On grammar teaching

This blog is an adapted section of our book Breaking the Sound Barrier: Teaching Language Learners How to Listen (Conti and Smith, 2019). We wanted to povide some background about grammar for teachers, before explaining how you can develop the ability for learners to 'parse' utterances they hear, i.e. use their knowledge of grammar (morphology and syntax) to make meaning.

If you don't know much about what researchers think about this, you should pick up some useful mew knowledge here. I haven't provided the references in this post, but they would be easy enough to seek out.

A brief summary of the research

A few questions to begin with. Can teaching grammar explicitly help students comprehend and use a language more proficiently? Does learning develop primarily through explicit teaching and conscious manipulation of structures, or merely through unconscious processes when people have extensive exposure to meaningful input (known as implicit learning)? Or is it a mixture of both and, if so, in what measure? Fair to say that this is a long-standing controversy in second language acquisition research!

 

Two types of grammatical knowledge

Explicit learning of rules leads to explicit knowledge, often called declarative knowledge, i.e. ‘being able to explain the rules’. This, in itself, is not much use when it comes to speaking and understanding in real time. Implicit or procedural knowledge, on the other hand, is usually said to occur based on extensive meaning-focused input, acquired with little or no awareness and stored implicitly (so typically you can speak the language without being able to explain the rules). Nearly all researchers believe that explicit declarative knowledge, and practice thereof, helps develop procedural knowledge. The arguments in this area revolve around how much and in what ways.

What is the relationship between these two types of knowledge, explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious? In particular, can explicitly gained knowledge become implicit, i.e. automatic?  Put another way, if we teach and practise a verb conjugation or drill a tense, can this knowledge become internalised and available for spontaneous use?

N. Ellis (2007) points out that explicit and implicit learning are functions of separate memory systems in the brain. Brain scans appear to support this, showing that explicit learning is supported by neural networks located in the prefrontal cortex, whereas implicit learning involves other areas of the brain, the perceptual and motor cortex. This would seem to confirm the relative distinctiveness of the two types of learning and knowledge. But can explicit become implicit?

There have traditionally been three views about this issue, which involve what has become known in the scholarly literature as the interface between explicit and implicit knowledge: 

1. The non-interface position (e.g. Krashen, 1982) holds that explicitly, consciously learned language cannot become implicit. Grammar instruction makes little or no difference to acquisition; all you need is a lot of meaningful exposure.
2. The strong interface position (e.g. DeKeyser, 1998; Suzuki & DeKeyser, 2017); is that implicit knowledge can always result from automatisation of explicit knowledge, i.e. you can become proficient through explanation and skill practice.
3. The weak interface position is that conscious knowledge can help with gaining implicit knowledge, but does so indirectly by helping students notice language features which they can add to their implicit knowledge when they are ready (e.g. N. Ellis, 2005; R. Ellis, 2008).

Should we bother teaching grammar then? Does teaching grammar really make a difference? Long (1983) looked at twelve studies comparing exposure learning with explicit grammar learning and concluded that, overall, instruction made a positive difference at all levels with both children and adults. Ellis (1990), Ozkan & Kesen (2009) and Larsen-Freeman & Long (1991) also found that instruction helped with the rate and ultimate level of acquisition. Other studies have reached the same conclusion, most famously Norris & Ortega (2000) and Spada & Tomita (2010). There is a good discussion of these issues in Nava & Pedrazzoni (2018) who conclude that explicit teaching of grammar plays a useful, perhaps indirect, role in acquisition.  A few scholars continue to throw doubt on the research referred to above, so it is fair to say that the case is far from closed.

 

Pedagogical versus internalised grammar

Most of us think of grammar as a set of rules about how words are constructed (morphology) and put together (syntax). These rules are described in simplified form in school text books and result in a pedagogical grammar. These are the rules we usually teach in classrooms. Through learning and practice, these rules get established in our brains and we become better at speaking accurately and fluently. Applied linguists, however, tell us that what is actually in our heads has very little to do with pedagogical grammar and is not open to observation. Most researchers believe that students develop their own, internalised grammars based on the input they receive, and that these are at least somewhat immune to what we teach them. In particular, the evidence suggests that students acquire grammatical forms in their own, somewhat or very predictable order (Pienemann, 1984).

 

 What does this mean for teachers?

 In our book we made the following recommendations based on our knowledge of research and classroom experience. We think these are particularly apt for MFL/WL teachers working in secondary classrooms.

·         Use implicit and explicit learning in synergy, with one supporting the other. For instance, after students have worked on a text or series of texts containing multiple occurrences of a structure, you can teach it explicitly or through a guided-discovery approach.

·         Be aware that conversion of explicit to implicit knowledge requires a long period of extensive exposure and practice across all language skills and a wide range of contexts. Nation (2007) recommends providing specific training in the recognition and production of L2 to time limits in order to develop automaticity (fluency training).

·         Provide opportunities for repeated use of L2 grammatical forms in meaningful contexts, using both controlled and free practice. Recycle language through extensive spaced practice consistent with human forgetting rates and interleaving (see Chapter 4).

·         Use explicit teaching, lots of input-flooding, extensive recycling and attention-enhancing techniques for forms which appear only rarely in input (e.g. in French, less common negatives such as ni…ni; connectives such as à moins que; present and imperfect subjunctive verb forms).

·         Bear in mind that some grammatical features are much less noticeable (‘salient’) in the input to native English learners, e.g. adjective agreement. Since low saliency negatively affects learnability, make such structures as salient as possible if they are considered important and flood the input with them.

·         Use extensive receptive practice before moving on to production. Ensure that target structures are consolidated through listening and reading before being used in speaking and writing.

·         Avoid cognitive overload. For instance, model and practise new structures within very highly comprehensible input to decrease the cognitive load on students’ working memory. Use L1 to teach grammar points with all but the most highly proficient classes.

·         Consider whether your class is developmentally ready to learn certain grammatical forms. In a highly mixed-proficiency class this is problematic and is a possible argument against such classes.

·         Use formative assessment techniques, e.g. listen for frequent errors students make in conversation or written output to guide future grammar teaching.

·         Give feedback on errors which are within the developmental grasp of students. Correction which focuses only on a few specific areas at a time is likely to be more effective than feedback than focuses on many errors (Sheen, 2007; Ellis et al, 2008; Alroe, 2011). For instance, you may decide to focus on only three or four important problem areas every few weeks.

·         Bear in mind the whole range of differences between learners, e.g. age, ability, attitudes, cultural background and attitudes towards learning. Use a wide range of teaching techniques to cater for such individual differences.

·         Teach for mastery rather than coverage. Better to teach a few key grammatical structures deeply than many superficially. Less is more!