Transformational Grammar for Learners of English: An Introduction

I’ve given myself a hard sell here! Most people probably haven’t heard of transformational grammar (TG), and even those who have tend to want to run a mile at the thought of using it in the language classroom. Received wisdom holds that the very idea of transformational grammar for learners of English is something of a contradiction in terms.

I was in the unenviable position of being a language teacher with a master’s in applied linguistics, and I soon found that language teachers and applied linguists generally don’t get on well. Even my great friend and colleague Mario Rinvolucri, author of Grammar Games, Humanising Your Coursebook and other EFL classics, could not hide his scorn for Noam Chomsky, the originator of TG.

But I am a stubborn soul. I was convinced there were ways to make TG work in the language classroom, and I was determined to prove it. This was in the early 1990s, and computers had not yet found their way into the classroom, but I gained a certain notoriety among my colleagues with colour-coded cardboard diagrams and arrows that turned Chomsky’s tree diagrams into something much more straightforward and manageable.

And it worked! The school – with some misgivings – gave me an exam class, and, after three months, the students passed with very good results. Of course, not everything I did was TG-based, but those cardboard diagrams proved their worth time and time again.

In this introductory course, I adapt those cardboard diagrams in an entertaining way, with an engaging narrative and plenty of opportunities for students to try out the structures covered for themselves. The content is limited to the present simple, and the only auxiliary verb introduced is “do”, but that implants the basic sentence structure of English firmly in students’ minds, so they can move forward with confidence.

Within those limitations, the course sets out to help anyone who wants an understanding of TG for EFL teachers and students, or to have transformational generative grammar explained at a very basic, practical level, without having to deal with the complications of Chomsky tree diagrams.

I’m aiming to follow this course up with a second – and even third – series, but, with so many other commitments, it’s going to take a while for that to materialise. In the meantime, take a look at what’s here and see how it helps you (or your students, if you are a teacher) to get a handle on the basic sentence pattern of the English language.
For other insights into English grammar, please visit my main grammar page.

An Introduction to Transformational Grammar