Grammar and Meaning

It is important to develop students’ understanding of English grammar so that they know when different sentence structures are used to convey the same meaning and when different sentence structures convey a difference in meaning.

They should know, for example, that a sentence such as ‘The ancient Olympics were abolished by the Roman Emperor Theodosius’ has the same meaning as ‘The Roman Emperor Theodosius abolished the ancient Olympics’. The same meaning can be expressed using the passive voice of the verb and the active voice of the verb.

Similarly, they should know that a change in the tense of the verb, for example, may make the meaning in a statement quite different. A sentence such as ‘The Scandinavians have objected to a winter games’ means something quite different from ‘The Scandinavians object to a winter games’.