Learning Grammar by Example

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Rules and examples are the two sides of grammar

Which of the following two sentences is easier to memorize?
Whether you're a student or a teacher, you've probably decided that example A is far easier to remember than example B, and of course you'd be absolutely right. It's not just because the number of words (four in answer A, fifteen in answer B) makes answer A easier to remember, it's also the fact that answer A is a pragmatic sentence drawn from the experience of real life, while answer B expresses a theoretical construct, which is the kind of thing that most people do not bother about on a daily basis. Answer A is an example of grammar in context; answer B is an example of a grammar rule.

The path to grammatical proficiency

    While it is important for language teachers to be familiar with the rules of grammar, it may not be at all necessary for language learners to actually learn the "rules". For many learners, grammatical proficiency can be acquired far more thoroughly by remembering practical clear and simple examples, than by learning theoretical rules. After all, this is the way young children gradually begin to master the grammar of their mother tongue, as the following example shows.
    A young child, learning English from its mother, is likely to hear the question "What are you doing?" hundreds of times before it is even able to speak, with the result that when it does begin to speak, it understands – from example, not from any rule – that "What are you doing?" is a question, and that it is similar to "Where are you going?" or "What do you want?"...  From these familiar examples, the child can then extrapolate new questions, like "Where's my rabbit?" and so on.

    Nobody will ever have told the child that in order to ask a question in English, we normally invert the subject and the auxiliary (helper) verb. A young child does not even know what grammar is, and certainly does not know what the words subject and verb mean. That will probably come later, in school, but even then the older child or adolescent may still develop no understanding of grammar, nor have any inclination to do so... a classic problem faced by English teachers worldwide.

    Nevertheless a teenager or an adult with absolutely zero understanding of "grammar" is not necessarily illiterate, particularly when it comes to oral communication, speaking and listening. Knowledge of grammar rules, or grammar principles, is only a vital skill for those who need to write a language; but that means most people whose formal education continues beyond the age of about 10, and most people who find themselves in a situation where they need to or have to learn a second or additional language.

    For anyone teaching or learning learning English in secondary education or beyond, whether as a first language or a second or additional language, an understanding of English grammar is vital. For teachers, that means understanding and being able to explain the simple rules; for students that means knowing how these rules are applied - with or without any knowledge of the rules themselves.  Grammar is the highway code that learners need to follow, in order not just to pass their language tests, but to become proficient, to understand what other people write and say, and to be able to correctly express their own ideas and thoughts in speech or writing, without ambiguity and without confusion.

    The sixty-four thousand dollar question that bothers so many teachers is how to develop their students' grammar proficiency without making them learn difficult or boring rules; and for students themselves, it is how to get better in English without the hassle of having to learn grammar rules – which brings us back to the start of this short article.

Best results

    For the best results with the greatest number of students, teachers need to concentrate on the examples, working from examples to rules, not the other way round. After all, as  a language develops, it is the examples that come first, not the rules. With the exception of Esperanto, grammar rules are devised by grammarians or linguists by looking at the examples and extrapolating a theoretical framework to explain them. Different people look at examples differently, producing different linguistic theories and different ways of analysing language; but where there may be many different ways of looking at a single sample sentence, and different kinds of grammar to explain it, in the end what is important is the sample sentence itself. Take
    I know (that) my father has been looking for a new job for years.
    This sentence can be used to illustrate a lot of different points of grammar - main clause and dependent clause, possessive adjectives, adverb clauses of time, choice of tense/ verb form, phrasal verbs, and more. And it can be disected in many different ways, using different methods of grammatical analysis.
    Indeed, any phrase or sentence can be used as the illustration of one or more points of grammar, since it is its grammaticality - its adherence to grammatical conventions - that gives it meaning. We understand that
       My oldest friend is a London based artist called Mark Winter
means that Mark Winter is the name of my oldest friend, and that he is an artist who works in London.
However the meaning will only be correctly conveyed if the producer (speaker, writer) applies the correct rules of vocabulary and grammar, relating to subjects and verbs, punctuation, spelling, adjective position, and so on. We need only make one tiny change to the sentence and either its meaning changes (examples 1 to 3), or it means nothing at all. Example 4, where the words are in alphabetical order, and without capitals, is totally meaningless:

1.     My oldest friend was a London based artist called Mark Winter.
2.     My oldest friend is a London base artist called Mark Winter.
3.     My oldest friend is a London based cyclist called Mark Winter.
4.     a artist based called friend is london mark my oldest winter.

While this set of sentences shows how a single error of grammar or vocabulary can distort meaning, it is not the kind of sentence to remember as an example of a specific point of grammar. Sentences to use as examples need to be relevant and clear, such as.
    Yes, I eat hamburgurs, but I'm not eating one right now.
which is a clear illustration of the difference in usage and meaning between the simple present and the present progressive forms of the verb. Or
    I had to buy a new phone, I must have left my old one on the train.
illustrating the difference between must have and had to, which can be very confusing for learners.  Or
    He goes to Chicago after New York; afterwards he's going to Minneapolis. 
which shows the use of after as a preposition and afterwards as an adverb... as well as showing different ways of expressing future time. Or we can take the very succinct aphorism Seeing is believing - which is the clearest possible illustration of the use of gerunds, i.e. verbs behaving as if they were nouns – which they are not. (see Rossiter, 2020, p38*) .

    The examples above have been chosen randomly. Most teachers and learners, particularly in the context of formal education, use manuals and books with some kind of grammar-based progression, though the grammar is not always clearly explained and examples not always helpful. Many teachers (whether native speakers or not) do not have a clear understanding of the rules of English grammar, even though they have a gut feeling for what is right and what is wrong; and most teachers have found themselves in a situation where a student asks a question about English grammar that they are unable to answer. It happens to everyone, even the best teachers.
    Having access to a personal database of examples, or even better to a good reference grammar with plenty of examples, can help the teacher provide the answers to the questions that students ask, and better still do so with clear and memorable examples that will help students develop their language proficiency without necessarily having to "learn grammar".


References

Andrew Rossiter A Descriptive Grammar of English - by example.  2020. Paperback or ebook