“English Grammar” at Commonwealth School of Languages stresses:
A systematic and thorough survey of the structure of contemporary English. Also, usage issues (including problems with the sentence, punctuation, and agreement) and their underlying sources (language change, language attitudes, and the notion of Standard English) are emphasized.
The course objectives focus on enhancing the students’ ability to understand:
- ‘Syntax’, ‘morphology’
- Overview sentence structure: words, phrases, clauses
- Word classes: noun, pronoun, determiners
- Verb forms and their varied usage
- Word classes: adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction
- Formality and informality
- Verb tenses – form
- Auxiliary verbs
- Regular and irregular verbs
- Use of the tenses – tense and time
- Modal verbs
- Imperative mood
- Transitive and intransitive verbs – the passive
At the end of the course, the students will be able to:
- Apply the principles of syntactic analysis to a variety of texts
- Assess the accuracy of a grammatical analysis
- Define, describe, and classify different types of usage problems
- Understand the essential ways in which words are used to form sentences in English
- Understand the main grammatical features of different categories of words and phrases
- Have a working knowledge of the basic terminology used to describe the grammar of English
The course will also focus on the three fundamental issues underlying all errors of grammatical usage: the notion of Standard English, the effects of language change on English grammar, and the effects of language attitudes on our ideas of “correct” English. This course will be of interest not only to English, education, journalism and technical writing students, but also anyone who wishes to improve his/her editing and proofreading abilities. This course will satisfy the State of Illinois English language requirement for teachers and education majors.
