Active and passive grammatical minima

Formation of grammatical habits faces two main difficulties in school:

1) Formation of grammatical habits requires a lot of practice time, a great amount of language material and a large number of drills to operate this material.

2) It’s common knowledge that language as a system possesses certain entropy. Rich as the language is, only the part of the language used most often is necessary and significant for communication. That’s why it seems possible and purposeworthy to restrict the store of grammar material with due regard of a teaching situation.

Thus, actuality of grammatical material selection is clearly reasonable if one bears in mind a limited number of academic hours provided for English classes in school.

So, the main requirement to the store of grammar material in a secondary school is to be sufficient for the realisation of communicative objectives of teaching English within the limits of a given syllabus. In these terms, the content of teaching grammar is a specifically selected grammatical minimum for schools. This school grammatical minimum includes active and passive sub-minima.

The active grammar minimum has to be used by a student in all four major skills, although some methodologists think it possible to be used only in speaking and writing. That is by no means correct, for active grammar, as well as active lexicon, is smaller in range than the passive one and is included as a core into passive grammar (or lexicon) of an individual.

The passive grammar minimum is selected in school only for reading, though it is meant for understanding grammatical structures while reading and listening. The problem of active and passive grammar was brought forward by L.V. Scherbain 1946. He wrote in the preface to Gadd’ and Braver’s ‘ Grammar of German’, ‘Grammar, on the one hand, must teach to use vocabulary for constructing correct phrases, expressing one’s ideas. On the other hand, it serves to teach comprehending a spoken or written phrase and, first of all, to grasp its structure. In both cases it is one and the same grammar, but it has to be explained in different ways. In the first case, you have to take into account the idea expressed in a phrase, in the second one your starting point has to be a vocal form. In the first case, I am speaking about the active aspect of grammar, in the second case I am speaking about the passive aspect of grammar…’

Thus, not every grammatical phenomenon is studied in school. The active grammatical minimum includes the grammatical structures necessary for the student to be able to express his own ideas in the target language. The passive grammatical minimum comprises grammatical structures enabling students to perceive and understand other people’s speech. For doing this, acquiring both sub-minima is vital. The correlation between the grammatical sub-minima can be illustrated as follows:

School grammatical minimum

Expressing one’s own ideas

Understanding other people’s ideas