Teaching Grammar, Revised Edition by Crawford William J.;

Author:Crawford, William J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TESOL Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

REFLECTIVE QUESTION

What types of grammar activities are you most comfortable using in class: input or output activities?

Implicit and Explicit Grammar Knowledge

Many highly proficient speakers of English may not be able to tell you why, but they do know that I gave it up is preferable over I gave up it. Highly proficient speakers are also more likely to use correct or appropriate grammar forms even if they cannot explain the rules that they successfully use in their daily production. On the other hand, many L2 learners at lower proficiency levels often do not possess the same type of knowledge; they may be able to explain a grammar rule but not use the rule appropriately. As discussed in chapter 1, this distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge is an important one for both teachers and students because no clear relationship exists between the ability to talk about grammar and the ability to use grammar. Grammar teachers must have some explicit knowledge of grammar to be able to respond to student output and provide adequate feedback and explanation to aid students in the development of grammar ability. The extent of this teacher knowledge, however, is subject to a good deal of variation. Furthermore, relying on too much explicit explanation of grammar can overburden (or perhaps even bore) students, so teachers need to learn to balance clear explanations with multiple opportunities to use language in meaningful ways. The goal of grammar teaching is not to teach grammar rules but to help students use language in accurate, meaningful, and appropriate ways. For students, having some explicit knowledge of grammar can help them to notice when and how certain grammar features are used or to see some mismatch between their knowledge of a given rule and their ability to use the rule in meaningful ways.

Even for teachers confident in talking about grammar, the corpus perspective covered in chapter 3 may challenge some of their intuitions about grammar form, meaning, and use. In one sense, whether teachers are, or are not, confident in their ability to talk about grammar with students, having reliable sources on how grammar is used in different contexts is invaluable. In another sense, though, the extent to which teachers are confident in their ability to talk about grammar will likely have an important impact on how they decide to teach it.

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