ELEMENTS OF POPULAR CULTURE IN TEACHING SENTENCE PATTERNS AND VERBAL CATEGORIES TO STUDENTS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Abstract

The paper deals with the application of elements of present-day popular culture in teaching certain elements of grammar to first-year undergraduate students of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad. Preceded by a theoretical discussion of implicit/explicit and descriptive/prescriptive grammar teaching at the university level, the paper introduces elements of popular culture as a motivating factor and connective tissue to teach numerous grammar rules otherwise often perceived by students as uninteresting and difficult to understand, memorize and apply. In order to illustrate and reinforce the point that grammar is made more comprehensible when its rules and principles, their correct or incorrect use, are explained through examples from present-day popular culture, a selection of language units is extracted from films, cartoons, comic strips, TV series, talk shows and song lyrics, most of which are well-known to Millennial students. Employing qualitative methodology, various uses of elements of popular culture implemented in teaching grammar are extensively described and analyzed, while two of the students’ answers in the e-survey were also analyzed quantitatively. This research is expected to demonstrate, explain and systematize the various ways in which the teaching process exploits grammatically relevant examples from widely known works of contemporary popular culture. The authors’ presumptions about the effectiveness of introducing elements of popular culture are reinforced by the results of a short survey carried out in order to obtain feedback from students who attended the courses English Grammar 1 and English Grammar 2.