Module 3

Grammar Rules: Teaching Grammar in the Foreign Language Classroom

This module is divided into the following sections:

Outcomes

Author of this module

Acknowledgements
 
3.0	  Introduction

3.1  Grammatical constructs and pedagogic grammars
	3.1.1  Grammatical constructs
	3.1.2  Pedagogic grammars
		3.1.2.1  The contents of pedagogical grammars

3.2  The case for teaching grammar
	3.2.1  The case against grammar
	3.2.2  The case for grammar

3.3  Grammar and methodology
	3.3.1  Grammar–translation
	3.3.2  Audiolingualism
	3.3.3  Presentation–practice–production
	3.3.4  Consciousness-raising 
	3.3.5 Task-based learning
3.3.6  Protogrammar

3.4  Grammar in the syllabus
	3.4.1  Traditional approaches
	3.4.2  The grading of grammar items

3.5	Review activities

3.6	Summary

3.7	Commentary on activities

3.8	References

3.9	Further reading

3.10  Assessment task

Outcomes

By the end of this module, you should be familiar with a number of key concepts.  In terms of approaches to grammar teaching, you should be able to demonstrate awareness of three different perspectives:
•	A focus on forms (FOFS)
•	A focus on form (FOF)
•	A zero position on teaching grammar 

You should also be able to distinguish key methodologies, and show how these methodologies relate to the approaches outlined above:
•	Grammar–Translation (GT)
•	Audiolingualism (ALM), 
•	Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP) 
•	Consciousness-raising (C-R) 
•	Task-based Learning (TBL)

Finally, you should be able to identify the role of grammar in the foreign language syllabus.

Author of this module

Terry Shortall is the Programme Director for the MA TEFL/TESL and MA Translation Studies Open Distance Learning programmes at The University of
Birmingham. He has worked for many years as a language teacher, teacher
trainer and university lecturer in Brazil, Portugal, and Japan. His main
interests are Second Language Acquisition, grammar, L2 learner attitudes,
and translation. He is Reviews Editor of the international journal, Language Awareness, published by Multilingual Matters.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kaori Hara for her help with the Japanese, Eilis Ní Mhordha for assistance with the Gaelic, and Kevin Ferreira Shortall for help with the Portuguese. Thanks are also due to an anonymous DELPHI reviewer for perceptive comments and some helpful suggestions.

3.0  Introduction

This module examines the role of grammar in Modern Language Teaching (MLT) as we enter the new Millennium. In the traditional language classroom of these islands, the study of grammar was often seen as synonymous with the study of language itself. Grammar–Translation was widely used as a method until the 1960s, and learners were given little opportunity to use language meaningfully. In the 1970s, audio-visual approaches were in vogue. Students were encouraged to practise language actively, but the syllabus was still often grammatical, and rote learning was encouraged.  
In the 1980s, there was a move towards more communicative methodologies, and grammar was no longer strongly emphasized. This change was in response to research findings on how second languages are learned, and also to the introduction of the National Curriculum for MLT in the early 1990s (see Swarbrick, 2002b). As a result, explicit grammar teaching was treated to some extent as an outdated methodology, such that ‘there was confusion within MFL [Modern Foreign Language] departments about the place of grammar within the largely accepted communicative approach’ (Swarbrick, 2002b: 19). For Miller (2002: 144), grammar was ‘forced underground’ for much of the 1980s.
The pendulum has swung back, and there is now general acceptance that grammar teaching has an important role to play in classroom language learning (Doughty and Williams, 1998a; Hinkel and Fotos, 2002). In this module we will examine the research in favour of grammar teaching, the way methodology influences grammar teaching, how grammar is presented in the syllabus, and the new tools that are now available for the devising of a grammatical syllabus.
	
There are four distinct sections to the module:

Grammatical constructs and pedagogic grammars
Here we look at the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammars, and suggest that a second language pedagogic grammar should be both prescriptive (ie should provide guidelines on how to use the language in accordance with native-speaker models) and descriptive (should reflect the way language is used in real-world communication). We also look at L2 grammar definitions, and how these can be sometimes inadequate in the analysis of real texts.

The case for teaching grammar
In this section we provide an overview of the research into the benefits or otherwise of teaching grammar explicitly. We note that more communicative methodologies have eschewed grammar teaching in favour of meaning-focused instruction because of a belief that learners do not always internalize explicitly taught grammar items. We also consider recent research findings that a focus on grammar does in fact accelerate the language acquisition process, and can lead to more accurate use of language.

Grammar and methodology
Here we examine how the methodologies we employ influence the way we teach grammar. We look, for example, at traditional teacher-led methodologies like Grammar–Translation (GT), Audiolingualism (ALM), and Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP) and note that these still influence modern-day textbooks. We then move on to look briefly at how recent approaches, such as Consciousness-raising (C-R) and Task-based Learning (TBL), often advocate a student-centred ‘discovery’ approach, with learners encouraged to detect rules in the language they produce and are exposed to. We also look at protogrammar which, although not a methodology in itself, reflects how language users represent grammar in their minds, and how this knowledge may be influential in the design of a grammatical syllabus.

Grammar in the syllabus
We look also at how grammar is represented in the language syllabus, and we examine how grammar items are graded and sequenced. We look at how the grammatical syllabus is often simply a list of sequenced structures, and in particular at how features such as frequency, utility, and linguistic complexity influence the position of each item in the grammatical sequence.

Throughout the module, you will be asked to carry out activities; commentaries are provided for these activities at the end of the module.

3.1  Grammatical constructs and pedagogic grammars
Essentially, we can divide grammars into two types. Prescriptive grammars prescribe or dictate how we should use the language. These kinds of grammar were traditionally used in first language education, and contain judgmental views on what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ English, for example. Prescriptive approaches often assume that some dialects are superior to others, so that in the example below, ‘I’m not’ would be seen as more ‘standard’:
I ain’t. 
I’m not. 
I amn’t.    
To a large extent, traditional prescriptive grammars were based on the study of Latin. For example, the rule I myself learned as a child that one should never split infinitives, as in ‘to boldly go’, derives from the fact that in Latin all infinitives are single words (as they are in modern Spanish, French, etc), and therefore cannot be split. Similarly, the rule that one should never end a sentence with a preposition also comes from the fact that Latin sentences never end in prepositions. The difficulties involved in trying to impose rules on a language are well known:
The grammarian of our own language considered that his function was to settle usage and control development – but from the point of view of the scientific grammarian, who looks on language as a thing that lives and grows and changes, he might as well set himself to control the tides or the winds. (Kittson, 1918: 23)
For the purposes of second language (L2) acquisition, grammars are largely prescriptive in that they try to teach learners how to use grammar accurately, usually in accordance with native speaker models.
Descriptive grammars describe how we actually speak, ie how we use communicatively the rules stored in our mental grammars. A descriptive grammar will attempt to uncover rules of grammar from examinations of real-world language use, rather than lay down these rules according to socially determined norms. For a descriptive grammarian, the following concepts are key: 
•	grammar ‘rules’ do not tell us how we should use the language, but describe a pattern observed in our use of language;
•	no one language or dialect is superior to any other;  
•	the grammars of all languages are equally complex and capable of producing any thought and an infinite number of sentences.
The best examples of descriptive grammars are those based on analyses of large-scale computer databases of language, known as corpora. The COBUILD dictionaries for learners of English are based on a corpus of over 300 million words, as is Hunston’s (2000) work on pattern grammar.
From our perspective as language teachers, what we need is a pedagogic or teaching grammar. As we have noted, this will be largely prescriptive, as it will need to serve as a guide to learners on how to use the language accurately.  At the same time, it will be based on a description of  the way certain designated speakers of the target language use the language.

3.1.1  Grammatical constructs

Activity 1

Grammar is to some extent the language we need, the metalanguage, in order to describe language.  Which grammatical terms do your students know?  Which terms do you feel they that need to know, or that you need to teach?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

To describe a grammar, we need to identify and define items such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases, clauses, sentences, and so on. While there are numerous and useful definitions for these items, in practice these definitions do not always help us to deal adequately with real-world, authentic language. The following definition for an English-language noun, for example, is reasonably adequate:
Noun: a ‘naming’ word which typically fills the positions occupied by ‘sheriff’ in the sentences below:
I shot the sheriff [direct object, ie complement of the verb]. 
The sheriff shot me [subject]. 
I gave my gun to the sheriff [complement of a preposition].
Typical nouns inflect for number (singular or plural [sheriff versus sheriffs]), but ‘sheep’, ‘milk’, ‘beer’, for example, are exceptions and do not take plural -s; nouns also inflect for genitive case (ie possessive as in ‘the sheriff’s gun’); typical nouns are often accompanied by determiners (‘the’, ‘a’, ‘this’, ‘that’, etc).
While such definitions may seem clear-cut and appropriate, they are not always adequate for the purposes of analysing authentic language, as you will see when you attempt Activity 2. It is for this reason, perhaps, that textbook sentences and texts are contrived to ‘fit’ and not contradict the kind of simplified grammar rules and definitions we provide for learners.

Activity 2

Read the transcripts below. Can you guess the context of these interactions? For each transcript, count the number of concrete nouns (ie those which refer to physical items in the world) and abstract nouns (ie those which refer to concepts and ideas) and record them in the grid. You should count each occurrence of every noun as a separate item. If possible, compare your answers with those of someone else studying this module.

Then refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

	Concrete nouns	Abstract nouns	

            Transcript 1	

Transcript 2	

Transcript 3	

Transcript 1:
f	There’s eh a little portable TV on the table and there’s a man with something... 	
m	With a set of dog’s ears.	
f	Yeah.	
m	Right.	
f	And there’s a bag of chips or something beside the TV	
m	No, no bag of chips here.	
f    	And there’s a phone on the desk.	
m 	There’s a phone on the desk, yeah.	
f     	And there’s the man sitting, ehm...	
m     	With his legs crossed.	
f	Yeah, he’s sitting side on in the picture on one of those little office chairs with wheels.  And he has his hand under his chin.	
m	The same thing. Holding onto his tie with his hand [inaudible] hand, left hand.	
f 	Yeah. Go on back to the books on the top, the top picture.  There’s three large books and one small book in mine.	
m	No. There’s only two and one small [inaudible] beside it.	
f	There’s a telephone on the desk.	
m	Yeah.	
f	There’s a key, there’s a little book.	
m	How many keys?	
f	on the side.  There’s one key.	
m	There’s two keys in mine.	
f	There’s a little book on its side.	
m	Black?	
f	There’s another little... yeah, and then there’s another strange looking object, which might be a packet of fags, or book.	
m	Mmm, mm.	
f	And a no-smoking sign.	
m	And on the table, then, in front of them, there’s eh... looks like a graph or something.	
f	Yeah	
f	Yep.  [pause] That’s about it.	
m	I think that’s about it, you’re right.	

Transcript 2:
A	By the way, John, can I say something else while I'm on the programme? 	
B	Course you can. 	
A	Er, I echo the sentiments of the lady who said about your calling people flower and girl. I think it's fantastic. It makes my night when I hear you say that.	
B	That's all right then, flower. 	
A	Oh you know it's lovely. Don't you think it's down to earth? 	
B	I hope so.	
A	Yes it really is down-to-earth. I tried to get on your programme last night with the left-handed business you know? 	
	(CONVERSATION DELETED)	
B	Uh huh. 	
A	We were... we were very grateful for this. 	
B	It does make a lot of difference yeah. 	
A	It does indeed. Thank you for your programme, John. 	
B	Thank you, Mary. Nice to talk to you. 	
A	Thank you. Bye bye. 	
B	Bye bye. God Bless. 	
A	Bye bye, flower. 	

Transcript 3:
A	There was a there is a phrase that I have heard among humans that they use to describe erm many of er of these meaningless conversations they have. Erm they called it politics I believe. <pause> 	
B	Yes I've heard about politics. 	
A	It's an interesting notion. Does a politics butter its bread? 	
B	Er no.	
A	I think it's a bit more abstract than that.  	
B	Ah. 	
A	I think a politics tries to butter  <laughs> its bread and everybody else's on both sides.  	
B	Ah.  	
A	But none of them ever manage.  	
B	Then perhaps some day I shall meet a politics. <pause>  I'm sure that will be interesting.   	

3.1.2  Pedagogic grammars
Second language (L2) grammars are by nature prescriptive as they try to guide the learner towards accurate use of the target language. The rules presented in many L2 grammars are often simplified so as to be more accessible to the learner. In many instances, these rules do not provide full coverage of a language structure. Leech (1994), for example, notes that pedagogic descriptions are often not comprehensive, but contain broad generalizations, ie simplifications or ‘rules of thumb’. He also notes that while such simplification facilitates learning/assimilation, it can be misleading. There is a rule in English language teaching, for example, stating that ‘already’ should be used in statements, and ‘yet’ in interrogatives and negatives:
‘I’ve already done it.’
‘Have you done it yet?’
‘I haven’t done it yet.’
This rule is only a partial truth, however, as it is possible to use ‘yet’ in statements:
	‘His addictive personality was yet to manifest itself.’ (from COBUILD Bank of English)
Leech, and some other L2 grammarians, would argue that it is necessary to offer simplified rules to learners in order to maximize learning.  
L2 grammars often use concocted sentences to illustrate grammar patterns as real-world, authentic language texts are sometimes considered too complex to clearly illustrate specific patterns. Recent corpus-based approaches, where large computer databases of language are analysed for frequency of different patterns, attempt to show that there are ways in which the use of authentic language can help us to construct a grammatical syllabus that reflects real-world language use.
In traditional pedagogic and textbook grammar, grammar topics and materials are usually graded; learners have their attention drawn to general rules (similar to Leech’s ‘rules of thumb’); and there are usually practice exercises to accompany the rules.
Chalker (1994: 34) believes that pedagogical grammars may be comprehensive, but are more useful if modest in aims, and that prescription should be combined with description.
Corder notably believes that grammar should not be the objective of teaching, and that communicative skills should be emphasized:
[P]edagogical descriptions [...] must [...] help the learner learn whatever it is he learns, but are not necessarily what he learns. Pedagogical descriptions are aids to learning, not the object of learning [...] the teaching of grammar cannot be divorced from the teaching of meaning. (Corder,1973: 335–36)

3.1.2.1  The contents of pedagogic grammars
Very often, pedagogic and textbook grammars focus primarily on verbs and verb tenses (see sections 3.3.2 ‘Audiolingualism’ and 3.4 on ‘Grammar in the syllabus’). However, it is important that, as language teachers, we are aware that grammar covers a wide range of features, from morphology through to text structure (for an example of grammar at the level of text, see Activity 10), and also a wide range of word classes.

Word Classes
Standard definitions of word classes or parts of speech are as follows:

noun	naming word	
verb	doing word	
adjective	describing word	
adverb	a word which describes a verb	

These definitions are fine as far as they go. Possibly the most striking fact about such definitions is that they describe the semantic function of words –  what they contribute to meaning.  
It should be obvious that a given word does not always belong to the same word class, so that, while most people would instinctively say that ‘brick’ is a noun, this seems true only in sentence number one below:

1.	I’ll build my house of brick and stone.
2.	I’d like to own a red brick house.
3.	They bricked in the window.
4.	I’ll brick you if you’re not careful.
5.	I’ll build the house *brickly.

In number 2, ‘brick’ seems to be an adjective, but the fact that we can say ‘very happy’, but not ‘very brick’ suggests that this is not such a simple matter; for the moment, it might be better to say that ‘brick’ in 2 is a noun doing the job of an adjective.
In 3, ‘brick’ is obviously a verb, and in 4 also, at least in the grammars of speakers of certain dialects of English.
If 1–4 suggest that a word can belong to any word class, 5 suggests that this is not the case. In 5, ‘brick’ is behaving like an adverb, a fact unacceptable (I think) to all speakers of English.
Simple definitions of word classes thus seem problematic, and it may be easier to look instead at what words are doing in phrases, sentences, and utterances (and, by extension, in texts).   
In attempting to do this, rather than look at definitions we will examine for four word classes both the form (whether words change their shape and how) and the distribution of words (where different words can occur). (Note that the examples we will look at will show only typical members of different word classes, and you should easily be able to think of many exceptions to the generalizations I will be making.)

a) Nouns
Words that can fill the ‘sheriff’s’ spot in 6 to 8 are very likely to be nouns:
6.	I shot the sheriff.
7.	The sheriff shot me.
8.	I gave my gun to the sheriff.
Nouns typically inflect for number and genitive case in English.

b) Determiners
A second look at 6–8 above shows that sheriff is always preceded by ‘the’. It should be obvious that ‘the’ can be substituted by a number of other words, giving us the additional sentences below:

6.	I shot 	the 	sheriff.	
9.		a		
10.		this		
11.		that		
12.		our		
13.		which	sheriff?	

These words are determiners. Although traditional grammars often ascribe distinct terms and roles to many of the determiners, these distinctions are not central to our discussion. In English, the main determiners are:
articles: 	the, a
demonstratives: 	this, that, these, those
quantifiers: 	some, any, each, every
possessives:	my, your, his, her, etc
Wh-determiners: 	what, which, whose
Determiners do not inflect. They are a closed set: we cannot create new determiners with the same ease we constantly create new nouns, verbs, and adjectives.    

c) Pronouns
If we look at 6 one more time, it should be obvious that it is possible to substitute the sheriff by other elements, giving us the following:

6.	I shot 	the sheriff.		
14.		him.		
15.		her.		

These words are pronouns (often defined as words which substitute nouns).   Pronouns are one of the few parts of the English language where inflection is still widespread. Pronouns in subject position are often said to take nominative case (eg he, she), while pronouns in the object position take the accusative case (eg him, her). Pronouns inflect for number as well as accusative and genitive cases. Like determiners, they are a closed class that cannot easily be added to.

d) Verbs
Following the system we have used so far, you can probably predict that verbs are just about anything that can fit into the ‘shot’ slot in 6.

6.	I	shot 	the sheriff.		
16.		Killed			
17.	He frequently	Kills	Sheriffs.		

Typical verbs inflect for 3rd person singular and tense:   
	
Apart from looking at word classes, it is important to note the interaction between grammar and lexis. Many words both carry meaning and perform a grammatical function. Pronouns, prepositions, and determiners, are essentially grammatical words, but also carry meaning.  Grammatical words are closed sets. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives, on the other hand, are lexical rather than grammatical, and are open sets.
There is another sense in which grammar and lexis are interactive.  Sinclair (1991) has maintained that much language knowledge and use is based, not just on the manipulation of grammatical structure, which he calls the ‘slot and filler’ model, but also on the production of fixed and semi-fixed phrases. In other words, rather than slotting lexical items into structural frameworks in order to communicate, much of the language we produce consists of fixed phrases and collocations (collocation is the way words tend to occur with each other).
As an example, Sinclair notes that the phrase ‘of course’ is equivalent to one word. Similarly, the expression ‘by the way’ is also really only one lexical item. The grammar of this expression is ‘frozen’ and cannot be changed to *’by a way’, for example.  
Sinclair also notes how semi-preconstructed phrases show levels of predictability. The phrase ‘set eyes on’, for example, generally takes a pronoun subject, and is often accompanied by either ‘never’ or a temporal conjunction like ‘the moment’ or ‘the first time’. Similarly, the verb ‘happen’ collocates with unpleasant things such as accidents.
Hunston (2000) extends this idea and shows how lexical items show a range of collocational behaviours not covered in traditional grammars.
We can see how this works in the following (slightly edited) lines taken from the COBUILD Bank of English database. The expression ‘no reason’ is followed by a wh-clause, while ‘chance’, ‘danger’, and ‘no doubt’ are followed by that-clauses. In other words, lexical items are often patterned with specific grammatical structures. These aspects of language are rarely covered in traditional pedagogic grammars.

    years. Yeah. so there's no reason why it shouldn't happen in South Africa as 
 of catching it then there's no reason why you shouldn't talk to people with 
these qualities then there's a chance that you won't be out of a job. You know
         I mean I know there's a chance that it won't actually but there  is a      
                   so there there's a danger that people who use   
off. Right. There's always the danger that you might not know which one   
 motivation is there. There's no doubt that he is one of our most talented 
      that then there's there's no doubt we will beat them. Absolutely 

We can see here that grammar is a complex phenomenon that is not restricted to lists of verb tenses. It takes places at all levels of language, from the morpheme (smallest item of meaning) up to the level of text discourse (see Figure 3.1), and it is important that we as language teachers keep this in mind.

Figure 3.1: the scope of grammar

3.2  The case for teaching grammar
There are well-argued positions against the explicit teaching of grammar. The most influential anti-grammar researcher of recent times has been Krashen (1981, 1982, 1985) who has argued that learners do not internalize grammatical items which are presented formally. There are other problems associated with the structural syllabus, just as there are arguments suggesting that explicit teaching of structure can at least accelerate the acquisition process, and may lead to more accurate use of language.  We will examine both positions in this section.

Activity 3

What do you think are the main benefits of teaching grammar?  

What arguments are there against the teaching of grammar? 

How much time, if any, do you spend teaching grammar in each class?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback on this activity. 

3.2.1  The case against grammar 
Krashen (1982, 1985) was very much against grammar teaching as he felt that conscious attention to grammatical structures would not result in learners being able to use these structures in real-world communicative environments. In his Acquisition-learning Hypothesis, Krashen (1985) made a distinction between acquisition, the unconscious absorption of linguistic knowledge, and learning, the study of language rules. He believed that learning could never become acquisition, that learners would not assimilate taught structures, and that the explicit teaching of grammar was of no benefit. In other words, conscious learning through the study of grammar would be quite limited, and is unlikely to drive acquisition forward. For Krashen, meaningful interaction in the target language, with an emphasis on message transmission, and not on accurate use of rules, would lead to successful acquisition. He believed that if learners were exposed to ‘comprehensible input’ (ie language at a level slightly above their current ability) they could understand and use this to drive their own acquisition process forward. Krashen was not the first to note the problems of trying to learn a language exclusively via the grammar:
From what has already been said about the nature of language it will be evident that any attempt to acquire a foreign tongue by the learning of paradigms and rules must meet with failure. When the pupil appears to be learning from a rule, he is in reality learning from the example which accompanies it. (Kittson, 1918: 23)
Krashen’s views influenced proponents of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), a methodology which has as its basic premise the idea that language teaching should be message-focused and should concentrate on the development of communication skills. (In one language school where I taught, Krashen’s ideas were so influential that one of our teachers would not teach language at all, and would only play Monopoly with his students.  At the end of a few months of Monopoly, all of his students were proficient in saying, ‘It’s your turn’, and ‘Can I have the dice, please’!).  For Miller (2002: 144) the 
dissemination of Krashen’s views led to the orthodoxy which held sway for much of the 1980s, according to which both error correction and grammar teaching were banished (or, more accurately, forced underground; many teachers went on doing both, but felt guilty about it).
Although Krashen’s ideas remain influential, and CLT is still a popular approach among teachers and researchers, his theories have been criticized as being largely untestable, and based on research that has been carried out primarily with naturalistic rather than classroom learners (see Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991; Gregg, 1984). Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could even test Krashen’s assertion that learned rules cannot become proceduralized into automatic unconscious knowledge. In addition, Krashen’s emphasis on input as the driving force behind acquisition fails to consider the role of learner output (for a discussion of how learner output influences acquisition, see Swain, 1985, 1995).
From a pedagogic perspective, Grauberg (1997: 36) argues that ‘[t]he view, so often expressed, that one can just learn to engage in conversation “without bothering about grammar”, is fallacious’. Grauberg (1997) points out that this communicative ‘revolution’ was not so favourably received by linguists and teachers on the Continent, and it does seem to have been more influential in English Language Teaching (ELT) than in Modern Language Teaching (MLT). Grauberg notes that 
In Germany a three-phase procedure is normally followed: first a grammatical point is met within a story or a factual account [...] next it is elicited by pupils and formalized by the teacher, and finally it is practised [...]. In the Soviet Union and probably in its successors the conscious-practical method involved pupils studying the language theoretically and at the same time learning to use it in practice […]. And in France the Baccalauréat examination in foreign language still contains one paper specifically testing grammar. (Grauberg, 1997: 34)
In recent times, proponents of the use of authentic texts (AT) (Little, 1997; Little et al, 1989, and Little and Singleton, 1992) have put forward arguments not dissimilar to Krashen’s: an authentic text is one devised to transmit a message in a real-world situation, and not designed for pedagogic purposes. The belief in pedagogic applications of AT derives largely from the idea that language teachers can ‘better serve their students through activities in L2 communication and comprehension than by grammar practice and direct instruction’ (Pica, 1997: 50–51). One of the advantages of using AT is that it ‘entails a pre-requisite engagement in meaning before attention to linguistic features can be expected to be effective’ (Doughty and Williams, 1998b: 3).
For Little (1997: 225), ‘authentic texts have the capacity to draw language learners into the communicative world of the target language community [... and] support the communicative purpose of language teaching.’  Little believes that AT acts as a substitute for a native-speaking community and thereby provides a linguistically rich environment.
It is not entirely clear what the role of grammar is in AT. Some suggest that it allows for grammar teaching in context (Larsen-Freeman, 1991), although there are few specifications as to how this can be achieved in methodological terms. In other words, although AT is a seen as a rich source of language input, there is nothing in this approach that indicates whether or how grammar should be taught explicitly.
Apart from theoretical positions against grammar teaching, there are pedagogic problems in using textbook grammar rules. We have already noted that textbook grammar rules are often partial and incomplete, and do not show how structures actually occur in authentic communication. As Willis (1990) notes, the textbook rule that ‘any’ should be used in negatives and interrogatives is a misleading one:
Do you smoke? Do you have any problem with your lungs?
They don't have any rights then, as prisoners. 
(From COBUILD Bank of English)
He points out that ‘any’ is in fact often used in declarative statements:
If the number of titles on offer are any indication, Mr Parish has shown
it doesn't mean to say there are any more offences
Maestri (1995: 92) provides the following example of learner output to show how this misleading rule is applied to produce error:
She didn’t take any books, but dozens of them.
As Maestri, (1995: 95)  states: ‘[...] teachers often resort to a series of oversimplifications and false generalisations which lay stress on the formal system of the language and thus gradually mislead students into approaching the language as a system of absolute rules.’ Kittson noted that ‘the nature of language is such that, however skilfully we devise our rules, they will fail to cover all its features. The learner will always be meeting difficulties in which no rule can guide him’ (Kittson, 1918: 23).
Carter feels that ‘there are many features of real, naturally occurring, spoken standard English which are not recorded in the standard grammars of English language’ (Carter, 1998: 43). For Andrews, ‘textbook categories are erroneous because they stress rudimentary and decontextualized structural features and not meaning as it emerges through contextualized and authentic language use’ (Andrews, 1998: 30).
Most textbook rules derive from authors’ intuitions, as well as pedagogic reference sources of various kinds, and as many textbook writers are themselves language teachers, they are greatly influenced by their own teaching experience, and also by their experience of language textbooks they have used themselves. What this often means is a perpetuation of the grammar list syllabus.
For many language teachers and textbook writers, the target language (TL) is epitomized by such a focus on lists of grammatical structures to be learned in succession, and these structures are very often lists of tenses, eg once the Present Continuous tense is mastered, learners are taken on to face the Present Simple, and so on. The idea is that learners should gradually accumulate a series of possibly inter-related and contrasted structures (Rutherford, 1987). Research has suggested that learning a language involves, at least to some extent, meaning-focused communication in that language, rather than just studying one structure after another (see, for example, Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991; Skehan, 1998).
The main problems associated with traditional grammar rules and syllabus, then, are: 
1.	the presentation of lists of structures to be learned in sequence does not reflect second language acquisition processes (Rutherford, 1987);
2.	grammar rules as presented in traditional textbooks fail to reflect how language is used authentically in real-world communication;
3.	the rules are often incomplete and may mislead students.

3.2.2  The case for grammar
The process of acquisition involves making modifications to the learner’s interlanguage (Selinker, 1972) where interlanguage is a developing system that is intermediary between the L1 and the L2, with grammar rules that may be a mixture of L1 and L2 rules, or may be rules that the learner him/herself has created.  A learner will have a number of different interlanguages as proficiency increases (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2: the development of interlanguages

Research now suggests that a focus on grammatical form is beneficial for interlanguage development (Doughty  and Williams, 1998a; N. Ellis, 1993; R. Ellis, 1994, 2001; Fotos, 1993; Long, 1991; Long and Robinson, 1998), but there is much discussion as to whether this should involve a focus on lists of structure, or simply a focus on form as it appears in student output (see Willis, 1996; Willis and Willis, 2001). 
Larsen-Freeman and Long maintain that:
Formal SL instruction does not seem able to alter acquisition sequences... [but has] clearly positive effects on the rate at which learners acquire the language, and probably beneficial effects on their ultimate level of attainment. (Larsen-Freeman and Long, 1991: 321)
Skehan believes that ‘methods of contriving a focus on form are needed which capture learners’ attention, so that they may incorporate newly noticed forms into their developing language systems’ (Skehan, 1998: 4).
Schmidt and Frota (1986) suggest that reliance on communication strategies alone does not lead to improved syntactic accuracy. Pienemann (1988) argues that instruction does not alter the order of acquisition, but it does accelerate it. Gass finds that ‘[p]edagogical descriptions may aid the learner to internalize parts of the target language’ (Gass, 1997: 154) and that ‘[f]ocused instruction […] is a first step in the modification of one’s grammar” (Gass, 1997: 155).
Ellis states that ‘it seems reasonable to assume that formal instruction is of value in promoting rapid and higher levels of acquisition’ (Ellis, 1990: 133), that naturalistic learners ‘do not develop high levels of accuracy even though they become communicatively effective’ and that ‘instructed learners do better than naturalistic learners precisely because they are encouraged to focus on form’ (Ellis, 1990: 165). Hulstijn  and Hulstijn (1984) also found that
learners who were asked to pay attention to form improved the correctness of their utterances.
There has been growing interest in recent years in the contribution of cognitive psychology to L2 learning theory, and many believe form-focused instruction provides the sort of practice necessary for automatization of language forms (see, for example, McLaughlin, 1987; Johnson, 1996, DeKeyser, 1998).
Other findings demonstrating that grammar teaching has a positive influence on the learning/acquisition process, include the following:
•	Form-focused teaching makes grammar more salient or noticeable (eg Schmidt, 1990, 1995; Schmidt and Frota, 1986), and noticing, at some level, seems essential for acquisition.
•	Post-puberty L2 learners seem to need an element of analysis in their learning (DeKeyser, 2000).
•	Explicit form-focused instruction seems to compensate for a lack of analytical aptitude in learners (Robinson, 1995).
•	Grammar forms which are easy to comprehend but difficult to produce (eg Spanish conditional forms, French reflexives) may benefit from a form- and output-focused approach; forms which are difficult to comprehend (especially in relation to L1) but easy to produce (eg Spanish OVS word order) may benefit from a more input-oriented approach, though still form-focused (see DeKeyser and Sokalski, 1996; VanPatten and Cadierno, 1993; VanPatten and Sanz, 1995).
In general, then, the research consensus is that grammar is seen to aid the acquisition process, while grammarless instruction leads to fossilization, ie  the language system does not continue to develop (Skehan, 1998).
There are also communicative arguments in favours of a focus on grammar rules: ‘Grammar […] is a description of the regularities in a language, and knowledge of these regularities provides the learner with the means to generate a potentially enormous number of original sentences‘ (Thornbury, 1999: 15). And indeed, there are clear pragmatic arguments for teaching grammar in classrooms. As Turner points out, ‘[i]n foreign language learning, grammatical knowledge must be explicitly taught for there is simply not enough contact time to pick up its patterns and regularities in passing’ (Turner, 2002: 67).
In terms of pedagogy, while we have noted that there are problems with the use of simplified rules, simplification may also bring benefits. Nation, for example, notes that: 
Simplification is an important tool in second language learning. It may be that the use of the term with its implications of reducing text is unsuitable and something like 'roughly tuned input' will get simplification the respectability it deserves. Without simplification, the strands of meaning‑focused input, meaning‑focused output, and fluency development become impossible for all except advanced learners […] Many of the criticisms of simplification are criticisms of bad simplification. We need to have standards of good simplification and praise those texts that exemplify them. (Nation, 2001: 172–73)
Van Els et al suggest that: 
[...] it is sometimes forgotten that communicative competence not only includes a command of rules of language use, but also a command of morpho-syntactic rules, and that in the absence of some form of grammatical gradation there is no guarantee that the latter will be attained. (van Els et al, 1984: 230)
Indeed, in a survey of modification in teacher speech to non-natives, Chaudron (1988) shows clearly that teachers simplify their own language output in terms of syntax, lexis, and rate of speech, and that the degree of simplification relates directly to the proficiency of the learners. In other words, not only do textbooks take a graded approach to grammar in the syllabus, but teachers seem to unconsciously follow this tendency.
Cook (2001: 225) adds that ‘simplified grammar, slow clear speech, and the selection of basic vocabulary, are natural features of adult speech to children, and […] to a foreign speaker of our language’.

3.3  Grammar and methodology
In this section we look at the different ways grammar is represented in the classroom.  
Before considering the influence of methodology on grammar, we will take an opportunity to reflect on your attitudes to teaching grammar, and to how you teach structure.

Activity 4

Read the statements below, and grade them 1-5, where 1 means ‘I disagree strongly’ and 5 means 'I agree strongly’.
	
1	The most important thing to learn in a language is the grammar.		
2	If students are communicating meaningfully, they will learn the grammar automatically.		
3	If you learn the grammar, the words will take care of themselves.		
4	Learners should be encouraged to formulate their own grammar rules.		
5	Students learn language well if the teacher explains the grammar.		
6	The study of grammar should only take up a small amount of class time.		
7	The teacher should explain the grammar before asking the students to use it in communication.		
8	Studying the grammar of a language is not enough to build good communication skills.		
9	A large amount of classroom time should be spent on studying grammar.		
10	Meaningful communication is more important than accurate use of language structures.

Now click on ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 5

Answer these questions in terms of what you actually do in your language classroom.

1.	Do you teach grammar in any formal manner?
		Yes	____	Got to question 4 and ff.
		No	____	Go to questions 2 and 3; then take a rest.

2.	How do your learners acquire structural aspects of language?

3.	Do you think your learners are more/less accurate than those who have more formal grammar lessons?  Why?

4.	Does your textbook have a grammatical syllabus?
		Yes	____	Go to question 6, 7 and ff.
		No	____	Go to question 5; then take a rest.

5.	How do you choose the items of grammar that you teach?

6.	Do you teach grammar items in the order your textbook presents them?

7.	Do you teach grammar
	a) at the beginning of the lesson?
	b) during the lesson?
	c) at the end of the lesson?

8.	Do you 
	a) give learners a rule and expect them to practise sentences 
based on it?
	b) give learners some texts and expect them to ‘find’ the 
grammar patterns?
	c) give grammar content based on your students’ errors?

9.	Why do you teach grammar?
	a) because it helps learners to communicate meaning
	b) because it makes students use more accurate language
	c) because learners expect it
	d) because it helps students to pass the exam.

10.	Does your department use examinations based on
	a) grammar items?
	b) oral fluency skills?
	c) knowledge/comprehension of written texts?
	d) ability to communicate?

After you have completed the activity, refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

The way we teach grammar is tied essentially to the approaches, methods, and techniques we use in the classroom. In this section, we will look at how grammar is treated in three traditional approaches, Grammar-Translation, Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP) and Audiolingualism (ALM), and three modern approaches, Consciousness-raising (C-R), Task-based Learning (TBL), and what I will call Protogrammar (protogrammar is not a methodology in itself, but does give important insights into psychological representations of grammar in the mind, and should therefore be an important influence on how grammar is represented in the different methodologies).
We will look at these methodologies in terms of teaching approach, and of how grammar is treated. In terms of teaching, the approach will be either:
•	deductive, where learners are given rules and then asked to practise these rules in sentence-based drills or exercises; or 
•	inductive, where, although the textbook is organized into lists of structures, there is no explicit teaching of rules, and learners are expected to somehow acquire rules subconsciously after extensive practice of model grammar patterns.
In terms of grammar, there are three possible positions:
A focus on forms (FOFS) (Long, 1991; Long and Robinson, 1998), where the syllabus consists of a list of structures predetermined and present in the textbook;
A focus on form (FOF) (Long, 1991; Long and Robinson, 1998), where there is no linguistic syllabus, and the grammar focus is on structures that appear in the input or are produced by learners during task completion, or during classroom interaction; or
A ‘zero’ position, where there is no focus on grammar, and learners are expected to acquire structure subconsciously.

3.3.1  Grammar-Translation

Activity 6

Do you ever use translation in your classes? How much time do you spend on translation activities? Do your translation tasks have specific objectives. If so, give some examples.

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Grammar-translation is a method that dates back to the teaching of Latin and other ‘dead’ languages. Rules are presented and explained, and learners practise these rules in specially prepared exercises. Explanation is often given in the learners’ L1, and there is little L2 oral practice. Many GT exercises involve translation of L2 sentences and texts into the L1, and vice versa.
Grammar-translation is still used in many countries, particularly where language teachers are not themselves proficient in the L2. In Japan, a version of GT called ‘yakudoko’ is still used, with the specific aim of developing learner reading skills (recent educational reforms in Japan suggest that ‘yakudoko’ is gradually being replaced with more communicative methodologies).  
Methodologies like GT are very teacher-centred, deductive, and FOFS.  In GT, grammar teaching is always explicit, the rules are available to the learners, and the textbook is organized around a list of structures.
Although much discredited nowadays as a methodology, GT can be a useful (occasional) technique if employed with the specific aim of developing cross-linguistic awareness, and not used simply as a mechanical translation exercise.
The following example is from a Latvian textbook for English learners (Martinstone et al, 1985). The objective of the exercise is to develop learner awareness of cross-linguistic differences at the level of vocabulary (in this case, English phrasal verbs), and many would argue that this kind of activity can be beneficial:

Translate the sentences paying attention to the word ‘get’:

1.	She will get a ticket for her friend.
2.	 They got the chest open. 
3.	They had to get out of the house before the men came. 
4.	What time did you get here? 
5.	She got wet in the rain. 
6.	I got off the bus at the wrong stop. 
7.	Then I got on another bus and continued on my way. 
8.	What time does the train get in (arrive)? 
9.	 How are you getting on? Quite well, thank you. 
10.	She usually gets up at seven. 
11.	We got up to (read [red] as far as) page 50 last lesson. 
12.	Let's get together and talk about the excursion.
13.	 Let's get down to business. (Let's start work.) 
14.	Did you get through (pass) the exam? 
15.	We got to our feet when the teacher came in.

The following example, from Le français en faculté: cours de base (1999), focuses on the fact that French allows different kinds of inversion, such as simple subject–verb inversion (eg ‘pensez-vous partir?’), and complex inversion, where the subject noun phrase is repeated (eg ‘Comment le gouvernement va-t-il réagir?’):

Translate the following into French, inverting subject and verb or using complex inversion wherever you can:

1.	I opened the cupboard where the cakes and sweets were to be found.
2.	So the students went home.
3.	Perhaps he'll come tomorrow.
4.	No doubt the ecologists are right.
5.	Whatever be the truth in the matter, I must say no.
6.	Vainly the population of the village fought against the building of the new motorway.

The final example we look at is also from Le français en faculté: cours de base (1999), and is an example of word-level translation, where learners are asked to translate lexical items from a text they have read. This kind of activity is possibly less effective in developing cross-linguistic awareness:

Traduisez en anglais les mots et expressions suivants : 
Succès de librairie, d'un trait, éditeur, conjonction, sensibilité, photographes (W), quoi de plus ténu, matière, aventures, intrigue, revêt, déçu, ressorts, succédé, relégué aux oubliettes.

3.3.2  Audiolingualism 

Activity 7

Do you use drills in your classroom, ie do you have students repeat aloud grammatical patterns, or do you, for example, have students orally transform sentences from, say, present to past tense?
Is there a justification for using such drills?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Audiolingualism was developed in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, and was related generally in its principles to behaviourist psychology. The ALM textbook is typically organized into lists of structures, and these are numerous drills and repetition exercises. Learners are constantly asked to repeat model sentences, and then to manipulate these sentences by changing them to other tenses, or by substituting some of the words, as in the following examples:

He has some	sheep	but he doesn’t have any 	cows.	
	ducks		turkeys	
	chickens		ducks	
	cows		horses	
	hens		roosters	

(From: Intensive Course in English, Part I, 1963)

Transformez les phrases suivantes en discours indirect (<< reported speech >>). Voir GS 2, §3.2.2.

Exemple: 	L'enfant dit: je m’appelle Patrick.
		L'enfant dit qu'il s'appelait Patrick.

(1) L’enfant a dit: j'ai faim.
(2) Sa mère lui a dit: je t’ai apporté un pain au chocolat.
(3) Le manuel d'histoire disait: la guerre éclata en 1870. 
(4) Le maître lui demanda: comment t'appelles-tu?
(5) Le directeur leur a dit: nous allons faire une dictée.
(6) Le conducteur annonça: le car partira dans dix minutes.

(From Le français en faculté: cours de base, 1999)

The general belief for proponents of ALM is that learners will be conditioned unconsciously into absorbing the rules through constant repetition of sentence patterns. This then is an example of an inductive FOFS approach. One coursebook states that ‘Grammar is presented inductively in this course.  Technical terms and explanations are avoided’ (Intensive Course in English, Part I: vi).  For proponents of this approach, teachers are ‘being asked to teach a set of habits, not a set of rules for sentence formation […] the rule of grammar is [only] a summary of behaviour’ (Diller, 1971: 15).
A typical audiolingual drill is shown below (recorded in a Brazilian language school in 1992). For Diller, ‘[t]hese drills involve nothing more than the manipulation of structures. There is no pretence that they do anything else; they are not intended to resemble real communication’ (Diller, 1971: 45).   The extract has been edited in the interest of brevity. In the original, the teacher often asked the students to repeat each sentence three or four times.   The whole exercise was repeated a number of times using different model sentences (eg ‘I work here’ and ‘I live here’). It is also worth noting that two or three of the fifteen students were unable to keep up with the rest of the class during the drill.

Teacher (T)		I study English. Everybody!
Students (Ss)	I study English.
		T	I started five years ago. Repeat.
		Ss	I started five years ago.
		T	I have been studying English for five years.
		Ss	I have been studying English for five years.
		T	I have been studying English since 1987.
		Ss	I have been studying English since 1987.
		T	You!
		Ss	You have been studying English since 1987.
		T	He!
		Ss	He has been studying English since 1987.
		T	Interrogative!
		Ss	Has he been studying English since 1987?
		T	Yes!
		Ss	Yes, he has.
		T	How long!
		Ss	How long has he been studying English?
		T	Answer!
		Ss	He has been studying English since 1987.	
		T	For!
		Ss	He has been studying English for five years.

3.3.3  Presentation–Practice–Production

Activity 8

One of the most common methodologies involves teachers presenting a grammatical pattern, having students practise the pattern in mechanical written or oral activities, and then practising it again in freer, conversation-like activities (eg pair work tasks and role plays).
Do you use an approach like this? Why do you think this approach is so popular?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Another FOFS methodology related to ALM is Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP). Essentially, PPP is a British offshoot of ALM, although it is deductive rather than inductive. Unlike ALM, PPP is not related to any established psychological theory such as behaviourism. PPP is based on practical pedagogy rather than any specific learning theory, and for Skehan (1998: 94) ‘is still probably the commonest teaching approach when judged on a world-wide basis’. At the Presentation stage, learners are presented with a rule. They practise this intensively in highly controlled activities at the Practice stage, and then move on to slightly more meaning-focused practice in the Production stage.
The success of PPP is, for Skehan (1998: 94), due to the fact that ‘communicative approaches have probably had only a marginal impact on the range of teachers operating in many school systems’, and he notes that PPP has had ‘an excellent relationship with teacher training and teachers’ feelings of professionalism’ (Skehan, 1998: 94).
Despite the fact that PPP ‘generates clear and tangible goals [and] precise syllabuses’, it is, he maintains, ‘essentially a discredited, meaning-impoverished methodology’ (Skehan, 1998: 94).

3.3.4  Consciousness-raising 

Activity 9

Instead of ‘feeding’ rules to learners, some teachers like to give language data to students and have the students try to ‘discover’ the grammar rule. Do you ever use this approach?  What benefits do you think such an approach offers?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Consciousness-raising (C-R) is a technique that is much commented on these days (see Rutherford, 1987). This approach attempts to focus students’ attention on particular forms. C-R is a fairly loose term that can cover any technique which attempts to make salient a particular language form, and tries to ensure that students ‘notice’ this form and somehow integrate it into their own language system (for an overview of C-R, see Rutherford, 1987, and Rutherford and Sharwood Smith, M, 1988). Ellis stresses that C-R is essentially learner-centred:
A C-R task is a pedagogic activity where the learners are provided with L2 data in some form and required to perform some operation on or with it, the purpose of which is to arrive at an explicit understanding of some linguistic property or properties of the target language. (Ellis, 1997: 160)
There are other terms similar to C-R: input-enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993) suggests that specific forms should be emphasized in the input so that they become salient for learners; ‘noticing’ (Schmidt and Frota, 1986) is the idea that learners should be encouraged to notice gaps between their own language ability and the authentic language they are exposed to. In essence, C-R is an inductive-FOF approach, so that learners are encouraged to ‘notice’ specific forms, and thereby make the rules explicit for themselves. Grauberg questions the benefits of this kind of ‘discovery’ approach: ‘One can applaud the stress on pupils making their own grammatical discoveries, but to deny so categorically the value of any explanations by the teacher […] may hinder rather than further understanding’ (Grauberg, 1997: 36).
C-R is not necessarily tied to any kind of syllabus, so there may not be a pre-determined list of structures to be studied. The C-R example in Activity 10 is based on Rutherford (1987).

Activity 10

Look at the following extract from a student essay. How could it be improved?

	(1) My father’s house had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. (2) A large garden was in front of the house.  (3) My father had planted a lot of flowers in the garden.  (4) These flowers were roses and tulips.

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

3.3.5  Task-based Learning

Activity 11

Tasks are not a new technique in language teaching, and have been around for some time. However, it is only in recent years that Task-based Learning (TBL) has been put forward as a complete method in itself.

Typically, tasks have involved students working in pairs or groups to solve some problem or other. Very traditional tasks are things like picture-difference and map-direction activities used in pair situations.  What kind of tasks do you use?  What benefits do these offer learners?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Task-based Learning is the subject of Module 4 and so will be discussed only briefly here. TBL uses a topic-based rather than grammatical syllabus, and asks learners to detect and study language patterns that appear in their own output. Typically, it will provide a number of tasks to be carried out around the list of topics; on completion of the tasks, learners are asked to focus on grammar patterns which emerged during their own language production. TBL has a learn-while-doing approach, and is in some ways compatible with Vygotskyan scaffolding, ie the use of prior knowledge and activity to build new knowledge. For Vygotsky, 
the most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge. (Vygotsky, 1978: 24)
The TBL cycle proposed by Willis (1996), and the role grammar plays in the cycle, is shown in Table 3.1:

		Students	Teacher 	
Pre-task:		•	note useful words
•	prepare individually	•	introduces task/topic
•	helps with useful words
•	ensures task is understood	
Task cycle:	Task	•	do the task in pairs/small groups	•	monitors and  encourages	
	Planning	•	prepare report on task outcome
•	rehearse report presentation	•	acts as language advisor
•	helps with report organization	
	Report	•	present spoken report to class or circulate written report	•	acts as chairperson
•	gives feedback on report	
Language focus:	Analysis	•	C-R activities to identify/process language patterns	•	reviews analysis activity
•	may point out phrases, patterns	
	Practice	•	practise words, phrases, and patterns	•	conducts practice activities	

Table 3.1: the TBL cycle (from Willis, 1996)

For Willis, 
The aim of the task is to create a real purpose for language use and provide a natural context for language study. Students prepare for the task, report back after the task and then study the language that arises naturally out of the task cycle and its accompanying materials. (Willis, 1996: 1)
We can see from this that there is a focus on form in TBL, but this focus is not predetermined by any syllabus, but is instead dependent on student production. Like C-R, TBL is inductive-FOF.

Activity 12

Fill in the table below to show how the different methodologies (GT, ALM, PPP, C-R, TBL, Protogrammar) fit into the inductive/deductive clines, and the FOFS / FOF / ZERO distinctions.

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

	Inductive	Deductive	
FOFS	

FOF	

ZERO POSITION	

Table 3.2: methodologies as inductive / deductive and FOFS / FOF / ZERO

3.3.6  Protogrammar 

Activity 13

In your own L1, or in the language that you teach, write down the name of the first three pieces of furniture you can think of.

    ___________________________________________________

    ___________________________________________________

    ___________________________________________________

In your own L1, or in the language that you teach, write down the first sentences you can think of with the equivalent of ‘There is/are…’. (eg imasu/arimasu in Japanese, há/tem in Portuguese, and so on)

    ___________________________________________________

    ___________________________________________________

 Check your answers in the Commentary before you read on.

When asked to name a piece of furniture, many people will answer ‘table’, ‘chair’, or ‘sofa’. This is because table, chair and sofa are the most representative members of the category furniture (Rosch, 1975, 1976, 1977) commonly known as prototypes. The same phenomenon occurs for other categories. When asked to name a bird, people tend towards robins, sparrows, and so on, but not penguins: robins and sparrows are more prototypical because they fly; penguins do not fly. The prototypical bird has wings, feathers, a beak, two legs, and can fly. When asked to give examples of any category they know, people tend towards the prototypes, and this is as true for grammatical categories as it is for birds.
There is evidence that people classify all knowledge in terms of categories, with prototypes at the core of the category. When asked to give an example of a grammatical category such as noun, most people will give concrete, common nouns like ‘table’ and ‘book’, but will rarely give abstract nouns like ‘education’ and ‘linguistics’. Again, this is because concrete nouns are the prototypes of the category.
Prepositions as a grammatical category also function as a category with prototypes. The features of the preposition ‘in’, for example, are that it is concrete and is delineated in space (Hayashi, 1999). Other uses, or extensions, of this preposition, lack one or other of these features (Table 3.3).  

Concrete / delineated	Example	
+ concrete

+ delineated	Meanwhile, melt the white chocolate in a bowl. 

We live in the country during the summer. 	
+ concrete

- delineated	The sun is already high in the sky.

They've turned up in a couple of national papers.	

- concrete

- delineated	
A small dialogue box appears when the printer is in operation.

Jack was in agreement with most of his fellow-students	

Table 3.3: the preposition ‘in’

Typically, textbooks teach the prototype systematically, but not the extensions, which are actually more common in real language than the prototype. The same is true for the preposition ‘on’, which is characterized in its prototype as concrete and horizontal (Table 3.4).

Concrete / horizontal surface	Example	
+ concrete

+ horizontal surface	Jack’s sitting on the floor watching TV.                    

There was blood splashed on the carpet	

+ concrete

- horizontal surface	
Please keep your dog on a chain.                        

These shoes have given me blisters on my heel.	

- concrete

- horizontal surface	
Air traffic controllers are on strike.

He is now on trial for murder.	

Table 3.4: the preposition ‘on’

If we look at the existential structure (ie the structure containing ‘there is/are’ in English, ‘há/tem’ in Portuguese, and ‘imasu/arimasu’ in Japanese), we can see again how prototypes prevail as the intuitional response. The existential structure is universal in that it occurs in all languages. In English, we use the dummy pronoun ‘there’ in sentences like:
‘There is a pencil on the table.’
This pattern is found widely in textbooks, and is a structural pattern that is fairly standard across languages, with the existential phrase followed by a noun phrase (NP), ‘a pencil’ in this example, and a prepositional phrase (PP), ‘on the table’ (see Table 3.5).

Language	Existential phrase (there+be)	Noun phrase (NP)	Prepositional phrase (PP)	
English	There is 	a pencil 	on the table.	

Portuguese	
Tem

Have-3rd person singular	
um lapis

a pencil	
na mesa

on the table	

Japanese	
empitsu 	ga	
pencil-subject	
teburu 	ni	
table on	..
arimasu.

be	

Table 3.5: prototypical existential structure in different languages

This pattern is the prototype and is commonly taught in textbooks, and it is typical of the responses people give when asked to produce a sentence of this structure; yet there are at least six different existential patterns to be found in the corpus of authentic spoken English. These other patterns are seen as extensions away from the prototype (Figure 3.3):

Figure 3.3: existential prototype and extensions

What does all this mean? Well, textbooks tend to teach the prototypes of language structures (prepositions, nouns, and existential constructions, for example), because these accord with the intuitions of textbook writers. Of interest also is the fact that native speakers of any language will produce prototypes when asked to give examples of, say, the existential structure or the past tense.
Many grammatical constructions are universal. This means that native  speakers of Portuguese, for example, will have in their minds a prototypical vision of, say the existential structure, and it is more than likely that they will expect to see something similar when starting to learn English.
In other words, as textbook grammar is largely prototypical, it may make sense to use this traditional approach for beginner-level textbooks. At higher levels of proficiency, it would seem to be advisable to use more authentic texts and sources, so that students are exposed to more complex representations of grammar, ie extensions away from the prototype.
This allows us to posit an overall grammatical syllabus that will start with the prototypical representations, and gradually move towards real-world language. In parallel, we can also suggest that lower-level classes will be teacher-led, and will use prescriptive, rule-of-thumb grammar and a deductive teaching approach, while higher levels will be student-centred, will involve exposure to complex, authentic grammar patterns, and will be inductive in methodology (see Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4: an overview of grammar teaching across proficiency levels

3.4  Grammar in the syllabus

Activity 14

Does your textbook have a grammatical component, either in the table of contents or as inserts within each unit? If so, make a list of the first five or six grammar items in the textbook.  

Why do you think these items are sequenced in the way they are? Is the grammar in Unit 1, for example, easier than the grammar in Unit 2?  If so, what makes it easier? Why did the textbook authors sequence the grammar items in the way that they did?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

3.4.1  Listing structures and other elements
Early textbooks contained lists of grammatical structures as their tables of contents, with lessons organized around these structures. The syllabus of the first beginner-level textbook I used (an Audiolingual textbook) in the 1970s was largely verb tense-driven, a feature of textbooks at the time, although other elements of grammar were also given some coverage. The course introduction stated explicitly that:
The basic organisation of the course is around the verb and the verb phrase. The uninflected forms (except for be) are presented first, and gradually the others are introduced. Affirmative and negative statement, simple and negative questions, substitute sentences, and attached questions are presented, first for be and then for all other verbs. (Intensive Course in English, Part I, 1963: vi)
The verb tenses were listed as in Table 3.6:

Verb	Learning objective	
Verb be	Statements, questions, short answers	

Verb be	
Negative statements, questions, and short answers	

Verb be	
Past tense: affirmatives, questions, negatives, and short answers	

Present and Past 
Continuous with be auxiliary	
Affirmative and negative statements, questions, and short answers	

Verb be	
Attached (tag) questions: present, past, affirmative, and negative	

Going to future	
Statements, questions, negatives, and tag questions	

Verbs other than be with I, we, you and they	
Statements, questions, and negatives with do/don’t auxiliary	

Verbs other than be with he, she, and it	
Statements, questions, and negatives with does/doesn’t auxiliary	

Verbs other than be 	
wh-questions in negative and affirmative	

Past tense of regular and irregular verbs	
Statements, questions, and negatives	

Past tense and past progressive 	
Contrast of two verb tenses	

Table 3.6: verb lists from Intensive Course in English, Part I (1963)

This kind of listing is still fairly common in today’s textbooks. The sentences and texts used to illustrate specific language forms are generally concocted for illustration purposes, and are often unnatural. Andrews notes how much textbook language lacks authenticity and context:
[M]any of the sentences appearing in textbooks, guidebooks, and prepackaged workbooks have been written by a professional Illustrative Sentence Generator. The sentences are isolated and have no context of authentic use. Second, these sentences do not represent the ways real people use real language in real circumstances. They are, therefore, misleading inasmuch as they appear out of nowhere onto a page in a textbook, but are, nevertheless, held up to the students as examples of good models […] Only when sentences are placed into some real context can we accurately describe them and their uses. Few people use language in single, isolated, one‑shot sentences. The traditional program tends to forget, nevertheless, that in real‑time language use, normal people simply do not go around making unconnected, unprompted, unsolicited statements or comments about the world! (Andrews, 1998: 37–38)
While modern textbooks still focus largely on grammatical items, functional or other categories may also appear; these categories are listed in the five different types of syllabus reported by McDonough and Shaw (1993: 15):
•	grammatical or structural
•	functional-notional
•	situational
•	skills based
•	topic based.
McDonough and Shaw point out, though, that most syllabuses combine a number of the above, as illustrated by the contents of a coursebook unit focusing on comparatives and superlatives (Richards et al, 1990):

Category	Activity	
Topics:	Comparing cities and places; world geography	

Functions:	
Describing similarities and differences; describing cities and countries	
Grammar:	
Comparisons with adjectives	

Pronunciation:	
Intonation: questions of choice	

Listening:	
Listening to a radio quiz show; listening for correct and incorrect information about places	

Writing:	
Writing a comparison of two cities	

Reading:	
World geography; nations of the world	

Interchange:	
A quiz that tests general knowledge	

The focus of the above unit is essentially the teaching of comparative and superlative constructions, with the functional and other categories organized around this, so that discussing the unit topics (comparing, etc), practising the language functions (describing similarities and differences), and so on, all involve using the grammar target.
Like many coursebooks, the one above claims to be a multi-skills syllabus in which ‘language is used for authentic communication’ (Richards et al, 1990: ix). In many ways, the functional, listening and other activities seem at best to be disguised attempts to present the grammar item. Again, as in most coursebooks, grammar items are presented in list form, to be learned one-by-one, with appropriate opportunities for practice – what Rutherford (1987) refers to as the ‘accumulated entities’ approach, whereby the language is segmented into ‘hierarchically arranged constructs’ (Rutherford 1987: 149).
Essentially, the multi-skills syllabus is often really clothing for a structural scaffold, and it is therefore the structural syllabus that is still the most common in language teaching today (Long and Robinson, 1998).
Variations on the multi-skills syllabus are also common. The following five units from a 12-unit French course for advanced learners (Le français en faculté, 1999) weds a series of topics to specific grammar items, in an attempt to ‘combine an inductive, text-based approach with a deductive, grammar-based one’ (Le français en faculté, 1999: 6). 

1	Portraits de pays
1. Cavalier seul... Le Royaume-Uni
2. Diversité et histoire
GRAMMAR SECTION Personal pronouns

2	La francophonie
1. Le français langue scolaire
2. La francophonie: pourquoi faire ?
DOSSIER La francophonie
GRAMMAR SECTION Tenses: present and past

3	Médias, cinéma et réalité
1. La vache folle vue par les médias
2. Le documentaire entre cinématographie et télévision
DOSSIER Médias et cinéma
GRAMMAR SECTION Expression of the passive

4	Le monde du travail
1. Une ouvrière dans une usine d'automobiles
2. Le droit au travail
DOSSIER Le travail
GRAMMAR SECTION The subjunctive

5	L’éducation en France
1. Enfances, adolescences
2. Violence à l'école : il est temps de réagir
DOSSIER L'éducation nationale
GRAMMAR SECTION The articles

Similarly, in the following unit from a German textbook (Brückenkurs: Deutsch als Fremdsprache für die Mittelstufe, 1998), we find a variety of strands, including sections on grammar, speaking, writing and vocabulary:

LEKTION  I
LERNWORTSCHATZ DER LEKTION
ÜBUNGEN ZUM KURSBUCH
			Kurstagebuch
		1	Prioritäten im Kurs
Wortschatz/	2	Was bedeutet Arbeit für Sie?
Schreiben
Wortschatz	3	Lerntipps: Wortfelder erarbeiten/
			Vokabelkartei/Sätze bilden
Lesen		4	Videotipp: Pappa ante portas
Grammatik	5	Formen des Konjunktivs II
Grammatik	6	Irreale Möglichkeit
Sprechen	7	Spiel: Was würden Sie machen, wenn ?
Grammatik	8	Konjunktiv II in der Vergangenheit
Grammatik	9	Wie wäre das nicht passiert?
Grammatik	10	Irreale Wünsche
Grammatik	11	Ein Traumjob
Grammatik	12	Ratschläge geben
Lösen		13	Textpuzzle
Grammatik	14	Höfliche Bitte
Sprechen	15	Situationen
Wortschatz	16	Immer wieder sonntags
Grammatik	17	Finale Nebensätze
Grammatik	18	Finalsätze
Grammatik	19	Damit oder um...zu
Wortschatz	20	Spiel: Freizeitaktivitäten
Schreiben	21	Klassen-Brieffreundschaften
		22 	Lehrwerk-Quiz
AUSSPRACHETRAINING - die Vokale a-ä-e
LERNKONTROLLE

3.4.2  The grading of grammar items
We have seen an example of a grammatical syllabus, and noted that structures are presented in lists. At this point, it is worth asking how and why these lists are organized, and why, for example, the present tense is presented before the past tense. The justification for listing was noted nearly 100 years ago:
To ' know' a grammatical form is to be able to use it freely; it will be undesirable therefore to introduce the pupil to too many forms at once. The language must unroll itself before him gradually. It is for this reason that we begin with the present tense, and pass from that to the perfect and the future. (Kittson, 1918: 104)
Indeed, Mackey also points out that grading in language education has existed for at least 500 years, and notes that Comenius was the first to claim
 that systematic gradation reduced the difficulties of language learning by distributing the extensive material of a language into steps arranged in specially prepared text in which everything progressed, not by leaps and bounds, but gradually. (Mackey, 1965: 204–05)
Willis (2003) also accepts a role for the gradual accumulation of language items, at least at lower levels of proficiency. 
Typically, grammar-based approaches involve the use of contrived or scripted language to illustrate the target structure. Many believe that such contrivance facilitates comprehension, and would worry about the use of unmediated authentic texts (by unmediated, I mean texts which are engaged with by the learner without guidance/interpretation from the teacher):
The scripted text is unreal English, which is unlikely to be reproduced in actual contexts of use but is easier to comprehend, and more real pedagogically; the unscripted text is real English, but more difficult to comprehend and to produce, and therefore likely to be considered less real pedagogically. (Carter, 1998: 47)
A key principle, alongside the question of grading and sequencing, is simplification, the idea that sentence-level examples can be contrived to provide simple and easily understandable instances of target structures. Simonsen (1987, cited in Nation, 2001) has suggested that, at least until recently, this has been a policy used by publishers in producing graded readers, but that the simplification process has been dependent on writers’ intuitions rather than, say, frequency of occurrence of lexical and grammatical patterns. Simonsen also notes that ‘some publishers make sure that grammatical and discourse signals are as explicit as possible, particularly with regard to pronoun reference, direct and indirect speech, and conditional sentences’ (Nation, 2001: 171).
The traditional language syllabus, consisting of lists of discrete and simplified grammatical rules accompanied by contrived linguistic illustrations of these rules, is ‘still used in the vast majority of classrooms the world over’ (Long and Robinson, 1998: 15), and the reasons are pretty much as we have already set out:
Language – any language – seen from ‘outside’, can seem to be a gigantic shapeless mass, presenting an insuperable challenge for the learner […]. By tidying up language and organising it into neat categories (sometimes called discrete items), grammarians make language digestible. (Thornbury, 1999: 16–17)
This implies that ‘a language teaching course can be based on a sequence of linguistic categories, and […] that these categories can be exemplified in simple sentences for intensive practice’ (Howatt, 1984: 141). What we are really talking about in one form or other is Structuralism/audiolingualism  where the sentence reigned supreme. The sentence-level language description system of Structuralism remains with us in contemporary foreign language textbooks. 
But how is the standard language syllabus to be sequenced and graded?  For Thornbury (1999: 9–10) grading the syllabus should include:
•	Complexity: an item is complex if it has a number of elements: the more elements, the more complex it is.
•	Learnability: the learnability of an item was traditionally measured by its complexity: the more simple, the more learnable.
•	Teachability: the fact that it is easy to demonstrate the meaning of the present continuous (‘I am walking’, ‘she is writing’ etc) has meant that it is often included early in beginners' syllabuses, despite the fact that it has a relatively low frequency of occurrence (Thornbury, 1999).
For myself, I would include the following:
•	Frequency: the importance of frequency as a constraint in textbook design has been noted by Willis (1990), and with the use of Corpus Linguistics techniques we are now in a position to include structures which are frequent (there is little point, for example, in spending much time teaching infrequent structures like the 3rd conditional).
•	Utility: structures should be useful in communication acts (the 3rd conditional is not very productive or useful, and learners are unlikely to need to produce very often sentences like, ‘If I had had money, I would have bought a car’.
•	Complexity: the number of items/elements in a structure (‘he’ll be arriving late’ has more structural elements and is therefore more complex than ‘he’s arriving late’); the number of operations in a construction may also be important, both within a language and across languages. The formation of interrogatives in Portuguese, for example, involves zero operations, ie intonation provides the interrogative impact, and there are no structural modifications:
João 	comeu 	o chocolate.
John	eat-past	the chocolate.
‘John ate the chocolate.’

O João 	comeu 	o chocolate?
John		eat-past	the chocolate.
 ‘Did John eat the chocolate?’
	
	Japanese on the other hand, uses one operation to form interrogatives, the insertion of the question particle, ‘ka’:

John wa 		chokoreto wo 	tabemashita.
John-subject		chocolate-object	eat-past
‘John ate the chocolate.’

John wa 		chokoreto wo 	tabemashita ka.
John-subject		chocolate-object	eat-past-question 
particle
‘Did John eat the chocolate?’

English is the most complex of the three languages, using two operations, the breaking down of the verb into stem and auxiliary, and subject-auxiliary inversion:
John ate the chocolate.
Did John eat the chocolate?	 

•	Truth: language patterns should be true to life, modelled on or extracted from authentic language; again, the use of corpora allows for this with relative ease.

Finally, Swan (1994: 45–52) lists the following criteria for pedagogic rules:
1	Truth: rules should be true.
2	Demarcation: a pedagogic rule should show clearly what are the limits on the use of a given form.
3	Clarity: rules should be clear.
4	Simplicity: a pedagogic rule should be simple.
5	Conceptual parsimony: an explanation must make use of the conceptual framework available to the learner.
6	Relevance: a rule should answer the question (and only the question) that the students’ English is ‘asking’.
The typical grammatical syllabus consists, then, of isolated lists of grammar items, all taught in a predetermined sequence devised in accordance with the criteria we have set out above. Often, these grammar items are illustrated by the use of specially contrived sentences or texts.

3.5  Review activities
In this section, you will be asked to carry out a number of tasks relating to your reading of the module. 

Activity 15

The following are extracts from ELT textbooks. What criticisms would you make of these materials? Can you identify the target of these lessons? How do you think these extracts fit into the inductive/ deductive and FOFS/FOF/ZERO categories?

From a practical primer in English, which appeared in its second edition in 1893, I take the following specimens: 		

Are the king's horses very old? 		
No; but the duke's carriage is old. 		
Is it older than your friend's ? . . . 		
Has the nobleman told you the news? 		
No, sir; but the lady has told me the news about the business
and the wedding. 		
Why do you not give the Negro a house? 		
No, sir; but I can tell you that the German has given each of the 
Negroes a pretty little house. 		
Has the lady a knife ? Yes, the lady has two knives. 		
Why do you not give the ladies the German's keys to the 
church? 
The noblemen have the German's keys. 				(Jespersen, 1904: 12–13)	

Tom:		Have you read the newspaper yet?	
George:  	No, I haven’t. Why?	
Tom:  	There’s an advertisement in it. I’m sure it would interest you. There’s a new clothing store, in town.	
George:  	Have you been there yet?	
Tom:  	No, not yet. I need a new hat, though. I haven’t bought a new hat for two years.	
George:  	I’ve worn the same suit for three years. I haven’t bought any clothes for a long time. Let’s go tomorrow, shall we? (Intensive Course in English, Part 2, 1969)

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

In the following activities, you are asked to perform a number of tasks with a number of languages: English, Portuguese, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic.
 
English data (verb: choose)

The boy chooses the girl.
The girl chooses the boy.
The girls choose the boys.
The boys choose the girls.
The tall girl chooses the short boy.

The tall girls choose the short boys.

Does the boy choose the girl?
Do the girls choose the boys?
He chooses the girl.
She chooses the boy.
The boy chose the girl.
The girl chose the boy.
The girls chose the boys.
The boys chose the girls.
The tall boy chose the short girl.

Did the boy choose the girl?
Did the girls choose the boys?
They chose the girls.
They chose the boys.
The boy is in the kitchen.
The girl is in the garden	European Portuguese (verb: escolher)
O menino escolhe a menina.
A menina escolhe o menino.
As meninas escolhem os meninos.
Os meninos escolhem as meninas.
A menina alta escolhe o menino baixo.
As meninas altas escolhem os meninos baixos.
O menino escolhe a menina?
As meninas escolhem os meninos?
Escolhe a menina.
Escolhe o menino.
O menino escolheu a menina.
A menina escolheu o menino.
As meninas escolheram os meninos.
Os meninos escolheram as meninas.
A menino alto escolheu a menina baixa.
O menino escolheu a menina?
As meninas escolheram os meninos?
Escolheram as meninas.
Escolheram os meninos.
O menino está na cozinha.
A menina está no jardim.

Japanese data (verb: erabu)

Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimasu.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimasu.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimasu.
Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimasu.
Se-no-takai onna-no-ko wa se-no-hikui otoko-no-ko o erabimasu.
Se-no-takai onna-no-ko wa se-no-hikui otoko-no-ko o erabimasu.
Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimasu ka.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimasu ka.
Onna-no-ko o erabimasu.
Otoko-no-ko o erabimasu.
Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimashita.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimashita.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimashita.
Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimashita.
Se-no-takai otoko-no-ko wa se-no-hikui onna-no-ko o erabimashita.
Otoko-no-ko wa onna-no-ko o erabimashita ka.
Onna-no-ko wa otoko-no-ko o erabimashita ka.
Onna-no-ko o erabimashita.
Otoko-no-ko o erabimashita.
Otoko-no-ko wa daidokoru ni imasu.
Onna-no-ko wa niwa ni imasu.	

Irish Gaelic data (verb: togh)

Toghann an buachaill an cailín.

Toghann an cailín an buachaill.

Toghann na cailíní na buachaillí.

Toghann na buachaillí na cailíní.

Toghann an cailín ard an buachaill beag.
Toghann na cailíní arda na buachaillí beaga.
An dtoghann an buachaill an cailín?

An dtoghann na cailíní na buachaillí?

Toghann sé an cailín.
Toghann sí an buachaill .
Thogh an buachaill an cailín.

Thogh an cailín an buachaill.

Thogh na cailíní na buachaillí.

Thogh na buachaillí na cailíní.

Thogh an cailín ard an buachaill beag.

Ar thogh an buachaill an cailín?

Ar thogh na cailíní na buachaillí?

Thogh siad na cailíní.
Thogh siad na buachaillí.
Tá an buachaill sa chistin.
Tá an cailín sa ghairdín.	

Activity 16

Describe a rule for basic word order in the four languages. English, for example, is a Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) language. Other possible word orders are SOV, VSO, etc.

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 17

Describe rules for forming plurals in the four languages (you should consider adjectives, nouns, verbs, and determiners (articles and demonstrative pronouns).

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 18

How is past tense formed in the different languages? 

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 19

Look at sentences (9), (10), (11), (18) and (19) and identify the element which is missing from two of the four languages. Say why you think it is possible to omit/delete this element, and why it is not possible in English.

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 20

How can you identify the object (accusative case) in each of the languages?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 21

How are questions formed in each of the languages?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 22

Look at sentences (20) and (21). Note the position of the preposition in relation to the noun. How does this relate to the position of the verb in relation to its object?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

Activity 23

Did these activities involve an inductive or a deductive approach? Was the grammatical content FOFS or FOF?

Would you describe these activities as C-R?

How did you feel about doing these activities? Were they enjoyable or frustrating? How do you think your students would respond to such activities?

Refer to ‘Commentary’ for feedback. 

3.6  Summary
In this module, we have examined grammar at a number of levels. We have concluded that there is considerable justification for focusing on structural elements. We have examined how methodology influences the way we teach grammar, and we have looked at how grammar is organized within the traditional syllabus. We have also looked at the important difference between focusing on form, and focusing on forms, and the consequences this has for teaching approaches.	In conclusion, there is clearly still a role for traditional, intuition-based grammar in introductory level courses, with the use of non-authentic materials  and a prototype-driven structural syllabus. Beyond this preparation stage, as proficiency levels increase and authentic materials become standard, students will move on to dealing with richer, more complex and more authentic grammatical descriptions.

3.7  Commentary on activities

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).

	Concrete Nouns	Abstract Nouns	
Transcript 1  	24–63	18–40	
Transcript 2	10–35	8–21	
Transcript 3	6–15	0–8	

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:

Subject (S)	Verb (V)	Object (O)	Prepositional phrase (PP)	
Mary 	bought 	the car 	from me.
	
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:

S O PP V	Mearii wa	kuruma o	watashi kara	kaimashita	
	Mary-topic	car-obj.	me from	buy- past	
S PP O V	Mearii wa	watashi kara	kuruma	kaimashita	
	Mary-topic	me from	car-obj.	buy- past	
 
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.

	Inductive	Deductive	
FOFS	Audiolingualism (drilling and repetition reinforce patterns and condition learners, but there is no formal rule-teaching)	Grammar–Translation; Practice–Presentation–Production, Proto-grammar (rules are presented systematically, and practised repeatedly before semi-spontaneous production activities).	
FOF	TBL, C-R (form is only focused on as it appears in the input)	None: ‘deductive’ implies a predetermined grammatical syllabus.	
ZERO POSITION	Krashen’s Natural Approach (exposure to input, without any formal grammar instruction); some versions of Communicative Language Teaching	None:  as above.	

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:

Object	Rank	
Chair	1.5	
Sofa	1.5	
Couch	3.5	
Table	3.5	
Easy chair	5	
Dresser	6.5	
Rocking chair	6.5	
Coffee table	8	
Rocker	9	
Love seat	10	

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:
English:	SVO	
European Portuguese:	SVO	
Irish Gaelic:	VSO	
Japanese:	SOV	

Activity 17
Plurals are formed as follows:
English:	English pluralizes nouns only, usually by adding –s or –es.	

European Portuguese:	
Based on our data, Portuguese has plural forms for: 
adjectives: add -s (eg baixo  baixos); 
nouns: add -s (eg menina  meninas); 
verbs: add –m (eg escolhe  escolhem); 
determiners (eg o  os, a  as).  
Verb plurals are formed in accordance with verb types (ie whether regular or irregular), and in accordance with the person of the verb.	

Irish Gaelic:	
In our data, Gaelic has plurals for 
adjectives: add -a (eg  ard  arda); 
nouns: add -í (eg  cailín  cailíní); 
determiners: change ‘an’ to ‘na’.
The plural of determiners is constant in Gaelic, but the plural of nouns can vary according to noun class (there are five of these) and according to case, and adjectives vary in plural according to case.  	

Japanese:	
In our data, Japanese has no plurals. This is true for the language in general, although there are plurals for a small class of nouns, usually with human referents (eg the first person pronoun: watashi  watashitachi).  Japanese is very much a context-dependent language, and it is context which informs whether a noun has a singular or plural referent.	

Activity 18
These are the past tense rules:
English:	English forms past tenses by adding -ed to regular verbs.  Irregular verbs vary in the way they form past. In our data, the pattern was choose  chose.
	
European Portuguese:	Based on our data, Portuguese forms past by adding -eram to the verb stem (escolh-  escolheram). This is a general pattern across the language, although there is variation depending on whether the verb is -er or -ar in type (falar: fal-  falaram).
	
Irish Gaelic:	In our data, Gaelic forms past tense as follows: toghann  thogh (it’s worth noting that the letter ‘h’ in Gaelic is not actually a letter, but is an accent). In general, there may be variation in past tense formation according to verb type.
	
Japanese:	In our data, Japanese forms past tense by adding -mashita to the stem (erabu: erabimasu  erabimashita). This rule works for most verbs.	

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:
Escolhe 				a menina.
Choose-3rd person 			the girl
sing., present
‘He chooses the girl.’

Escolheram 				as meninas.
Choose-3rd person 			the girls
plural, past	
‘They chose the girls.’

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:

	Word order	Verb-object order	Prepositions or post-positions	
English:	SVO	VO	prepositions	
Portuguese:	SVO	VO	prepositions	
Irish Gaelic:	VSO	VO	prepositions	
Japanese:	SOV	OV	post-positions	

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.

3.8  References
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Bygate, M, Tonkyn, A and Williams, E (1994) Grammar and the Language Teacher, Prentice Hall, London
Carter, R (1998) Orders of reality: CAMCODE, communication, and culture,  ELT Journal, 52 (1), 43–56
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3.9  Further reading
If you wish to read more about the teaching and learning of grammar, the following books may be useful: 

Braidi, S (1999) The Acquisition of Second Language Syntax, Arnold, London 
A somewhat theoretical, but nevertheless accessible, treatment of how grammar is acquired by language learners. 

Doughty, C and Williams, J (1998) (eds) Focus on Form in Classroom SLA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
	Provides a good overview of recent positions on teaching grammar.

Grauberg, W (1997) The Elements of Foreign Language Teaching. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon
One of the few books devoted specifically to the teaching of modern foreign languages, as opposed to EFL. It offers some excellent pointers for teachers of French and German, in particular.

Hinkel, E and Fotos, S (2002) (eds) New Perspectives on Grammar Teaching in Second Language Classrooms, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey
This volume provides a useful survey of current approaches.

Rutherford, W (1987) Second Language Grammar: Learning and teaching,  Longman, London
A magnificent attempt to situate the teaching of grammar in a wider context that includes discourse skills, text development, and so on.
Thornbury, S (1999) How to Teach Grammar, Longman, London
This is a very good and accessible read, and serves as a fine introductory text.

3.10  Assessment task

1.	Write out a description of your own current approach to grammar teaching. Define how your approach fits into the FOF / FOFS / Zero position cline, and note to what extent your approach reflects features of any of the methodologies we have examined in this module. 

2.	Consider what changes you might like to introduce into your own approach, and explain your reasons for wanting to make these changes. Illustrate this with three sample grammar-focused lessons based around a textbook or course materials pack that you use in your undergraduate teaching.