Introduction

Abstract

AbstractIn the last several decades, vast amounts of effort have been devoted to both theorizing and empirical research concerning various aspects of the teaching and learning of second or foreign language grammar. These endeavors have been undertaken not only in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language teaching, but also in related research areas such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology. A few examples of the issues which have been investigated are the sequences and orders of acquisition of different grammatical elements (e.g. Dulay and Burt 1974b; Meisel et al. 1981; Klein and Perdue 1992), the processing and storage of the grammatical component in the mind/brain, including explicit and implicit representation of grammatical knowledge (e.g. Levelt 1989; Paradis 2004; Loewen et al. 2009), and the nature and effectiveness of various techniques and procedures aimed at developing the mastery of diverse grammatical features (e.g. Smith 1970; VanPatten and Cadierno 1993; Erlam 2003; Nassaji and Fotos 2011). Naturally, all of these issues, and many more, feature to varying degrees in this book, the general interest of which is in the teaching of grammar. Equally relevant to this work, however, is linguistic theory. This is because the teaching of grammar cannot do without descriptions of the grammatical elements of the language being taught, which may only be produced with any degree of systematicity with the help of some theoretical assumptions, if not within the confines of some linguistic theory or theories. In fact, Taylor ([1993] 2008, p. 37) observes that “[a]ny major innovation in linguistic theory is bound, sooner or later, to have an impact on the language teaching profession.”KeywordsLinguistic TheoryForeign Language TeachingCognitive LinguisticPedagogical ApplicationTheoretical LinguisticThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.