Activity 1
Metalanguage, the language used to describe language, is arguably essential to a methodology that involves explicit explanation of grammar, although it may not be necessary in an approach where no grammatical explanation is involved (see Alderson et al (1997) who suggest the teaching of knowledge about language does little to improve linguistic proficiency.) Minimally, learners probably need to know the names of the word classes, noun, verb, adjective, and so on, and probably also need to know a number of the terms used to describe grammatical functions, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and so on. In the UK, knowledge of metalanguage is sometimes lacking. Until recently, little grammar was taught in primary or secondary schools, with the result that many students could arrive at university without the necessary background knowledge for language study. To counter this, it may be a good idea to provide a glossary of metalanguage items. A number of textbooks, such as Le français en faculté: cours de base (1999) even provide such glossaries. This same textbook notes: 'Our professional language teaching colleagues in British universities are unanimous in finding that the level of grammatical awareness and competence [...] is now considerably below what it was in the 1970s' (Le français en faculté: cours de base, 1999: vi).

Activity 2
Transcript 1 is a recording of two native speakers of English doing a picture difference task. Transcript 2 is from a radio call-in show, and Transcript 3 is a radio interview. I have given these texts to over 50 English language teachers, all with four years or more of teaching experience. I don't know what the right answer is to this question, and I don't even know if there is a 'right' answer. All these teachers were either native speakers of English, or had high proficiency in English. The startling results are shown below. No two teachers ever came up with exactly the same number of concrete or abstract nouns for any one of the texts. The numbers shown in the table are ranges (ie the top and bottom figures produced by these teachers).

It is easy, really, to understand why this is so difficult to analyse accurately. In the first two utterances of the first transcript we have six (or perhaps seven) nouns:

'There's eh a little portable TV on the table and there's a man with something.. with a set of dog's ears.'

If we look at these individually, we can see how easily problems arise:

TV: definitely concrete as it refers to an indisputably physical entity in the world.

Table: definitely concrete as it refers to an indisputably physical entity in the world.

Man: definitely concrete as it refers to an indisputably physical entity in the world.

Something: here is where our problems begin; this noun seems to refer to something physical in the world, but we don't know what, so is it concrete or is it abstract? We don't all give the same answer.

Set: a 'set' is a group of something or other; in this case it is a group of 'dog's ears', so therefore it would seem to refer to concrete entities; on the other hand, we could argue that 'set' is a collective noun which does not in itself refer to any entity in the world, and is therefore abstract.

Dog's: 'dog' is a noun, and dogs are physical entities in the world, so this would seem to be a concrete noun, but 'dog' is being used adjectivally here, so is it really a noun, or is it some kind of nominal adjective?

Ears: definitely concrete as it refers to an indisputably physical entity in the world.

So three of the above seven nouns already cause problems for many people. In part this is because grammatical categories, like other categories, in the world, have prototypes and have vaguer extensions from the prototypes. We can easily identify the best examples, the prototypes, but we have difficulty with the extensions. Often, these extensions sit on the border between categories, as does 'dog' in the above example, and it is this that causes confusion. All in all, grammatical categories are not clear-cut, easily defined sets. This is why authentic texts can prove so difficult - the sentences/ utterances don't often conform to the clear-cut and contrived examples we, as teachers, like to present to our students. And it is for this reason that many teachers, and textbook writers, are happy to create texts that behave in accordance with the target grammar rule.

Activity 3
As we have seen, a focus on form can accelerate the language acquisition process, and can lead to greater accuracy in the use of language. At the same time, an overemphasis on grammar teaching can turn language into a sterile academic exercise with little relation to language as a system of communication. A balanced approach is probably ideal, with time dedicated both to using language for communication and to studying language as a system. The amount of time you yourself spend on grammar teaching probably depends on a number of factors: you may find, for example, that higher level learners need less focus on form and more focus on communicative activities; and you might find also that the time you spend on grammar will often be determined by whether the exam system is itself grammar-oriented.

Activity 4
Sentences 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 take a very much 'pro-grammar' stance, while sentences 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 are very much 'anti-grammar' in nature. If you total your scores for each of these two sets of sentences, you will get a picture of your own attitudes. If you scored higher on the odd-numbered sentences, you tend towards a grammar-focused approach. If you have a higher score for the even numbered sentences, you are probably an exponent of Communicative Language Teaching, in one of its versions. If you have roughly even scores for both sets of sentences, you are fairly eclectic in your approach, and probably feel that a good language class should combine communicative activities with a focus on form.

Activity 5
This is really just a self-reflection activity. Again, your answers will give you insights about your own attitudes to grammar teaching, and about the kind of classroom practices you use. In general, all of us follow practices that we think work. Different kinds of environments require different solutions. For example, if you are teaching a language class that meets only once a week (eg on an institution-wide language programme), you may decide to focus on grammar in order to give your students at least some foundation in the language. On the other hand, you may feel it more appropriate to focus on language functions such as 'introductions', 'descriptions', etc, in order to give your students at least some basic communicative skills. If you are very lucky, and meet your students three or four times a week (eg on a modern language degree course), you may have the opportunity to be eclectic, and to combine a focus on form with communicative activities.

Activity 6
As we have seen, translation can be a useful technique, if used judiciously and occasionally. Mechanical translation activities are probably of little use: they do nothing to develop communicative competence in the second language, and do not necessarily develop grammatical awareness if they do not have a specific focus. Ideally, translation tasks should attempt to make learners aware of specific differences between their own L1 and the target languages. See Module 11.

Activity 7
ALM was a method that relied almost exclusively on mechanical drills, in the belief that oral repetition was a way of conditioning students to produce and memorize accurate sentence patterns. As a methodology, ALM is largely discredited, and it is often the case that drilling is often looked on with suspicion. However, occasional drilling may be beneficial, as it involves using the so-called 'articulatory loop' (see Cook, 2001). In other words, repetition works as a memory-preserving device. In the same way that we often repeat telephone numbers in our minds in order to remember them, judicious use of drills may also help learners to memorize important patterns.

Activity 8
Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) is popular for a number of reasons: it's easy to teach and doesn't require too much preparation; it allows teachers to establish study goals that seem to be attainable in fixed periods of time; it satisfies learner needs for tangible study goals; and it gives learners the clear impression that the teacher is in charge of the study process and knows what s/he is doing. Although PPP is largely discredited by academics, it continues to be popular with both teachers and learners. This makes it, at least to some extent, a valid approach. I often feel that learners learn despite methods, not because of them. However, I do believe that the best teachers are eclectic in their approach, drawing as need arises from a variety of teaching methods and approaches.

Activity 9
Consciousness-raising (C-R) has received a lot of attention in recent years. Essentially, this is a 'discovery' approach, where students are encouraged to 'create' rules from sets of language data. A number of benefits may accrue from such an approach: it allows learners to be active in the learning process, rather than just be passive receivers of teacher knowledge; it encourages self-belief in learners, and allows them to develop confidence and motivation. Most of us (myself included) instinctively try to work out the mechanisms of our target language. There are few greater pleasures in the language learning process than the feeling of elation that we feel when we work out a rule for ourselves, perhaps triggered by a text, by an utterance we have heard a number of times, or by the noticing of a grammatical morpheme, for example. For this reason alone, C-R is an important resource for the teacher who wishes to build confidence and motivation among his/her students.

Activity 10
This is a good example of how structure can be seen to be important above the level of the sentence. One of the things that makes a text felicitous and comprehensible is the way that the information is organized:

One of the things that makes language processing possible at all is the arrangement of information in linear order such that what we are hearing or seeing in the text for the first time is linked to something else with which we are already familiar. These kinds of information are usually referred to as new versus old, or given. (Rutherford, 1987: 69-70)

If we label the text you have looked at, we get the following picture (n = new; g = given):

If we now extract the key nouns, we get a picture in which the lines of reference overlap:

If we reorganize the text so that the new information comes before the given, we get a text which flows more naturally:

Here the new-given chain is sequential and the text is therefore easier to process:

There are a number of important points to be made here. First of all, text has patterns of structure just as sentences do, and learners need exposure to these patterns. In restructuring this text, we used a number of grammatical devices. First of all, we used inversion, so that in the sentence below, a locative (prepositional phrase) has been fronted:

A large garden was in front of the house.
In front of the house was a large garden.

English is a grammatical word order language, and follows a fairly rigid subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. This in part is because English has little inflection on its verbs, and its nouns rarely mark for case (subject, object, etc). To compensate for this rigidity, we often use grammatical devices to reorganize word order. Clefting, for example, allows the following change:

He got the flowers in the garden.
It was in the garden that he got the flowers.

Pseudo-clefting also allows for word order manipulation:

He expected a better deal.
What he expected was a better deal.

English has many such devices. Other languages with richer inflection and clear case markers, such as Greek, and to a lesser extent Italian and Spanish, do not need such devices, as they have more flexible word order. We can see this by comparing a Japanese and an English sentence. Japanese has no inflection, but clearly marks case such as subject and object. In English, the following sentence does not allow for flexible word order unless we use a grammatical device:

Japanese, a Subject-object-verb (SOV) language, allows much more flexibility, because it uses case markers (topic, subject, etc). This means that the different elements in the sentence are easily identifiable regardless of the word order, and there is no need, as in English, to use structural change of any kind in order to manipulate the word order:

One of the challenges for language teachers is to focus on form at levels beyond the sentence, and to show learners that there is much structural activity at text level:

an exclusive focus on sentences, rather than on texts or on words, risks under-equipping the learner for real language use. There is more to language learning than the ability to produce well-formed sentences. Text and words also have grammar, in the sense that there are rules governing how both texts and words are organised, but it is not always clear where sentence grammar ends and either word grammar or text grammar begins. (Thornbury, 1999: 3)

Activity 11
Tasks offer a number of benefits:

• They allow learners to be involved in a communicative activity rather than focusing exclusively on the language system.
• They encourage communication and learner autonomy.
• They reflect Vygotskyan beliefs in learn-by-doing approaches.
• When combined with a focus on form, they allow for both communicative and system-focused learning.

Activity 12
The table below shows how different methodologies fit into the inductive / deductive clines, and across the FOFS / FOF / ZERO distinctions. Naturally, individual teachers vary their applications of different methods. When I was teaching Audiolingual classes, for example, I often included a grammar summary at the end of class so that learners would be clear on what the lesson target was, which would change ALM from inductive-FOFS to deductive-FOFS.

Activity 13
For furniture you probably wrote table, chair, bed, or sofa. These are the prototypes of furniture. Prototypes, remember, are the best examples we can find for different categories. The way we categorize objects and events is determined to some extent by the world we live in, and is also culturally bound. A Japanese person, for example, might think of futon (a cushion for sitting on) as an example of furniture.

The most famous experiments in this area were carried out by Rosch (1975) who asked 200 college students to rank 60 objects according to which ones were the most 'furniturish'. The rank order results were as follows:

For the existential sentence, you probably came up with something like: 'There is a (concrete noun) on/in a (concrete noun).'

I have carried out this experiment with numerous people with different language backgrounds, and the results are usually quite close to the pattern above. The most common sentence I see is: 'There is a book on the table.'

As already suggested, this shows us that human intuitions and expectations about language are to some extent predictable. In teaching grammar, we should take these expectations into account, and we should provide prototypical grammar for low-level learners.

Activity 14
The sequencing of grammar in textbooks is predominantly the result of structural tenets about linguistic complexity. Grammatical patterns which have more structural items are considered more complex, so that 'I arrive at 8 pm' is less complex than 'I'll be arriving at 8 pm'.

The frequency and utility of patterns is also important, so that frequent patterns are given more saliency, as are patterns considered useful in communication.

In recent years, with the demise of the structural approach, and the growing belief that there is a natural order of acquisition for grammatical items, the question of sequencing has become problematic. While there may be a natural order of acquisition, nobody has been able to establish this order for all structures of a language. In other words, while the structural syllabus has been discredited, no viable alternative has been proposed. Consequently, most textbook authors tend to 'play safe' and adopt a loosely structured syllabus which also features a clear sequencing of language functions.

Activity 15
The first text would seem bizarre to most people. It does not read as a text at all, but merely as a disjointed set of questions and answers, and the aim appears to be to teach yes/no questions.

The second text is from an Audiolingual textbook, and seems to aim at illustrating the English present perfect tense.

It is difficult to decide where these texts lie on the inductive / deductive and FOFS / FOF / ZERO clines without seeing the full lesson, but in all probability these are both examples of inductive-FOF lessons.

Activity 16
The word orders are as follows:

Activity 17
Plurals are formed as follows:

Activity 18
These are the past tense rules:

Activity 19
In Japanese and Portuguese, the pronoun is 'missing'. Japanese and Portuguese - like Greek, Korean, Spanish, etc - are known as pro-drop languages as they allow pronouns to be omitted. In Portuguese (as in Greek and Spanish), we don't need the pronoun as we can identify the referent from the verb inflection:

Activity 20
In English (SVO), Portuguese (SVO), and Gaelic (VSO), the object is identified through word order. Word order in these languages is fairly rigid, so it is possible to identify the object by its position in the sentence. Japanese uses a special case marker, o/wo to mark the object. Languages like Japanese and Greek that use case markers have more flexible word order. The object, for example, can move position in the sentence, but can always be identified by its marker.

Activity 21
English questions are formed by breaking a verb down into its stem and auxiliary, and then inverting the auxiliary with the sentence subject. Portuguese uses no grammatical movement, or grammatical marker to denote questions, so this is done through rising intonation. Japanese uses a sentence-final question marker, ka. Irish Gaelic also uses auxiliaries, 'ar' and 'an'; the auxiliary can cause a change in the accenting of the verb (toghann » an dtoghann).

Activity 22
The position of prepositions is in many respects determined by the language's word order, specifically the verb-object order. If the verb precedes its object, prepositions will precede their nouns; if the verb follows the object the prepositions (post-positions, really) will follow the noun:

Activity 23
This kind of activity is inductive, in that you had to work out the answers yourself; you were given no rules to start with. The activity is also FOF, as you were required to focus on structure, but were given no structural information or metalanguage to begin with.

This kind of activity is very much C-R and 'discovery' learning. The benefits of this kind of activity are, as noted in the Commentary on Activity 9, that they encourage learners to think for themselves, solve problems, and become autonomous learners.

For some learners this kind of problem-solving activity is enjoyable. People with analytic minds tend to enjoy 'discovery' approaches. For those with less systematic, and more intuitive approaches to learning, it can be somewhat frustrating.

Each of us as learners uses different learning strategies, in accordance with our own learning preferences (see Module 12). As teachers, we are aware that in our classrooms we have a wide variety of learning styles present, and for this reason it is probably best to be eclectic in our approach and use a mixture of inductive and deductive teaching methods. In this way, we will hopefully provide useful learning experiences for all our learners.