Transformational grammar and the teaching of written composition

Abstract

Recently methodologists and teachers have suggested numerous approaches as to how composition should be taught. Whether or not these methods are truly effective, however, has not been established, though research has demonstrated not only how over-simplified past approaches have been, but is beginning to writing, this practice is often no more than the orthographic translation of oral that, despite general agreement that learning to write entails actual practice in suggest the complexities that the writing process entails. It has been stated pattern practice or substitution drills. The majority of approaches have been said to emphasize and focus upon practices that have very little to do with the creative process of writing. Maintaining that writing is a culmination of the other language skills and that composition is therefore dependent on the mastery of listening, peaking and reading, foreign language methodologists have described stages which theoretically bring the student from total control to freedom. All indicate the necessity of these stages, warning of the danger of asking students to write expressively too early. With the advent of transformational grammar, researchers have committed themselves to studying the effects of the TG model on the writing ability of students. It has been revealed (1) that certain writers tend to use certain transformational processes habitually and (2) that the manipulation of transformations, i.e. sentence combining practice, with or without a knowledge of transformational rules, results in the generation of sentences and syntactic fluency. This paper discusses the usefulness of the TG apparatus to prose style, defined as 'a writer's typical use of linguistic variables'. It is maintained that in any English prose text most elements in sentence patterns are required by the rules of English grammar, but there are other elements that a writer can vary without changing meaning. That Chomsky's formulation of grammatical theory is potentially useful should become apparent from an examination of the common sense notion of style. Writing must involve choices of stylistic transforms, and this awareness of these transforms is an important and relevant insight and asset to our teachers and students in both reading and writing skills. The thesis of this paper, therefore, is that stylistic variation can be best taught through stylistic transformations, and it is supported by observations made during research with Malaysian teacher trainees.