Abstract:

Nowadays innovative educators are focusing on multidimensional and interdisciplinary relations when teaching foreign languages. In this sense functional grammar offers a lot of opportunities to improve current methods of teaching foreign languages, grammar in particular. It considers a language to be a system of multidimensional units which serve certain communicative functions rather than a system comprised of phonetic, lexical and syntactical units and therefore it gives a more intuitive approach to describing forms and structures existing in a language. Functional grammar can help students realize the importance of knowing grammatical system of a language both theoretically and practically.

Although functional grammar was first developed back in1970s, it is still conspicuously absent in EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching in the Russian Federation. However, the new grammar methods it offers which reflect various communicative functions would prove to be highly beneficial for predominantly form-focused foreign language teaching in the country.

The article is a descriptive qualitative research which aims to provide a complex characteristic of grammar patterns to be used in the academic process. Its objectives are to describe constituent parts of these patterns, how they are formed and used in communication, to determine more and less frequently used patterns as well as to consider those additional factors which impact our language choices from the point of view of the usage (register) and users (age, gender and others). The main result of the study is a comprehensive description of innovative methods of teaching English grammar in terms of communicative functions taking into account the pragmatic aspect, which makes the process of explaining grammatical material more meaningful and communication-oriented.

Keywords:

Foreign language, English grammar, functional grammar, communicative function, innovative teaching method.