This Thursday, the Istanbul Instructors’ Network will be having a free educational session about how to teach grammar. Our very own Brooks Emerson will be speaking about the use of the “X-word Grammar” technique – see details below. 

January 9th session, Brooks Emerson, MA TESOL

Location: Viktor Levi Sarap Evi, Moda, Istanbul

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Free

X-word Grammar came out of Sector Analysis, the work of the late Dr. Robert L. Allen, Teachers College, Columbia University. Some of Dr. Allen’s graduate students, most notably the late Dr. Linda Kunz, applied sector analysis to the classroom teaching of English and the term X-word Grammar was coined. The X in X-word Grammar stands for our elegant auXiliary verbs that help make the English verb system so simple and, yes, regular.

X-word Grammar stresses the word order of English, the regularity, and relative simplicity of its syntax. It helps students discover what a “sentence” really is. It gives students a framework with which to create well-ordered sentences that express their thoughts.

For historical reasons, most grammar books have tried to use rules and terms appropriate for Latin grammar to teach English. Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue, writes, “English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin—a language with which it has precious little in common…Making English conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity.”

Most books still try to fit a square peg into a round hole by forcing English, a lightly inflected, word- order based Germanic language, to conform to the rules of Latin.