Abstract

The verb is one of the categories that a school grammar must necessarily face, not only in terms of the knowledge of the concept and the relationship with other categories, but also in terms of the role it plays in writing. In this paper we present three studies that describe the construction of grammatical knowledge by students of primary and secondary education when they learn contents related to the verb: the present tense, the verbal mood, and verbal complementation. Results from the three studies show how learners develop strategies and what obstacles they have to face in order to develop grammatical reasoning. They also show the value of interaction (on peers or with the teacher and writing) to promote the development of metalinguistic activity at school in order to connect grammar rules and language use.

Abstract

Learning language at school means learning grammar as a conscious and explicit knowledge about language, as a means to reflect on language use aiming at using language more consciously and in accordance with the different situations of discursive interplay, either from the perspective of the agent (speaker or a writer) or from the perspective of the interlocutor (a reader or a conversation partner). This article deals with the term pedagogical grammar (PG) explicitly referring to this goal, but also considering other aspects that a PG should be addressing: as a framework of reference to the social norms concerning language use, rejecting the idea of becoming a bunch of fixed and imposed norms; as a framework of reference to build the syntactic structures that the language system allows; as a tool helping to select among these structures to match the user’s discursive perspective; and as a means to progressively build and systematize reliable knowledge of grammatical concepts. In this respect, procedural and methodological aspects become unavoidable issues to conceive grammatical knowledge as a tool to think reflectively in learning situations at school.