I don’t keep my love of the Swedish theme park, IKEA, a secret. I love milling through fake rooms, imagining how my big family could fit into small spaces. I love a Swedish meatball and that Dime cake as much as (or even more) than the next person.
I know that many do not like Ikea for a range of reasons but it is close to my heart. My weekly (yes weekly) outings to IKEA with my then 3 yr old and newborn got me through the crazy first year of being a mum to two.
Keeping my love of IKEA in mind, let me tell you about an IKEA tragedy. It was 8 years into my marriage (yes for those wondering the marriage did last through this event!) and my husband and I had thoroughly assessed our well-loved, well-used, second-hand couch and decided it was time for an upgrade. I was pregnant with our second baby and we felt like we were adult enough to make big furniture decisions. Well, we couldn’t have been more wrong.
We went into the sofa buying process prepared. We measured the room, measured the other furniture, spaced out how much area we had for what would be our new couch. Then we deliberated over the different designs (all with a toddler in tow). We looked at a few different furniture places but in the end found one that we liked at my much loved IKEA. There we tested out a few styles, just to make sure. Finally, we made the decision on a corner leather (pleather) sofa and we went into the warehouse armed with a cart to pick up the pieces that would become our new couch.
As we loaded the couch pieces onto the trolley and wrangled our toddler, who was ready for his meatballs, we looked at each other and said “Do we need this?”. Thus ensued a “but I thought YOU wanted it/this isn’t very sustainable” discussion in the middle of the IKEA flatpack section. It ended in the crescendo of us both realising that our current couch, although it had seen better days, was still functional, it rose to the occasion of toddlers and dogs, which were both in our lives. We knew that although we could replace the old couch with a new one, a new couch would not serve the function we needed. We needed a couch that could have dogs rub their hair on it, a toddler jump, drop crumbs and smush yogurt on it. Our couch needed to function as a place to sort out the washing, a place for kids to lie on when they were sick with gastro or toilet training. Our couch did not need to function as yet another thing to keep clean.
That day we made a decision based on function…not form. A form decision would have said “This is a couch, just as that old couch is a couch, they are interchangeable” whereas the functional decision we made took into account the context, our growing family, our priorities…our messy kids.
So…what does this have to do with grammar?
Well, there are two distinct forms of grammar theory. Traditional and Functional. Traditional grammar theory focuses on language form. It pulls apart the puzzle of language and sorts the pieces into categories. e,g. nouns are always nouns.
Functional grammar, on the other hand, focuses on the functions of language. It looks at the whole puzzle and identifies the different parts. Functional grammar takes the context of each part into consideration to make meaning. e.g. the words used as a process in one text may be a participant in another.
I believe that these two theories of grammar theory have to be one of the best-kept secrets of the teaching world. The amount of print-ready-teaching resources I have stumbled on, that are labelled as “grammar lessons” are predominantly based on form-based grammar (noun charts, lists of verbs, adjective games). For many of the teachers who come to my courses, functional grammar is a revelation. This doesn’t surprise me (although FG has been in the curriculum for over 10 years) because I know about the generations of grammar in Australia (that’s a whole other post) and also I know how powerful education publishing companies are in influencing teachers and the classroom.
Some good news for those that are concerned that there are two seemly competing views of grammar, is that these theories can complement each other and the metalanguage from traditional grammar can be used to explain functional grammar parts. For example, functional grammar can analyse the composition of a salad and traditional grammar can pick out all the tomatoes.
The book Functional Grammatics by Macken-Horarik, Love, Sandiford and Unsworth (2017) explains this better than I can (and with less food metaphors), “Once learners can identify the ‘what’ of grammatical choices in a phrase, group or clause, they can more easily discuss the ‘how’ of its workings in longer stretches of text.”
I am a functional lady I do look at function first and foremost when I look at language (or couch purchases) but occasionally form can be quite handy, especially when I need to pick out tomatoes.
Reference
Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K., Sandiford, C., & Unsworth, L. (2017). Functional grammatics: Re-conceptualizing knowledge about language and image for school English. Routledge.