Dear all,
These days i have been wondering about grammatical terminology (and metalanguage) used in language classes and i would love to hear your opinions and experiences about a few things:
1. As a FL learner, do you find it important to master (a basic set of) grammatical terms in the target language?
If so, why?
If not, why not?
2. As a FL learner in a class room situation, did you ever have problems with grammatical terminology used by the teacher.
3. As a FL learner in a class situation, did you sometimes have problems with a teacher using GT in the target language (but without explaining exactly what it means).
4. As a FL teacher, do you (or would you) use GT and metalanguage?
Does it depend upon the level of your class?
Which terms do you use?
5. As a FL teacher, do you (would you) give your students a list of grammatical terms with a translation in their native language?
What would you consider to be the pros or cons of this?
Best regards,
Frank

I use grammatical terms all the time and they don’t pose any problem to my students, maybe also because, let’s say, the English terms are almost identical to the Portuguese ones: adjective - adjetivo, noun/substantive - nome/substantivo, verb - verbo, adverb - advérbio.  I guess it would be more complicated in Dutch, where you have very different words, such as verb - werkwoord, noun - selfstandig naamwoord, adverb - bijwoord.  German at least has the advantage of having the Latinate words alongside the Germanic ones:  Tätigkeitswort/Verb, Eigenschaftswort/Adjektiv, Umstandswort/Adverb.  

I believe a through understanding of those terms in fundamental for a complete grasp of the target language and how it behaves in a given situation, even though English word classes are very fluid, much much more than in any other language with which I’ve come in contact.

Brazilian dude

[quote author=Brazilian_dude link=board=translate;num=1140882845;start=0#1 date=02/25/06 at 11:10:01]I use grammatical terms all the time and they don’t pose any problem to my students, maybe also because, let’s say, the English terms are almost identical to the Portuguese ones

Yep, that’s indeed a point.
I have no clue about the level of your students, their age, their school-carreers, but do you notice problems with the terms in Portuguese?
I mean, if i’d ask my brother to distinguish an adjective from a noun, he’d be as successful as me trying to distinguish between two types of screwdrivers.

I guess it would be more complicated in Dutch, where you have very different words, such as verb - werkwoord, noun - selfstandig naamwoord, adverb - bijwoord.  German at least has the advantage of having the Latinate words alongside the Germanic ones: Tätigkeitswort/Verb, Eigenschaftswort/Adjektiv, Umstandswort/Adverb.

Nowadays, much of the latin-based terms are used in Dutch FL teaching, such as verbum, nomen, pronomen, adjectief, substantief, subject etc. exactly because they are closer to the English/Romance terms.  

Thanks for the comments…

Frank

I have no clue about the level of your students, their age, their school-carreers, but do you notice problems with the terms in Portuguese?

No.

Brazilian dude

It depends on the level at which you’re teaching I suppose. In my first year of Russian, grammar was taught in Dutch (with an American textbook). That works perfectly if you’re only interested in learning practical everyday Russian. You don’t need to know how cases are called in Russian to learn how to use them.

There are some exceptions. If you decide to use nothing but the target language (like we did from the second year Russian onwards), then obviously your students will have to know the grammatical terminology in that language. Grammatical terminology makes teaching grammar a lot easier, doesn’t it.

Also there could be a problem if your students have different languages of their own. You’ll have to find a common language anyway, so why not the target language.

Understanding grammar is probably the harder part. If you do and you know the grammatical terminology in your own language, then learning it in the target language is not harder than learning to name the days of the week in that language.

The only case where I put some real effort into learning the native names for features of grammar was Sanskrit. In my free translation, the names of the noun cases are: Case 1, case 2 ... case 7.

I still haven’t decided if I want to learn the indigenous terms for Arabic and Bible Hebrew. I’m leaning towards creating a set of my own, which hopefully will be more mnemonic than either foreign words or the very misleading traditional "imperfect" etc.

I did learn the Dutch terms, because of their transparency. So, no real effort.

For Hindi, there’s not that much terminology to worry about for the first few years of learning. The morphology is too simple to bother with labelling, and the difficult syntax things can’t be described in any language. I have written several pages just trying to sort out the existing English names for tenses, and explain the difference (if any) between compund verbs, auxiliary verbs, helping verbs, vector verbs, conjuncts and ...