Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

0.1- Reasons for choosing the topic

Teaching grammar is the cornerstone of any language teaching in the world because of the importance of grammar itself. Grammar can be defined as “the business of taking a language into pieces, to see how it works” (Crystal, 2000). It has been held that if a language is a building, the words are bricks and grammar is the architect’s plan. Penny (2000) gives a further explanation by putting grammar as “a set of rules that define how words (or parts of words) are combined or changed to form acceptable units of meaning within a language”. Therefore, guaranteeing the accuracy of sentences mainly depends on the learner’s mastery of grammar since it is a framework to describe languages.

Among the English grammatical rules that are taught in Malagasy lycées, the lessons on conditional sentences were found to be difficult. During our teaching practice in a lycée in Antananarivo, it was found out that some students also have troubles understanding those lessons clearly. The problem is that, apart from the complexity of the structures of conditional sentences and the variety of their meanings, many English language teachers think they reached their objective once they gave grammatical rules to their students and the students managed to apply those rules (i.e. the forms) in some accuracy exercises disregarding the students’ ability to use the rules in realistic or authentic situations. The absence of conditional structures in Malagasy language also makes the learning of English conditionals more difficult for Malagasy learners. It seems that conditionals are spoken in Malagasy language, like in “Raha hatory ianao dia hatory koa aho”, but they do not have fixed grammatical rules. Siméon Rajaona (1972) has never mentioned Malagasy conditionals in his doctorate thesis, “Structure du Malgache”.

Actually, there are “students, and especially students in developing countries, who have received several years of formal English teaching, [and yet] frequently deficient in the ability to actually use the language and to understand its use in normal communication” (Widdowson ,1979). Here, “developing countries” refers to the countries where English is taught as second or foreign language. We contend that many teachers of English in Malagasy lycées teach conditional sentences by using methods that restrict language learning to a very narrow, non-communicative range which does not prepare students to use the structures in real life situation. Therefore, we have decided to carry out a research work on promoting communicative grammar as a solution to the problems mentioned above. The present study is based on the assumption that if conditional sentences are taught communicatively in clear contexts, students will

not have trouble learning those grammatical rules and will communicate appropriately when using them.