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education. They will become proud of themselves for being more educated. Sometimes we underestimate
our students' abilities: teenagers as well as adult learners have acquired a lot about the Russian language
system. Help them display their knowledge, make it work, be effective in the acquisition of another
language. Your linguistic considerations will teach your students to generalize, to stop to think, to
philosophize. By learning to do so with a foreign language they will transfer their abilities onto the native
language and other subjects, and further on, to their everyday life. Just think of how much diversified
their insight into life and how much deeper their understanding of the word system will be!
You may contradict me by saying that the learners will not need this philosophizing and can do
without it. That's not true. Learning a foreign language is a lasting effort which requires a lot of time and
work. For instance, some practical manuals may seem discouraging to the learner, since the explanations
can contain not the well-accustomed formulations but unusual wording unheard of before. A successful
foreign language speaker is an indefatigable labourer, a great user of books, a constant improver of
his/her speech habits, a wise decipherer of all new information, an ingenious reader keenly reacting to any
nicety of thought expression.
An attempt to highlight several linguistic notions has been made, ways how to teach them have been
sought.
What is grammar? Grammar is part of linguistics (the learning about a language) which studies
changes of words (in other words, forms of words) and the connection of words into word combinations
and sentences. Hence, grammar consists of morphology and syntax.
As a result of such a study we receive a collection of rules since rules are practical directions given to
people by previous generations. The rules are about how to form the plural number of nouns and verbs,
the past tense of verbs, the degrees of comparison of adjectives, etc. The rules reflect the actual processes
that a language undergoes. Rules are secondary, while language behaviour is primary. That is why it is
incorrect to define grammar as a set of rules. Grammar is self-contained, abstract and independent.
Certainly, grammar reflects processes developing in human society, there would be no grammar without
language bearers, people, but it alienates itself, becomes a kind of philosophy granted to people, so a set
of rules is nothing but a bridge between philosophical matter (as grammar is) and a human being.
It is wrong to say that physics is a set of rules of how to use electricity, for example, nor is it correct to
say that chemistry studies how to make use of chemical elements. In the same way, grammar is not a set
of rules, but a study of language processes to create a verbal thought.
Grammar is a high degree of abstraction, a subconscious mechanism which is stuck in the native
speaker's mind as a kind of reflection of what they have seen and heard since infancy.
The similar foreign language mechanism can develop in you in the same subconscious way if you live
among the people speaking the language you want to learn. If not, you have to develop that mechanism
purposefully, making one step after another, understanding that this is a mechanism unlike the one you
have already developed in your mind, which still has coincidences and discrepancies and which should
become the core of your foreign language speaking abilities. That is why it is almost impossible to
overestimate the role of grammar as an impetus in your understanding language. No time devoted to
teaching what grammar is and teaching grammar itself is considered wasted. But teaching grammar is a
sophisticated process, it shouldn't overload the students' mind and should be skilfully incorporated in all
areas of knowledge and rationed in proportion to speaking, listening, writing and reading.
Grammar like any other part of linguistics (phonetics, lexicology, spelling, punctuation, etc.) deals
with words. All words in a language are subdivided for convenience into groups called parts of speech.
Alongside grammatical features such as number, case, tense, mood, etc. and interaction between words
of different parts of speech, the notion of a part of speech includes some lexical features: meaning, word-
building elements, and some phonetical ones. That is why, parts of speech subdivision is valid not only
for grammar; it is referred to in phonetics, lexicology, etc.
A part of speech is a group of words united together by the common lexical meaning (thingness,
action, property, characteristic of an action, property or another characteristic; connection, relation,
definiteness/indeflniteness, emphasis, human emotions, human attitude, affirmation/negation); by the
common changes of words to express number, case, degrees of comparison, tense, person, mood, etc.; by
the common ways of connection with words of other parts of speech; by the common functions in a