Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Current Issues in the Teaching of Grammar:
An SLA PerspectiveAuthor(s): Rod EllisReviewed work(s):Source: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 83-107Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Stable URL: londonessays.com .Accessed: 23/01/2012 13:02Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .londonessays.com is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL) is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to TESOL Quarterly.londonessays.com
Current Issues in the Teaching of Grammar: An SLA Perspective ROD ELLIS University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand The study of how learners acquire a second language (SLA) has helped to shape thinking about how to teach the grammar of a second language. There remain, however, a number of controversial issues. This paper considers eight key questions relating to grammar pedagogy in the light of findings from SLA. As such, this article complements Celce-Murcia’s (1991) article on grammar teaching in the 25th anniver- sary issue of TESOL Quarterly, which considered the role of grammar in a communicative curriculum and drew predominantly on a linguistic theory of grammar. These eight questions address whether grammar should be taught and if so what grammar, when, and how. Although SLA does not afford definitive solutions to these questions, it serves the valuable purpose of problematising this aspect of language pedagogy. This article concludes with a statement of my own beliefs about grammar teaching, grounded in my own understanding of SLA. article identifies and discusses a number of key issues relating to the teaching of grammar in a second language (L2) and, by drawing on theory and research in SLA, suggests ways to address these problems. It points to a number of alternative solutions to each problem, indicating that more often than not there are no clear solutions currently available. The aim, therefore, is not to identify new solutions to existing controver- sies, nor even to present new controversies. Rather it addresses within the compass of a single article a whole range of issues related to grammar teaching, problematises these issues, and by so doing, provides a counter- weight to the advocacy of specific, but also quite limited, proposals for teaching grammar that have originated in some SLA quarters. However, I conclude with a statement of my own position on these issues. The questions that will be addressed are 1. Should we teach grammar, or should we simply create the conditions by which learners learn naturally? 2. What grammar should we teach? TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 40, No. 1 , March 2006 83
3. When should we teach grammar? Is it best to teach grammar when learners first start to learn an L2 or to wait until later when learners have already acquired some linguistic competence? 4. Should grammar instruction be massed (i.e., the available teaching time be concentrated into a short period) or distributed (i.e., the available teaching time spread over a longer period)? 5. Should grammar instruction be intensive (e.g., cover a single gram- matical structure in a single lesson) or extensive (e.g., cover many grammatical structures in a single lesson)? 6. Is there any value in teaching explicit grammatical knowledge? 7. Is there a best way to teach grammar for implicit knowledge? 8. Should grammar be taught in separate lessons or integrated into communicative activities? DEFINING GRAMMAR TEACHING Traditionally, grammar teaching is viewed as the presentation and practice of discrete grammatical structures. This is the view promulgated in teacher handbooks. Ur (1996), for example, in her chapter titled “Teaching Grammar” has sections on “presenting and explaining gram- mar” and “grammar practice activities.” Hedge (2000) in her chapter titled “Grammar” similarly only considers “presenting grammar” and “practising grammar.” This constitutes an overly narrow definition of grammar teaching. It is certainly true that grammar teaching can consist of the presentation and practice of grammatical items. But, as will become apparent, it need not. First, some grammar lessons might consist of presentation by itself (i.e., without any practice), while others might entail only practice (i.e., no presentation). Second, grammar teaching can involve learners in discovering grammatical rules for themselves (i.e., no presentation and no practice). Third, grammar teaching can be conducted simply by exposing learners to input contrived to provide multiple exemplars of the target structure. Here, too, there is no presentation and no practice, at least in the sense of eliciting production of the structure. Finally, grammar teaching can be conducted by means of corrective feedback on learner errors when these arise in the context of performing some communicative task. The definition of grammar teaching that informs this article is a broad one: Grammar teaching involves any instructional technique that draws learners’ attention to some specific grammatical form in such a way that it helps them either to understand it metalinguistically and/or process it in comprehension and/or production so that they can internalize it. 84 TESOL QUARTERLY
SHOULD WE TEACH GRAMMAR? This question was motivated by early research into naturalistic L2 acquisition, which showed that learners appeared to follow a natural order and sequence of acquisition (i.e., they mastered different gram- matical structures in a relatively fixed and universal order and they passed through a sequence of stages of acquisition on route to mastering each grammatical structure). This led researchers like Corder (1967) to suggest that learners had their own built-in syllabus for learning gram- mar. In line with this, Krashen (1981) argued that grammar instruction played no role in acquisition, a view based on the conviction that learners (including classroom learners) would automatically proceed along their built-in syllabus as long as they had access to comprehensible input and were sufficiently motivated. Grammar instruction could con- tribute to learning but this was of limited value because communicative ability was dependent on acquisition. There followed a number of empirical studies designed to (a) compare the order of acquisition of instructed and naturalistic learners (e.g., Pica, 1983), (b) compare the success of instructed and naturalistic learners (Long, 1983) and (c) examine whether attempts to teach specific grammatical structures resulted in their acquisition (e.g., White, Spada, Lightbown, & Ranta, 1991). These studies showed that, by and large, the order of acquisition was the same for instructed and naturalis- tic learners (although there were some interesting differences1), that instructed learners generally achieved higher levels of grammatical competence than naturalistic learners and that instruction was no guarantee that learners would acquire what they had been taught. These results were interpreted as showing that the acquisitional processes of instructed and naturalistic learning were the same but that instructed learners progressed more rapidly and achieved higher levels of profi- ciency. Thus, some researchers concluded (e.g., Long, 1988) that teaching grammar was beneficial but that to be effective grammar had to be taught in a way that was compatible with the natural processes of acquisition. Subsequent research, such as Noms and Ortega’s (2000) meta- analysis of 49 studies, has borne out the overall effectiveness of grammar teaching. Further, there is evidence that, contrary to Krashen’s (1993) continued claims, instruction contributes to both acquired knowledge (see Ellis, 2002a) as well as learned knowledge. There is also increasing 1 For example, Pica (1983) notes that some structures (e.g., plural-s) were used more accurately by instructed learners and some (e.g., Verb-ing) by naturalistic learners. In other structures (e.g., articles) there was no difference. CURRENT ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR 85
evidence that naturalistic learning in the classroom (as, e.g., in immer- sion programmes) does not typically result in high levels of grammatical competence (Genesee, 1987). In short, there is now convincing indirect and direct evidence to support the teaching of grammar. Nevertheless, doubts remain about the nature of the research evidence. Many studies (including most of those reviewed by Norris and Ortega) measure learning in terms of constrained constructed responses (e.g., fill in the blanks, sentence joining, or sentence transformation), which can be expected to favour grammar teaching. There is only mixed evidence that instruction results in learning when it is measured by means of free constructed responses (e.g., communicative tasks). Also, it remains the case that learners do not always acquire what they have been taught and that for grammar instruction to be effective it needs to take account of how learners develop their interlanguages. As we will see, there is controversy regarding both how interlanguage development occurs and how instruc- tion can facilitate this. WHAT GRAMMAR SHOULD WE TEACH? Assuming, then, that grammar teaching can contribute to interlanguage development, the next logical question concerns what grammar we should teach. This question can be broken down into two separate questions: 1. What kind of grammar should we base teaching on? 2. Which grammatical features should we teach? Linguistics affords a broad selection of grammatical models to choose from, including structural grammars, generative grammars (based on a theory of universal grammar) , and functional grammars. Traditionally syllabuses have been based on structural or descriptive grammars. Structural syllabuses traditionally emphasised the teaching of form over meaning (e.g., Lado, 1970). Though the influence of structural gram- mars is still apparent today, modern syllabuses rightly give more atten- tion to the functions performed by grammatical forms. Thus, for example, less emphasis is placed on such aspects of grammar as sentence patterns or tense paradigms and more on the meanings conveyed by different grammatical forms in communication. Some attempt was once made to exploit the insights to be gleaned from generative theories of grammar (see, e.g., Bright, 1965), but in general, syllabus designers and teachers have not found such models useful and have preferred to rely on modern descriptive grammars, such as Celce-Murcia and Larsen- 86 TESOL QUARTERLY
Freeman’s (1999) Grammar Book. This resource is especially valuable because it not only provides a comprehensive, clear, and pedagogically exploitable description of English grammar but also identifies the kinds of errors that L2 learners are known to make with different grammatical structures. Such information is important because it helps to identify which structures and which aspects of a structure require special attention. The Grammar Book is also ideal in that it presents information not only about linguistic form but also about the semantic and discoursal meanings realised by particular forms. As VanPatten, Williams, and Rott (2004) emphasise, establishing connections between form and meaning is a fundamental aspect of language acquisition. Thus, any reference grammar that fails to describe the form-meaning connections of the target language must necessarily be inadequate. In general, then, the choice of which type of grammar to use as a basis for teaching is not a major source of controversy; descriptive grammars that detail the form- meaning relationships of the language are ascendant. In contrast, the choice of which grammatical structures to teach is controversial. Two polar positions can be identified and various positions in between. At one end of this continuum is Krashen’s minimalist position. Krashen (1982) argues that grammar teaching should be limited to a few simple and portable rules such as 3rd person-j and past tense-£d that can be used to monitor output from the acquired system. He bases his argument on the claim that most learners are only capable of learning such simple rules – that more complex rules are generally not learnable or, if they are, are beyond students’ ability to apply through monitoring. Krashen’s claim, however, is not warranted. There is now ample evidence that many learners are capable of mastering a wide range of explicit grammar rules. Green and Hecht (1992), for example, found that university-level students of English in Germany were able to produce clear explanations for 85% of the grammatical errors they were asked to explain, while overall the learners in their study (who included secondary school students) managed satisfactory explanations for 46% of the errors. Macrory and Stone (2000) reported that British compre- hensive school students had a fairly good explicit understanding of the perfect tense in French (e.g., they understood its function, they knew that some verbs used avoir and some être, they were familiar with the forms required by different pronouns, and they were aware of the need for a final accent on the past participle). Hu (2002) found that adult Chinese learners of English demonstrated correct metalinguistic knowl- edge of prototypical rules of six English structures (e.g., for the definite article specific reference constituted the prototypical rule) but were less clear about the peripheral rules for these structures (e.g., generic reference) . At the other pole is the comprehensive position: Teach the whole of CURRENT ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR 87
the grammar of the target language.2 This is the position adopted by many course book writers (e.g., Walter & Swan, 1990) or authors of grammar practice materials (e.g., Murphy, 1994). Such a position would also seem unwarranted because learners are clearly capable of learning a substantial amount of the L2 grammar without instruction and because most teaching contexts have limited time available for teaching grammar so some selection is needed. What then should selection be based on? The answer would seem obvious – the inherent learning difficulty of different grammatical struc- tures. The problem arises in how to determine this. To begin with, it is necessary to distinguish two different senses of learning difficulty. This can refer to (a) the difficulty learners have in understanding a grammatical feature and (b) to the difficulty they have in internalising a grammatical feature so that they are able to use it accurately in communication. These two senses relate to the distinction between learning grammar as explicit knowledge and as implicit knowledge, which is discussed later. Clearly, what is difficult to learn as explicit knowledge and as implicit knowledge is not the same. For example, most learners have no difficulty in grasping the rule for English third person-s but they have enormous difficulty in internalising this structure so they can use it accurately. These two senses of learning difficulty have not always been clearly distinguished in language pedagogy, with the result that even when the stated goal is the development of implicit knowledge, it is the anticipated difficulty students will have in understanding a feature that guides the selection and grading of grammatical structures. Third person-5, for example, is typically taught very early in a course. How then has learning difficulty been established? Traditionally, factors such as the frequency of specific structures in the input and their utility to learners have been invoked (Mackey, 1976), but these factors would seem to have more to do with use3 than with inherent cognitive difficulty. Here I consider two approaches that have figured in attempts to delineate cognitive difficulty. 1. Teach those forms that differ from the learners’ first language (LI). 2. Teach marked rather than unmarked f
orms. 2 Of course, it is not possible to specify the whole grammar of a language. Though the grammar of a language may be determinate, descriptions of it are certainly not. The Longman A Grammar of Contemporary English (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, 8c Svartvik, 1972) ran to 1081 pages (excluding index and bibliography) but doubtlessly does not account for all the known facts of English grammar. Nevertheless, there is a recognized canon of English structures that, in the eyes of syllabus designers and textbook writers, constitutes the grammar of English. 3 Structures like English articles that are very frequent in the input can impose considerable learning difficulty. Structures such as English conditionals may be very useful to learners but are also difficult to learn. 88 TESOL QUARTERLY
The first approach was, of course, the one adopted in many early structural courses based on a contrastive analysis of the learner’s LI and the target language. Although the contrastive analysis hypothesis as initially formulated is clearly not tenable (see Ellis, 1985, chapter 2), SLA researchers still generally agree that learners transfer at least some of the features of their LI into the L2. For example, there is ample evidence (Trahey & White, 1993) to show that French learners of English produce errors of the kind Mary kissed passionately John because French permits an adverb to be positioned between the verb and the direct object. Nevertheless, contrastive analysis does not constitute a sound basis for selecting grammatical structures. In many teaching contexts, the learn- ers come from mixed language backgrounds where it would be impos- sible to use contrastive analysis to tailor grammar teaching to the entire group because the learners have different Lis. Also, we simply do not yet know enough about when difference does and does not translate into learning difficulty, and in some cases, learning difficulty arises even where there is no difference. The second approach, however, is also problematic. Markedness has been defined in terms of whether a grammatical structure is in some sense frequent, natural, and basic or infrequent, unnatural, and deviant from a regular pattern (Richards, Platt, & Weber, 1985). Thus, the use of an infinitive without to following make, as in He made me follow him can be considered marked because make is one the few verbs in English that takes this kind of complement and because this pattern occurs only infrequently. The general idea is that we should teach the marked features and leave the learners to learn the unmarked forms naturally by themselves. The problem is that, as the definition suggests, markedness remains a somewhat opaque concept, so that it is often difficult to apply with the precision needed to determine which structures to teach. The selection of grammatical content, then, remains very problem- atic. One solution to the kinds of problems I have mentioned is to base selection on the known errors produced by learners. In this respect, lists of common learner errors such as those available in Turton and Heaton’s (1996) Longman Dictionary of Common Errors and Swan and Smith’s (2001) Learner English: A Teachers Guide to Interference and Other Problems are helpful. The problems of selection probably explain why grammatical sylla- buses are so similar and have changed so little over the years; it is safer to follow what has been done before. Of course the selection of what to teach will also depend on the learner’s stage of development. The problems that the learner’s stage of development involve are discussed in subsequent sections. CURRENT ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR 89
WHEN SHOULD WE TEACH GRAMMAR? There are two competing answers to this question. According to the first, it is best to emphasise the teaching of grammar in the early stages of L2 acquisition. According to the second, it is best to emphasise meaning- focused instruction to begin with and introduce grammar teaching later, when learners have already begun to form their interlanguages. I will briefly consider the arguments for both positions. A key premise of behaviourist theories of language learning is that “error like sin needs to be avoided at all costs” (Brooks, 1960). This premise holds that once learners have formed incorrect habits, they will have difficulty eradicating them and replacing them with correct habits. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that learners develop correct habits in the first place. This was one of the key premises of the audiolingual method (Lado, 1964). Other arguments can be advanced in favour of beginning to teach grammar early. The alternative to a form-focused approach emphasises meaning and message creation, as in task-based language teaching (Skehan, 1998), but many teachers believe that beginning-level learners cannot engage in meaning-centred activities because they lack the necessary knowledge of the L2 to perform tasks. Thus, a form- focused approach is needed initially to construct a basis of knowledge that learners can then use and extend in a meaning-focused approach. Finally, current connectionist theories of L2 learning, which give pri- macy to implicit learning processes based on massive exposure to the target language, also provide a basis for teaching grammar to beginners. N. Ellis (2005) has suggested that learning necessarily commences with an explicit representation of linguistic forms, which are then developed through implicit learning. He suggests that teaching grammar early is valuable because it provides a basis for the real learning that follows. This seems to echo Lightbown’s (1991) metaphor, according to which gram- mar instruction facilitates learning by providing learners with “hooks” which they can grab on to. The idea behind this metaphor is that a conscious understanding of how grammatical features work facilitates the kind of processing (e.g., attention to linguistic form) required for developing true competence. The argument against teaching grammar early on derives from research on immersion programmes (e.g., Genesee, 1987), which shows that learners in such programmes are able to develop the proficiency needed for fluent communication without any formal instruction in the L2. For example, learners of L2 Spanish do not need to be taught that adjectives follow nouns in this language; they seem to be able to learn this naturalistically from exposure to communicative input (Hughes, 1979). Similarly, learners of L2 English can master simple relative clauses 90 TESOL QUARTERLY
(e.g., clauses where the relative pronoun functions as subject and the clause is attached to a noun phrase following the verb) . There is ample evidence to show that learners can and do learn a good deal of grammar without being taught it. This being so, why bother to teach what can be learned naturally? A second reason for delaying grammar teaching to later stages of development is that early interlanguage is typically agrammatical (Ellis, 1984; Perdue & Klein, 1993). That is, learners rely on a memory-based system of lexical sequences, constructing utterances either by accessing ready-made chunks or by simply concatenating lexical items into simple strings. Ellis (1984) gives examples of such utterances in the early speech of three classroom learners: Me no (= I don’t have any crayons) Me milkman (= I want to be the milkman) Dinner time you out (= It is dinner time so you have to go out) Such pidginised utterances rely heavily on context and the use of communication strategies. They are very effective in simple, context- embedded communication. Arguably, it is this lexicalised knowledge that provides the basis for the subsequent development of the grammatical competence needed for context-free communication. This, then, is a strong argument for delaying the teaching of grammar until learners have developed a basic communicative ability. In general, I have favoured the second of these positions (see Ellis, 2002b) . Given that many classroom learners will not progress beyond the initial stages of language learning, it seems to me that a task-based approach that caters to the development of a proceduralised lexical system and simple, naturally acquired grammatical structures will ensure a threshold communicative ability and, therefore, is to be preferred to an approach that insists on grammatical accuracy from the start and that, as a consequence, may impede the development of this communicative ability. Task-based language teaching is possible with complete beginners if the first tasks emphasise listening (and perhaps reading) and allow for nonverbal responses. However, it is possible that such an approach can be usefully complemented with one that draws beginners’ attention to some useful grammatical features (e.g., past tense-^d in English) that they might otherwise miss. This is the aim of input-processing instruction (VanPatten, 1996, 2003), which is discussed later. CURRENT ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR 91
SHOULD GRAMMAR TEACHING BE MASSED OR DISTRIBUTED? This question is logically independent of the preceding question. That is, irrespective of when grammar teaching commences, we need to consider whether it should be concentrated into a short period of time or spread over a longer period. Remarkably little research has addressed this question. The research that has been undertaken reports on the relative effects of massed and distributed language instruction on general language proficiency rather than the effects on grammar learning. Collins, Halter, Lightbown, & Spada (1999) summarise the available research as follows: None of the language program evaluation research has found an advantage for distributed language instruction. Although the findings thus far lead to the hypothesis that more concentrated exposure to English may lead to better student outcomes, the evidence is not conclusive, (p. 659) Collins and colleagues then report their own study of three intensive ESL programmes in Canada, one (the distributed programme) taught over the full 10 months of one school year, one (the massed programme) concentrated into 5 months but taught only to above average students, and the third (the massed plus programme) concentrated into 5 months, supplemented with out of class opportunities to use English and taught to students of mixed ability levels. The main finding was that the massed and especially the massed-plus students outperformed the distributed programme students on most of the measures of learning, including some measures of grammatical ability, although this finding might in part be explained by the fact that the massed programmes provided more overall instructional time. Collins et al. ‘s study points to the need for further research, especially through studies that compare massed and distributed instruction di- rected at specific grammatical structures. Ideally such a study would compare short periods of instruction in a particular structure spread over several days with the same amount of instruction compressed into one or two lessons.4 Received wisdom is that a cyclical approach to grammar teaching (Howatt, 1974) is to be preferred because it allows for the kind of gradual acquisition of grammar that is compatible with what is known about interlanguage development. However, the results of 4 Given the problems that arise in controlling extraneous variables in evaluations of entire programmes, it might prove much easier to conduct rigorous studies of massed and distributed learning when these are focused on specific grammatical structures. 92 TESOL QUARTERLY
Collins et al. ‘s study suggest, at the very least, that such a position needs to be investigated empirically. Here, then, is an issue about which nothing definitive can be said at the moment. SHOULD GRAMMAR TEACHING BE INTENSIVE OR EXTENSIVE? Intensive grammar teaching refers to instruction over a sustained period of time (which could be a lesson or a series of lessons covering days or weeks) concerning a single grammatical structure or, perhaps, a pair of contrasted structures (e.g., English past continuous vs. past simple). Extensive grammar teaching refers to instruction concerning a whole range of structures within a short period of time (e.g., a lesson) so that each structure receives only minimal attention in any one lesson. It is the difference between shooting a pistol repeatedly at the same target and firing a shotgun to spray pellets at a variety of targets. Instruction can be intensive or extensive irrespective of whether it is massed or distributed. The massed-distributed distinction refers to how a whole grammar course is staged, while the intensive-extensive distinction refers to whether each single lesson addresses a single or multiple grammatical feature (s). Grammar teaching is typically viewed as entailing intensive instruc- tion. The present-practise-produce (PPP) model of grammar teaching, which underlies most discussions of grammar teaching in teacher handbooks (see, e.g., Hedge, 2000; Ur, 1996), assumes an intensive focus on specific grammatical structures. Although such discussions acknowl- edge that learners’ readiness to acquire a specific structure limits the effectiveness of teaching (no matter how intensive it is), they also assume that with sufficient opportunities for practice, learners will eventually succeed in automatising the structures they are taught. As Ur says, “the aim of grammar practice is to get students to learn the structures so thoroughly that they will be able to produce them correctly on their own” (p. 83). Thus, the idea that practise makes perfect is the primary justification for the intensive approach. Practise, however, must involve both drills and tasks (i.e., opportunities to practice the target structure in a communicative context) . It is perhaps less easy to see how grammar teaching can comprise extensive instruction. A teacher would probably not elect to present and practise a whole range of grammatical structures within a single lesson. Extensive grammar instruction of a kind, however, has always had a place in grammar teaching. Some 30 years ago, while teaching in a secondary school in Zambia, I regularly gave lessons where I illustrated and CURRENT ISSUES IN THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR 93
explained some of the common errors that I had observed my students making in their written compositions. Similarly, in the context of task- based teaching, some teachers have been observed to note the errors that learners make and then to address them when the task is over (Basturkmen, Loewen, & Ellis, 2004). However, extensive grammar teaching can occur within a learning activity, not just as some kind of postscript. Teachers provide corrective feedback in the context of both form-focused and meaning-focused lessons, and although feedback in form-focused lessons may be directed primarily at the structure targeted by the lesson, in the meaning-focused lessons it is likely to be directed at whatever errors learners happen to make. Studies of corrective feedback (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Ellis, Batsurkmen, & Loewen, 2001) demon- strate that in communicative lessons a wide variety of grammatical forms are addressed incidentally through corrective feedback. There is little doubt now that intensive grammar lessons can be effective. Though earlier research showed that learners do not always learn what they are taught, especially when learning is measured in terms of spontaneous production (e.g., Kadia, 1987), more recent research (e.g., Spada & Lightbown, 1999) indicates that even if learners are not ready to learn the targeted structure, intensive grammar teaching can help them progress through the sequence of stages involved in the acquisition of that structure. In other words, teaching a marked structure intensively can help learners learn associated, less marked structures even if it does not result in acquisition of the marked structure. Intensive instruction also helps learners to use structures they have already partially acquired more accurately (e.g., White, Spada, Lightbown, & Ranta, 1991). There are also theoretical arguments and some empirical evidence in favour of an extensive approach. Cook (1989) has argued from the perspective of universal grammar that learners require minimal evidence to set a particular parameter for the