Bhutanese Grammar

Grammar is considered to be the backbone of all languages and without it the language becomes distorted. English being the second language is very difficult to teach and learn for both Bhutanese teachers and students. Generally Bhutanese students are poor at grammar, be it in written or in spoken form. Students assume grammar as a challenging aspect of linguistics and a few even develop grammar phobia because of complexity of grammar in itself. Grammatical errors come in several forms which can easily confuse and dilute the actual meaning. Some common mistakes are with sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, punctuation, spelling and other simple mechanics and parts of speech. A simple comma used at the wrong place can change the meaning

Understanding the parts of speech, clause or phrase will help our students to write better English. In Bhutan, basic grammar is taught with the introduction of “Eight Parts of Speech” where students just roughly touch the tip of an ice berg. This is done with an excuse that students find it very difficult to cope up with grammar, but the irony is teachers somehow, somewhere lack the confidence and back ground on the subject presented. To learn more grammar, students should not be confined in the class room teaching-learning process only. They have to do a lot more writing practice themselves thereby improving their writing skills. For example, even to write a simple leave letter to the class teacher, they have to know the rule of sentence formation, the rules governing words. Nonetheless, writing demands a lot of mental effort. A student may be an effective English speaker, but he needs to learn how to convert his knowledge of grammatical concepts from spoken to written language, and this can only be done through constant writing practice under a teacher’s guidance. According to The Silken Knot, The standards of English for schools in Bhutan states that “our students are exposed to evaluate how author achieve effects by the use of linguistic, structural and presentation view at level VIII” (p.39) .Whatever little grammar Bhutanese students learn at the level mentioned is already learnt at primary level by the students in the west. So the introduction of grammar and linguistic in Bhutanese education system is too little and too late! The same could have been introduced at the lower level when Bhutanese students’ cognitive was still growing and fresh and both tutors and tutees can learn through listening. Most students who do not write more tend to make mistakes and misuse of grammar rules