How useful is grammar teaching?

I’ve posted previously about grammar teaching, for example here, here and here. Drawing on what I’ve read in the research and my own experience, I’d sum up my views as follows:

• Teachers often overestimate how useful it is to know and practise grammar structures
• There is confusion between declarative knowledge (“knowing that”) and procedural knowledge (“knowing how”). Teachers often don’t know that research suggests that it's hard to turn the first type of knowledge into the second.
• Given how little time we get for languages in school, we shouldn’t spend that much of it on grammar practice because it’s not grammar practice that drives acquisition.
• Grammar is more useful and interesting for some pupils than others. Most think it’s a turn-off and would rather use the language in other ways. Since many students only do a language for three short years, two hours or so a week, then why spend time on grammar?
• Organising a syllabus around grammar is one solution, but not the best. 
• Research is clear that learners are at least somewhat immune to the way we sequence and teach grammar. Natural orders of acquisition and learnability come strongly into play.
• Teaching and practising grammar is not useless, partly because it also involves comprehensible input and interaction, the two main drivers of acquisition. 

So what does recent research have to say on the matter?

Pawlak (2021) wrote an open access article on the topic. Below is a summary with observations of my own.

For years the argument about grammar teaching was often framed rather crudely: should we teach grammar explicitly or should learners acquire it through exposure and communication? These days there is much more agreement that some form of grammar teaching is useful. The fun question is then how we should do it!

This is the territory explored by Mirosław Pawlak in his 2021 paper Teaching foreign language grammar: New solutions, old problems. What I like about the paper is its pragmatism. Pawlak doesn’t offer a a method which to solve teachers’ problems. Instead, he looks at what research tells us about grammar teaching and asks how realistic the various approaches are in actual classrooms.

One of the key distinctions he reminds us of is between explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge. Explicit knowledge is what we consciously know about the language (I called it declarative knowledge above). We might know, for example, that in French the perfect tense is formed with an auxiliary verb and past participle. Given enough time, we can explain the rule, practise it and apply it in spontaneously in conversation. That’s the theory!

Implicit knowledge is different. It is the kind of knowledge we draw on rapidly and largely unconsciously when communicating. I called it procedural knowledge earlier. You might think of it as skill. We don’t have time during a conversation to search through our mental grammar book.

This creates what Pawlak calls the inert knowledge problem. Pupils can often perform perfectly well in a grammar exercise but fail to use the same grammar when speaking or writing more freely. Teachers see this all the time. A pupil gets 10 out of 10 when putting verbs into the perfect tense, then later says je joué au foot hier. How do we deal with issue.

Over the years researchers have proposed plenty of alternatives to traditional grammar teaching: input enhancement, processing instruction (VanPatten), corrective feedback, focused communicative tasks and task-based language teaching, among others. When I trained, the belief was grammar was “internalised” through controlled practice (question and answer mainly). No one said quite how it would be internalised, but it sounded plausible. After all, we learn many thing through explanation and practice.

Pawlak’s conclusion is that none of the above are a magic bullet.

Take processing instruction. It can help learners notice and interpret grammatical forms more effectively, but improved comprehension does not automatically translate into accurate production. Or take communicative tasks. These can provide excellent opportunities for learners to use grammar for a genuine purpose, but learners may benefit from already having encountered and practised the grammar beforehand.

This point seems important to me.

We sometimes set up a false opposition between controlled practice and communication. In reality, they can complement each other. There is nothing inherently wrong with explaining a grammatical pattern or doing some tightly controlled practice. The problem arises when we stop there and assume that success in an exercise means the grammar has been acquired.

Pawlak is also realistic about implicit learning. In a second-language environment learners may receive thousands of hours of exposure. The typical school foreign-language learner doesn’t. Expecting completely implicit grammatical knowledge to emerge from a few hours of lessons each week may therefore be unrealistic.

An alternative goal is what Pawlak describes as highly automatised explicit knowledge. Through repeated encounters and use, consciously learned grammar can become increasingly rapid and accessible. The learner may initially have to think about the rule, but eventually its application requires much less conscious attention. Some argue that this may be the best we can expect in high school settings with little extra-curricular exposure to the new language.

That seems a useful way of thinking about grammar teaching in schools, but keep in mind those bullet points above.

The implication of Pawlak’s paper is not that we should return to grammar explanation followed by pages of written exercises. Nor is it that explicit teaching should be abandoned in favour of communication alone. Rather, we need to provide a bridge from understanding, through practice, to meaningful use.

This means giving learners plenty of chances to encounter grammatical patterns in comprehensible input, helping them notice useful form-meaning relationships, providing explanation where it helps, practising patterns sufficiently for them to become familiar, and then creating opportunities to retrieve and manipulate them while communicating. The emphasis should be on communication but with occasional focus on form. The precise amount depends on the class.

Corrective feedback has a place too. Pawlak reviews evidence suggesting that correction during communicative work can promote learning. Once again, however, there is no single best form of feedback for every situation. Explicit correction, prompts, recasts and delayed feedback can all be useful depending on the learners and the task.

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Pawlak’s argument is therefore its principled eclecticism. We don’t have to choose between traditional grammar teaching and communicative approaches. Elements of both may be needed.

Ultimately, Pawlak prefers the idea of “grammaring” to simply knowing grammar. Grammar is not just a collection of rules stored in declarative memory. It is something learners need to be able to do while communicating.

For classroom teachers, I think the message is quite straightforward.

Teach grammar, but don’t mistake knowledge of a rule for acquisition.

Explanation may be useful. Controlled practice may be useful. Input is essential. Repetition and retrieval matter. But if our aim is communicative competence, learners also need repeated opportunities to deploy grammar while attending primarily to meaning.

The old problem remains: how do we get from knowing to using?

Pawlak doesn’t pretend that research has given us a definitive answer. But a combination of explicit teaching, plentiful input, carefully designed practice, communicative use and feedback looks like a sensible place to start.