When we teach 'language' or 'a language' there is an immediate problem of methodology. It's the tension between 'how we use language' and 'how linguists have broken language into what they think are its parts'.
The 'how we use language' part is at its heart a) 'conversation' and b) the many written forms that we've invented. We know that many people in the world learn their own language and the language(s) they come across because, say, of migration, is through 'immersion'. This is because they are 'in' situations in which people use language.
But many other people may learn a language in part through actual or 'pretend' forms of 'immersion' (conversations in class) but the other part is through learning the categories that linguists have invented. One obvious one: conjugations. Many of us have learned a language in part by learning how to say things like this: 'Je suis, tu es, il/elle/on est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils/elles sont'. When we learn these, we rarely question why it's in that order, or even why we're learning that particular category. The usual justification for learning this is that it's useful and helps you 'know' the language. What happens though, if you shake this up and ask, 'Is this more useful than another way of breaking up the verb system?' What if, instead of 'conjugating the present tense in French' (which is what I've just done), we say, 'how do you talk about 'what I am' in French in the present, the future and the past - or in other ways even? In other words, I create what might be called a horizontal conjugation which would come out something like this: je suis, j'étais, je serai, j'ai été, j'avais été, je serais, j'aurais éte, je fus...and others that I can't think of for the moment because I'm just relying on my memory to write this!
Now let's do something like this in English: I am, I am being, I will be, I was, I was being, I have been, I have been being, I would have been, I would have been being, I had been, I had been being,
Why am I doing this? In order to show that there are many ways we can chop up language into its parts. We might say 'the conjugation fo the verb 'to be' is...' but I've just shown another conjugation of the verb 'to be' and of course I could repeat that using 'you', 'he/she/it', 'we', and 'they' (or their equivalents in other languages). Why is it then that we say (or have come to accept) that the best way to learn the verb 'to be' is 'vertically' in their respective tenses (present, past etc) and not 'horizontally' across the tenses, as I've just demonstrated?
I don't know the answer to that question other than to say - that's the custom.
What this tells us is that we break language down into parts and systems but we never know why it's in these parts in that particular way. But we may also never know just how useful or not-useful these parts are, even though I've heard people describe these parts as eg 'the building blocks' of language, or some such. No, they're not the building blocks of language. They are the building blocks of language-teaching. I think it would be quite hard to sustain an argument that says that language itself has building blocks, unless we talk of the stages a very young child goes through in order to move from no-language to being able to speak. This makes me wonder whether there could even be (in theory) a language-teaching programme that imitated the stages we all go through when we learn how to speak!
First lesson we would do what one year olds do, which in technical terms means 'babbling phonemes'. Second lesson might be doing a lot of staring at people near to us and using phonemes (not words) to indicate it's them as with mum-mum-mum and da-da-da-da. Third lesson might be important processes like wanting a drink or a cuddle which we indicate with a mix of prepositions like 'up' and single words like 'dink'. Ideally, while we do this, a speaker of the language is translating for us and repeating the full versions of what it is we want. And on we go...
So what am I saying here? I'm saying that we often assume that in order to learn how to do something, we have to learn the parts of that process as they were broken down and described by the scientists and theorists. However, that may not correspond to how the process actually happens or works - in this case, how a native speaker learns a language. Put another way: 'how we break it down' isn't necessarily the only way or the best way to 'build it up'.
This is most apparent to me in the way in which writing is being taught at Key Stage 2 in maintained schools in England. Some people have 'segmented' and described English into 'parts of speech'/'word classes' and 'functions'. They've squeezed in a bit of elementary 'stylistics' and told the children that when you use these in the ways that we say are good and necessary, you're writing. I will say again, though, 'how we break it down' isn't necessarily the only way or the best way to 'build it up' - in this case how to write or what to write.
And again, I'll say, these parts of language that they've identified are by no means the only parts anyway. To take one example: if you're writing a story, you may well want some good dialogue. What is being given to children as the 'rules' of writing sentences may well be of little or no use for you to do this. For a start, a lot of dialogue is not in full sentences and actually getting our characters to talk in full sentences would sound stilted and very odd - in other words bad writing!
Good naturalistic dialogue that both sounds real but also reveals what people are thinking, their motives, their personality AND moves the plot on works to a whole different set of conventions, patterns and in genre terms, yes 'rules'. In order to learn how to do this, you may need to eg look at some great dialogue in novels and plays, read it out loud, imitate it; do some improvisations, perhaps record these improvisations, and then to try out what you write by giving out parts in class. You may also need to discuss how when you write dialogue in fiction, how these conversations have 'turning points' while at the same time discuss how it's good idea to disguise these turning points. Then again, how do you build tension into dialogue? And how do you build or break 'status'. Who is talking 'up', who is talking 'down' and does this change, if so how?
If ever you wonder why children's stories can often be very good in terms of plot and description but not very good on dialogue, that's because in the history of English teaching in primary schools, hardly anyone has ever thought that this is important, necessary, interesting or relevant. And yet, when we read a novel to children, we all know when the dialogue is good and when it's not so good.
So let's draw some strands together here: we can break language up into different parts and functions. These are not fixed for all time. We can break it down in ways that are different from the ones that we're given. These systems may or may not help us become good users of language. It's possible that some systems work better than others. To use language well, we need plenty of 'immersion' in the forms or genres we are learning eg writing fiction. Use of language is very diverse. For reasons not always clear, some very important, high prestige uses of language are not taught. Throughout, we should remember that 'how break things down' may not always be the best way to 'build things up'.
