Pedagogical Options in Grammar Teaching

Abstract

The ultimate focus of the present volume are the effects of teaching selected elements of the English tense/aspect system described at length in the previous chapter. Being morphological and, to a certain degree, syntactic in nature, the targeted linguistic features thus belong unequivocally to the area of grammar. Therefore, the present chapter focuses on the theoretical positions concerning grammar teaching that have originated in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and on instructional options which are at the disposal of foreign language teachers, including both methodological options and some choices in terms of pedagogical rules to be employed in instruction. At the outset, a brief clarification of the term grammar as employed here seems to be in order, given the plethora of possible perspectives from which it may be approached and a great number of conceptualizations of this notion related to these perspectives (cf. the relevant remarks and discussion by Pawlak 2006: Chap. 1; and Larsen-Freeman 2009). One of the many views of the grammatical component of language was in fact considered in detail in Chap. 2, which presented and discussed the CG conception of grammar as encompassing not only morphology and syntax, traditionally understood to constitute the core of grammar, but also the phonological level. What is more, it should be recalled that in CG grammar also comprises at least certain parts of the lexicon and the discourse/pragmatic component, because grammar is said to shade into them in a non-discrete fashion. Despite the adoption in CG of this almost all-encompassing view of grammar, in the present chapter, whose function is to consider the pedagogical options in grammar teaching and to review important theoretical issues surrounding this field, the notion of grammar is understood in a relatively narrow sense, which is close to its traditional view. Specifically, grammar is taken to refer to the formal elements of the morphological and syntactic language subsystems, together with their semantic interpretations and use. Sometimes the semantics and, especially, the use of grammatical elements might require reference to certain pragmatic factors, so pragmatics may also be included in some limited sense in this understanding of grammar. Such a restricted view of grammar is dictated by the focus of the quasi-experiment reported in Chap. 5, which investigated the teaching of primarily morphological, and, to a lesser extent, also syntactic units of English. It is also warranted by considerations of space, as the inclusion in our understanding of grammar of a wider range of linguistic units would certainly inflate the present chapter to an unfeasible size. Therefore, while for many purposes it is not unjustified to subsume a much broader array of entities under the heading of grammar, in the subsequent discussion of grammar teaching only instruction directed at morphological and syntactic features and their meanings/use is considered. Thus, since the term form is often taken in SLA and language teaching literature to be a synonym of grammar, the term form-focused instruction is used here as an equivalent of grammar teaching.