chased a mouse and then found the dog's toy.
 Robert kicked the ball in Mr. Wilson's yard.
 Jane made cookies in Grandma's new oven.
 Stephanie took the football and ran to Grant's house.
 Samantha gave Jodi a present.

45.  Step 1: Teacher divides students into groups. A leader is elected to help
the group make quick decisions.
 Step 2: Teacher gives each group an easel paper with the five sentences
and a stack of Post-Its.
 Step 3: The group will need to identify each underlined noun as object,
subject or possessive with Post-Its. Each group has 60 seconds.
 Step 4: When the 60 seconds is up, teacher will turn over the sheets that
are correct. The groups that have the papers facing up have 60 more
seconds to re-arrange the Post-Its to get them all correct.
 Step 5: Teacher will do this in 60-second increments until all groups have
the sentences correctly identified. The teams that had the nouns labeled
correctly can make up five new sentences for other teams to identify using
the first set as a model.
 For fun: The winner group will help teacher tell the other teams if they
have any wrong each time they complete the task.

46. Doing this work was crucial for our learning process. We have learned
important issues about the nature of language. We know now, that
language can be understood in terms of grammar. Morphology, pragmatics,
syntax, and semantics; language is complex and studying the way is
conformed is crucial for having a good domain of it, and having the
necessary tools to transmit all knowledge to our students. Designing the
teaching strategies gave us clear understanding of our responsibility as
teachers. Students need to be involved in activities that are relevant for
them. Students need to enjoy the learning experience with activities that
are according to their learning needs and are challenging enough; this is
crucial for learning to take place.

47. Laurel J. Brinton, Donna Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. Jobn
Benjamins Publishing, 2010. Pages 1-358
Stacia Ann. Teaching Morphology. Busy Teacher. Web online. Retrieved from:
http://busyteacher.org/9530-my-brother-is-very-success-teaching-morphology.html
Lisa Philips. Activities in Morphology. Retrieved from:
http://www.phillipsspeechtherapy.com/pdfs/Activities%20in%20Morphology.pdf
Duquesne University. (n.d). Morphology. Retrieved from:
http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Courses/Psy598/Ling-Morphology.pdf
Mary Beth Calhoon. (2012). Morphology for the Classroom. Pennsylvania
Department of Education. Retrieved from:
http://www.pattan.net/Videos/Browse/Single/?code_name=morphology_classroom
Kelly Hayden. (2012). Identifying noun case activity. BRIGHT HUB EDUCATION.
Retrieved from: http://www.brighthubeducation.com/middle-school-english-
lessons/21427-identifying-noun-case-game/