I wish to brig to your attention that, the first question on English grammar for the S.S.C.E. is wrong though it has been repeated for many years. The question is, “What is the grammatical name of the underlined word as used in the sentence?”
The question is wrong because, when a question asks about the use of a word in a sentence, it cannot at the same time ask about its grammatical name. It can only asks about its part of speech. You can ask about the grammatical name only if you want to find how the word is called outside a sentence or before it is used in a sentence. Please observe an example of the wrong question under discussion:
What is the grammatical name of the underlined word as used in the sentence?
1.Beautiful is an English word that comes from the French ‘Beau’.
- The grammatical name is adjective.
- The part of speech is ‘noun’ because the word is functioning as subject and every subject is a noun.
2.How many airplanes land at the Accra international airport per hour?
- The grammatical name is noun but the part of speech is verb,
The two examples above tell us that the examiner cannot question the candidate on both the grammatical name and the part of speech or function of the word in the same breath.
Fortunately, there is a book on English grammar entitled Advance Grammar For English Students which explains the following phenomena, which are problems to teachers of English grammar in West Africa.
1.The difference between ‘grammatical name’ and ‘part of speech’.
- The conjugation of the English verb, which actually motivated the writer to write that book when he came upon the following mistake in a) the Oxford English Dictionary, b) the Advanced Learners Dictionary and c) the MacMillan Dictionary For Schools.
Example: ‘The boy has slept’ is a past tense. In order to correct this, I wrote the following to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary who are also publishers of the Advanced Learners’ Dictionary:
- One cannot say that a sentence is a past tense but a sentence is in the past tense.
- If ‘I have slept’ is in the past tense then, in what tense is ‘I had slept?’
- If ‘I have slept’ is in the past tense, then what will be its present tense rendition?
- ‘I have slept’ is in the present tense perfective aspect.
3.The book teaches the difference between tenses and aspects.
- The book teaches that, a sentence like ‘Kofi has eaten the bread’, which some teachers say contains a past participle, has nothing participial about it. The book teaches both the present and the past participle very well.
I conclude by advising the Ghana Education Service and the W. A. E.C. to turn their attention to the Advanced Grammar For English Students, which was approved by GaCCA in 2014 since it will be the best Grammar book for both examiners and students and the best handbook for teachers of grammar.
By Osepetetreku Kwame Osei
