Methodological recommendations for teaching of tense-aspect verbal forms in English language using their stylistic potential

3. Methodological recommendations for teaching of tense-aspect verbal forms in English language using their stylistic potential

At the end of our paper we shall give some ideas for teachers to help them think steps, exercises and activities for students’ practical studies.

1 step: to research and use the pedagogical literature.

Many rules are considerably more complex than can be done, and linguistics are still researching areas of language. According to Michael Swan, an author not only of textbooks but also of one of the most widely-used pedagogic grammar, suggests anumber of measures of a good rule (1994). These include «simplisity», «truth», «clarity», and «relevance». From this point of view Raymond Murphy in his «Essential Grammar in Use» (elementary, intermediate courses) gives a lot of simple descriptions how to use and study the present perfect tense, for example, Units 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21 from entermediate course. «Longman Advanced Grammar» (Reference and Practice) written by L.G. Alexander and his «Longman English Grammar» begin at about the level of the Cambridge First Certificate, build up to the level of the Cambridge Advanced Examination and culminate at the level of the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency, This Grammar has three aims:

1. To serve as an advances «text decoder», ising the analysis of syntax as the key to understanding difficult text.

2. To provide practice in advanced point of grammar.

3. To serve as an advanced reference grammar, where citations are to be found in context, and not just quoted at sentence-level in isolation from their source.

For example, Unit 19, p. 84. The text «Alaska’s dirty dollars» is presented as difference between the present perfect tense and the past simple tense which are used here. And we suggest to all teachers of grammar to represent stylistic potential of tense-aspect verbal forms only in the frames of context.

Every teacher can elicit a lot of ideas for presenting and practicing tenses in English from book written by Rosemary Aitken «Teaching Tenses». In this book there are a lot of answers on teacher questions, namely:

1.  How to organize a tense for teaching: the main problems.

2.  How to prepare to teach a tense: CASSIAL:

Choose, Analyse, Sequence, Select, Identify context, Auxiliary material, Leaner error = CASSIAL. They are basic steps which it is helpful to follow in planning a tense for teaching purposes. For example: the present perfect is described through the analysis (table, questions to draw the target, notes), meaning and function (for uncompleted action, for action which took place in the past, etc), suggested context, learner error: meaning and function.

Thus, teachers can find and use these books for supplementing of supporting their classroom teaching.

On page 236 we can find a lot of interesting activities presented by Penny Ur in book «Grammar Practice Activities»: we are saying about how to understand and use the present perfect through communicated methodology: use of present perfect to present current news (materials, procedure, variantions, communicative context from a pile of English-language newspapers); «find someone who…» (tables, a set of cards with «ever-never»); «what has / have happened (two pictures showing situation before and after accounting for moods (set of photoes); I have lived here changes) for/since (to describe a past state or process extending into the present, etc.: a lot of communicative ideas.

Another interesting material we can suggest to teachers from «Play Games With English» 1,2,3, plus, systematically and selectively, for example, we can find the structures and language points in the second book «She’s packed her suitcase», p. 32,42,76, and in the third book – «I’ve lost my keys», p. 16,46. These exercises are given in visual pictures and students like to use them in their grammar study.

In «Explaining English grammar» George Yule presents a lot of exercises on difference between perfect and progressive aspects: «A number of exercise types can be found to practice progressive aspect, with verb that have both durative and stative aspect, for example» «What on earth is (s) he doing?», p. 79; «Why are they smiling?"(photograph with two old men), and others.

The teacher must be the researcher in the grammar ocean. Only in this case working with different pedagogical literature according to the specific grammar task and aim sistematically and selectively he or she can produce and present English grammar brightly and clearly and will be loved by students.

1.1. Throughout of centuries English Scholar created the system of the Morphology Grammar where English verbal forms as the basis of Grammar have gradually been presented, studied and researched as a great stylistic potential. Being placed in unusual syntagmatic environment which change their canonized grammatical characteristics and combinability, English Verbs acquire stylistic significant.

1.2. Following the description of basic verbal forms, Yuri G. conveys not only specific features of verbal forms and structures according to tenses and aspects, but includes a piece of information on how meanings of verbal forms can be shaped bf context and communicative purpose – stylistic potential of verbal forms.

1.3. R. Quirk and his team give a lot of information about time, tense and aspect; the tables in which English verbs are divided into stative and dynamic types; difficult theme as «aspect» is presented in clear and lucid language. There are some problems which are debated up to now, for example, «the reality of the perfective progressive».

1.4. N.N. Rayevska puts forward several interesting and stimulating ideas for the further philological observations that according to her point of view are very productive and prospective:

1. Development of grammat co-ideomatical structures.

2. Morphological correlations of interlevel units and inclusion them in the peripheral field of verbal forms.

3. The Phrasiological System in its unity with garammatical functioning.

4. Paculiarities of lexical combinability and realization of tense-aspect forms in the community of their syntactical structures and others (a lot of ideas!)

1.5. Two types of transposition [Table 1.4] described by I.V. Arnold are used in our practical part with the aim to expand the frames of their usage as obvious and visuial examples from English original literature.

1.6. Satisfactory results in the philological training of students can be achieved only on condition that students have firmly, mastered the basic principles if every linguistic disciplin, stylistics included.

1.7. In monograph Stylistics of English Language the authors show that the diapason of stylistic devices is very high. We have marked only s some of them but very expressive categories of time, voice and mood. All these means can be used only in context. We consider that the subject «The Theory of Context» must be included in the syllabus for students from the foriegn language faculties. Our tables (13–14) which were completed for students as HOs on the Theoretical Grammar will help them to realise this garammatical material in practical frames.

1.8. Grammatical material from the textbook written by M.Y. Blokh is very visual and inportant for students. There is no doubt that its numerous particular propeties, as well as its fundamental qualities as a whole, will be further exposed, clarified in the course of continued linguistic research.

1.9. We agree with the author that «the items selected for study here represent the most debatable parts of morphology. It concerns, first of all, the grammatical categories of the verb». Before presenting some facts at lecture a teacher have to transfer them according to the student's understanding.

1.10. At the same time of discussion on a question about stylistic potential of tense-aspect verbal forms in Modern English we, the teachers, have to expand the students’ skill in the sphere of grammatical usage of these forms in utterances. In this case we can elicit a lot of examples given by I.P. Verkhovskaya in her monograph.

1.11. All these notes are very important for our paper: they give some additional features to our subject but it is not enough for leaning in the frames of stylistic potential of tense-aspect verbal forms.

2.1. The use of archaic variant forms in fiction, for instance, in historical novels, serves to characterize the speech of the times, to reproduce its atmosphere, its «couleur historique» (historical colour). Numerous archaic forms can be found in poetry (XVII–XVIII c) written by W. Shakespeare, P.B. Shelly, G.G. Byron, W. Wordsworth, etc; in Bible, but it should be taken into our consideration that what appear to us today as archaic forms in Shakespeare’s times are in fact examples of their everyday language.

2.2. All these quotations present themselves the low colloquial sublanguage. These dialogues (above) may not be exactly like one’s. Writers prefer to paint their personages in words. A detailed analysis of these non-grammatical speech patterns show that they are elements of a system, which is not deprived of rationality. Substandard English is used by millions of people in English speaking counties. It is a conspicuous indicator of low language culture and educational level. Being introduced into books, it becomes a picturesque means of protagonist’s characterization.

2.3. Periphrastic modals are used to communicate a lot of connotations and subtle shades and tinges. This process of activation of periphrastic modals by relating them to our speaking and writing expands possibilities and potentialities of texts and discourses in the fraim of their contexts. They convey the identities, knowledge, emotions, abilities, beliefs, and assumptions of the writer (speaker) and reader (hearer); association and the relationships holding between them. The most striking instances of periphrastic modals presented above give us additional material for the practical course in the fraims of the theoretical English grammar.

2.4. The change of the tense-forms with one and the same time reference is a most effective stylistic devices in expressive language. The historical present describes the past as if it is happening now: it conveys something of the dramatic immediacy of an eye-witness account. The phenomenon of present/past tense alternation is common in informal spoken narrative, conversations and letter writings.

2.5. Echo utterances are recapitulatory echo questions, explicatory echo questions and echo exclamations. They repeat as a whole or in part what has been said by another speaker. They may take the form of any utterance or partial utterance in the language. The stylistic purpose is to express irony, sarcasm, incredulity, doubt, astonishment, amazement, confusion, wonder, or merely to fill in a conversational gap.

2.6. There are a lot of the subtle meaning associated with the progressive aspect. Syntagmatic connotative meanings of the Present Continuous signaled by different context, linguistic or situational, may denote: expression of anger or irritation; future arising from present, arrangement, plan and programme; the imperative modality and other expressive elements. We used literary texts to illustrate how various features of the progressive aspect can be used in spoken English.

Transposition of grammatical forms will lead to their synonymic encounter:

-  the Past Tense and the Historical Present;

-  the Future Tense and the Present Tense;

-  verb-forms of the Imperative and the Present Tense, and others.

2.7. The historical past tense of «will» is «would», often reduced in speech to «d. The combination of remoteness and likelihood as the conceptual basis of would generally leads to an interpretation of some event as being distant in time or possibility from the moment of speaking. The remoteness element in would, combined with the epistemic interpretation (deductions or conclusions made by the speaker) is am interpretation of past habitual behavior.

2.8. The important components of the peripheral field of aspect are the ways of actions which find their positions in such verbal patterns as Verb + on and on/over and over again/time and time again and syntactic reduplications.

2.9. Inchoative Aspect (ingressive aspect) expresses a focus on the onset of situations and is associated with verbs like begin and start. Correlation between morphological and semantic means can be found in the frames of the peripheral field of aspect, mood and modality.

2.10. The main function of DO is a syntactical function. The second purpose of DO – using is to express the subtle shades of subjective modal meanings which we can found only in the speech context or situation.

For foreign students there are not always easy to render the precise effect of the emphatic auxiliary DO in all the variety of its idiosyncratic use.

2.11. The stylistic range of such «phrasal» verbs is very wide. Their dynamic character and the possibility of attaching various kind of attributes to the nominal element makes them particularly suitable for use in descriptive pictorial language, as compared to corresponding simple verbs. Highly expressive in meanings these «metaphors» have contributed significantly to the development of emotional and affective means in present-day English.

2.12. In present-day English, especially in spoken English, these verb-phrases are found more frequently: scarcity in morphological devices to indicate aspect in English has necessitated the development of the conventional practices.

2.13. The analysis of the distributional meaning of tense-aspect verbal forms in present-day English, brief as it is, will remind us of the constitutional value of syntactic morphology whose subject matter is «grammar in context». Variations in the use of the tense-aspect verbal forms, their potential polysemy and transpositions conditioned by the mode of the speaker’s representation of the verbal idea are a source of constant linguistic interest. Different tense-aspect forms are not yet finaly and absolutely fixed. Making for greater subtle-ties and finer shades in expressing the speaker’s subjective attitude to the utterance functional shifts are really taking place.

3.1. The teacher must be the researcher in the grammar ocean. Only in this case working with different pedagogical literature according to the specific grammar task and aim sistematically and selectively he or she can produce and present English grammar brightly and clearly and will be loved by students.

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