Book title:

Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom

Book author(s):
Hedge, Tricia

ISBN: 9780194421720 "Teaching and Learning in the Language

Publisher: Oxford University Press Classroom". Hedge, Tricia. (2000), pp 143-184, tbc,
Pub. year: 2000 Oxford University Press

Course of study:
Page range: 143-184
29509_LING5460M - Language Teaching in
Chapter number: Chapter 5
Practice
Extract title: Grammar
Extract author(s): Hedge, Tricia

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5 GRAMMAR

'Grammarians dispute and the case is still before the courts. '
HORACE

1 What is the role of grammar in the English language

classroom?
2 What do we know about the learning of grammar?
3 What information can help us in the selection and
presentation of grammar?
4 What principles can guide us in the teaching of grammar?
5 How can we design the grammar component of a course?
6 How do we suit approaches to the teaching of grammar to
learner needs?

Introductory task
Look at Materials extract 5.A. It is designed for intermediate learners.
1 How authentically do you think the grammatical structures are contextu-
alized? Is the link between form and communicative function made clear?
2 What do you think are the underlying assumptions about the learning of
grammar?

5 .1 Introduction: the role of grammar in

English language teaching
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the role of grammar in
English language teaching. That is not to say that, for many teachers, grammar
has ever taken anything other than a central role in their classroom
methodology. However, the 1980s experienced an anti-grammar movement,
perhaps influenced primarily by Krashen's (1982) idea that grammar can be
acquired naturally from meaningful input and opportunities to interact in
the classroom: in other words, that grammatical competence can develop in
144 Teaching the language system

Materials extract 5.A

1
What we're going to do - what the future will bring Activate your grammar
'Will' and 'going to' future
a) Think about where you live. There are always jobs to be done:
'WIii' Is used to forecast the future when we are
cleaning, tidying and buying new things, for example. Imagine you are fairly sure that something will happen, or to say
going to spend all next weekend at home doing these jobs. Work with a what we want or e1pect to happen. tt is often
partner and say what you're going to do. used after 'I think', 'I 11pect 1, 'I hope', and
'hopefully'.
Eumple
Examples
A: I'm going to sort out my clothes. Tomonow's weather will be hot and sunny.
B: What else? Hopefully in ten years' time I'll be a millionaire.
A: I'm going to clean the kitchen .
'Going to' joins the present and the future.
b) Fill in the thoughts of the second person in each cartoon, using It is used to forecast the future when there is
these sentences: evidence for it now, to express intentions, and
to doscribe something that is about to happen.
a) She'll be lucky to b) I don't think c) He'll probably d) I think the E11mples
sell a record! we'll ever get lay an egg soon . sharks will be tt'I going to rain. II can see the
there. better company. clouds.) Evidence
now.

r,i r.:( EvetJ/hin9 ~'s 9otng t~ He-15 going to live

in ttaly.
(Al the end of the
summer.) Intention.

.. - 'f
.wo/4 [Link] 1e .~ I'm going to be sick. (I already feet bad.)
~r,,.,--..-.. About to happen•

. . . See Grammar ReYiew 7 on page 82.

~ i~~ C. You're gCJ/119 jJ> be

~(~1. a SfAR/~
...,p
•~·. , /~()• !)
- ,...,/ C

.....
vie ~e 9oin9 {(J nave~
Suen ,JJ!.11/'
1
4

j'-. .....

II::J c) Listen to this interview with a 19-year-old and

J
number the statements to show the correct order.
Fly to South Africa Visit Malawi Live in Italy
Start university Go to Zimbabwe Travel to Zanzibar
Have a holiday in
Malta
Get a job [ • . ; ~ ~M$, . • •
II::J d) Listen to the interview again and read the
tapescript, underlining the 'will' and 'going to' future.

g .-I
·---·
(Sinclair and Prowse: Activate Your English SB, pages 18-19)
 Grammar 145

a fluency-oriented environment without conscious focus on language forms.

The case against a methodology which presented grammatical items in a
controlled sequence certainly led to some approaches which relegated grammar
to a position of low priority. Disenchantment with this, and a growing
concern about accuracy in learners' language, has resulted in a reassertion of
the role of grammar in syllabus design and the content oflessons, and even in
giving explicit attention to grammatical forms and rules (Ellis 1993c). The
methodology currently suggested, however, does not necessarily replicate
earlier approaches. In fact, it has become a preoccupation among applied
linguists, informed teachers, and materials designers to find an approach to
the teaching of grammar that fits usefully with what we know about how
learners learn the grammatical system of English.
One issue for this chapter, then, is to ask what insights are available into the
ways in which learners move towards accurate production of the English
language and whether such insights hold implications for the usefulness of
grammar-based knowledge and grammar-based practice as part of classroom
methodology. Another issue is whether, and in what ways, the relative value
of focused and unfocused activities might vary with such factors as the age,
degree of exposure to English, and reasons for learning English of different
learners (see 1.3).
If we believe that a focus on grammar is a necessary and/ or a desirable part of
classroom language learning, the questions that follow are how to integrate
grammar teaching into a communicative methodology which pays attention
to all aspects of communicative competence, and what precise form that
teaching should take. And these imply further questions about the choice of
grammatical structures to present, what kind of grammatical description to
use, whether to use an inductive or a deductive approach, what the role of
practice might be, and what forms of practice are appropriate for different
types oflearner.
It is important to hold in mind, as we investigate issues in the teaching of
grammar, the strong relationship that exists between grammar and vocabulary.
This relationship has become a key concern in current linguistic thinking
and, as we shall see, has implications for the design of materials. Traditionally,
grammar has been considered as being of primary importance with vocabulary
in a subordinate role, but currently vocabulary is seen as of equal significance
in language learning, and some teachers and methodologists would reverse
their tradition_al roles. At various points in the discussion the link between
the two will be addressed.
146 Teaching the language system

5 .2 What do we know about the learning

of grammar?
Ideas about the learning of grammar have been substantially influenced by
the input hypothesis and the notion of intake, as discussed in 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
Learners receive information about language from a variety of sources in
their environment and in the classroom: the teacher, the textbook, recordings,
other students, reference books, and so on. This input has to be worked on
for acquisition. It is generally acknowledged that acquisition involves a number
of processes, which we will now look at in more detail.

5.2.1 Noticing
First of all, learners pick out specific features of the language and pay
attention to them, that is, they notice items of language. For example, it is
only after noticing that 'don't' seems to occur in regular ways in English to
express negation that a learner can work on the relationship between I-
meaning and form and begin to make sense of the rule involved in placing
'don't' before a main verb. In order for the learner to notice, the language
feature has to be noticeable. 'Don't' will occur frequently in directives,
warnings, advice, and expressions such as 'I don't think' and 'I don't know',
often with the identifiable paralinguistic behaviour of head shaking. It
therefore fulfils several criteria for being noticeable: it occurs frequently, it
relates to the learner's common sense about basic functions oflanguage, and
its functions are those to which a learner would be likely to pay attention.
Psycholinguists are still working on the task of sorting out what makes
language items noticeable. After items have been noticed and the relationship
between form and meaning interpreted, these items become part of intake
into the learning process. Learners then analyse the forms in order to reason
out how they fit into their existing knowledge of the language.

5.2.2 Reasoning and hypothesizing

Adult learners in particular tend to use their capacity to analyse new language.
They are able to see the patterns in the language, create hypotheses about the
rules these patterns might demonstrate, and gradually revise their hypotheses
according to new information. They seem to use a set of strategies for
analysing the language and reasoning about it. These have been described by
Oxford (1990) as 'reasoning deductively', 'analysing contrastively', 'translating',
and 'transferring' , and they can be exemplified as follows.
 Grammar 147

Reasoning deductively
Learners apply rules they already know to working out the meaning of what
they hear or to the formulation of what they want to say. A common error
which derives from this is the inappropriate application of inverted interrogative
word order, for example:
*Can you tell me where is the station?
*She doesn't know where are they.
Many adults report the need to have the language system laid out explicitly
with rules from which they can work deductively. And the reasons for this
might be various. For example, individual cognitive style may have developed
from early school-based language learning experiences in which the formal
system of rules was set out and deductive approaches were used. Or adult
learners may need to explore the cultural link between language and thought,
as this quotation shows:
'One of the things I seek to find out most from the syntax of a language
is its basic thought system, which I often find exhibited more clearly in
syntax than in any other aspect. I feel that unless I grasp this way of
thinking I shall never be able to handle the language efficiently.'
(Pickett 1978: 62)

Analysing contrastively
A learner may compare his or her first and second languages and work out
their similarities and differences. Or the comparison may be between the
new language and others already learned. We saw this in 3.2.1 when a learner
used her knowledge of the savoir-connaitredistinction in French to understand
the kennen-wissen distinction in German.

Translating
Pickett (ibid.) reports a proficient English-speaking learner of several other
languages telling of:
'the need to translate mentally in the early and consolidation stages of
FL [foreign language] learning, i.e. the process is one of using English
as a meta-language for getting my ideas straight on the structure and
semantic range of the FL.'
(ibid.: 61)
Used in this way, at certain stages, translation can clearly be a helpful strategy.

Transferring
Transferring is what learners do when they apply knowledge of one language
to the understanding or production of another. For example, in the example
148 Teaching the language system

given below of the stages of acquisition for negation, a Spanish learner is

likely to choose 'no' rather than 'not' at the first stage because it transfers
from how negation is formed in Spanish.

5.2.3 Structuring and restructuring

The strategies described above serve as examples of what learners do as they
notice features in input and work on it in various ways to structure and
restructure their knowledge of English. As learners work out new rules, these
have to be integrated into the representation of English grammar they hold
in their minds, and this information has to be restructured as the learner
moves on to another stage of development.
Evidence of this reasoning process is seen in the errors that learners make
when their reasoning is overgeneralized or influenced by the first language.
The errors are systematic and are the outward sign of an internally developing
system of grammar which moves through stages of interlanguage until it
approximates the grammar used by proficient speakers of English.
For example, Lightbown and Spada ( 1999) give the stages of acquisition for
negation, which may differ slightly according to the first language but which
generally follow this sequence:
Stage 1
The negative element (usually 'no' or 'not') is typically placed before
the verb or the element being negated:
No bicycle. No have any sand. I not like it.
'No' is preferred by some learners, perhaps due to transfer from their
first language. Italian and Spanish speakers may prefer 'no' since it
corresponds to the negative form in Italian and Spanish.
Stage 2
At this stage, 'no' and 'not' are alternated with 'don't'. However, 'don't'
is not marked for person, number, or tense and it may even be used
before modals like 'can' and 'should':
He don't like it. I don't can sing.
Stage 3
Learners begin to place the negative element after auxiliary verbs like
'are', 'is', and 'can'. But at this stage, the 'don't' form is still not fully
analysed:
You can't go there. He can't eat nothing. She don't like rice.
Stage4
'Do' performs its full function as a marker of tense and person:
It doesn't work. We didn't have supper.
 Grammar 149
r
For some time, however, learners may continue to mark tense on both
the auxiliary and the verb:
I didn't went there. She doesn't wants to go.
(Lightbown and Spada 1999: 77-8)

5.2.4 Automatizing
Once a learner can achieve regular and consistent responses in conversation
to a certain type of input, then it can be said that the language involved has
been automatized. This can be seen in an exchange between two colleagues
as they respectively move in an out of a lift:
A Did you get my message?
B Yes, I did. I'll let you know today.
Here B makes a quick and appropriate short-form response followed by a
choice of a particular future form to indicate a speedy reply. How is this
process of automatization achieved? In producing language a learner plans
and chooses what to say and how to say it by paying attention to whether the
form communicates a meaning successfully. Through repeated practice of
the successful form its use will ultimately become automatic, in just the same
way as it does with children acquiring their first language. This process can
be observed occurring naturally as learners acquire English outside the
classroom. The question for the teacher is whether classroom practice can
assist. Sharwood Smith (1981) claims that explicit knowledge gained in the
classroom can become implicit and form the basis of automatic production
through practice:
Let us also suppose that this type of activity is repeated again and again.
In such situations, it is surely reasonable to suppose that a certain
number of structures planned and performed slowly and consciously
can eventually develop into automatized behavior.
(Sharwood Smith 1981: 166)
This description of what learners do as they use grammatical information
available to them is tentative and partial as it relies on uncertain insights
from research. Teachers could easily be seduced into thinking that such a
description provides a straightforward framework for classroom procedures
and that trying to encourage the processes in sequence will lead to the
successful t~aching of grammar. But this notion needs to be qualified in
vanous ways.
One qualification is that the ways in which these processes of noticing,
reasoning, restructuring, and automatizing relate to one another is far from
clear. For example, Batstone (1996) makes a point about the complexity of
noticing:
150 Teaching the language system

... the cognitive load involved in noticing suggests that learners may
need time to make sense of new language before they can make sense
with it. In other words, it argues for receptive tasks to be clearly distinct
from productive tasks, and for the former to precede the latter.
(Batstone 1996: 173)
Others have commented on the role of practice. As we have seen, there is a
body of opinion which claims that explicit knowledge can become part of
the learner's internalized system through practice so that learned rules are
automatized and available for production. However, it has been noted (Eubank
1989; Ellis 1993a) that premature practice can actually confuse rather than
facilitate the intake of grammatical features. This relates to the idea of
readiness for learning. There is now substantial evidence for the claim that
learners follow a developmental route of acquisition in which structures are
acquired in sequence, but a natural sequence which may not be replicated by
the teacher or textbook. It is a predictable sequence and learners pass through
similar stages whether they are acquiring language naturally in a second-
language environment or learning in the classroom. The sequence appears to
be unmodifiable, and this inevitably raises questions about the role of practice.
Teachers are well aware that students might produce a form in focused
practice within a lesson but fail to take it up and produce it in later lessons or
even within the whole course. Intake and eventual automatization will only
occur as and when students are ready. This has implications for the timing
and type of practice which might aid acquisition of grammar.
Other qualifications are the extent to which any of the processes described
above occur consciously or unconsciously, and the relationship between
implicit and explicit knowledge in the learner. Second language acquisition
researchers make a distinction between these two. Implicit grammatical
knowledge is the intuitive knowledge of grammar which develops in the
same way as it does in young children acquiring their first language, through
natural processes and using input in the ways described above. It can
develop, without intervention from instruction, in the developmental
sequence just mentioned. Implicit knowledge develops naturally in the
foreign language classroom, too, as learners work on the input they are
exposed to and, in fact, the rate of this development can be increased through
exposure to frequently occurring structures. However, learners also receive
explicit knowledge of grammar from teachers and textbooks. What, then, is
the relationship between the two? If implicit knowledge is the primary source
from which learners try to produce language, as is generally believed, how
can explicit knowledge of grammatical rules play a role in the processes
described above?
It has been suggested that it can help in a number of ways. First, explicit
knowledge can help learners to appreciate the gap that exists between the
language which they and other students produce and native-speaker forms as
 Grammar 151

idealized in grammar texts. This can help them to monitor and check their
language, and be aware of what they need to improve on. Second, it has been
suggested (Seliger 1979) that knowing a pedagogical rule can help learners
with the structuring process when they are ready to internalize a grammatical
rule. Third, Pica ( 1985) has argued cautiously that instruction has a selective
impact depending on the complexity of the grammatical structure in
question. She found in a small-scale study, which compared learners
acquiring English outside the classroom and those learning in a classroom
setting, that the second group developed accurate production of the third
person '-s' more quickly. She also found that classroom instruction had little
effect on the use of the article. In other words, instruction seemed to
facilitate in the case of linguistically simple rules, but for others, where the
relationship between structure and function is not so clear, as with the use of
the article, it did not seem to help.
There is, therefore, a degree of agreement among researchers, based on extensive
studies, that a focus on grammar and the explicit learning of rules can
facilitate and speed up the grammar acquisition process. It is this belief that
has led to the reassertion of the value of grammar learning in the classroom.
The qualifications discussed above go some way towards demonstrating the
issues which complicate attempts to devise procedures for the teaching of
grammar. It might also be mistaken to assume that the learning of grammar
is somehow discrete from other processes. We need to remember that
learners have the capacity to memorize 'chunks' oflanguage and access these
ready-made items as they try to produce language. For example, I remember
picking up the Swedish expression, Tack ska du ha (literally 'Thanks shall you
have') from listening and perceiving it as two words, the already known tack
('thanks') with some kind of addition. It wasn't until I saw the written form
much later that it was possible for me to analyse the structure. Holistic
learning of this kind can enable later extrapolation from chunks which have
been memorized.
This brief example points to current debate on just how language is processed
by a learner: what the psychological reality is, and what the respective roles of
grammar and vocabulary are. For example, it has been suggested (Pawley and
Syder 1983) that learners improvise when they speak, especially in the early
stages of learning a language, stringing together chunks of language in a
process that owes more to memory and an understanding of word meaning
than the selection of grammatical units. And some writers, for example
Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), have set out lists of lexical phrases which
they believe are useful for learners to learn. What this debate brings into
focus is the need to acknowledge that, although grammatical instruction and
practice may have a role in helping learners to refine their interlanguage and
achieve greater accuracy, other processes are at work in language development.
152 Teaching the language system

If learners also depend, in actual language use, on using lexical chunks in

order to achieve fluency, then teaching in the early stages needs co cake this
into consideration and, more generally, teaching may need to pay greater
attention co the acquisition of vocabulary and lexical phrases (see Chapter 4).
All of these issues make the teaching of grammar a complex and uncertain
enterprise. Various suggestions have been made for classroom procedures
which will be taken up in 5.4, but, before looking at these, it is also necessary
to consider the role chat grammatical description plays in ELT.

5 .3 What information can help us in the

selection and presentation of grammar?
A central issue in ELT is what role linguistic description can play in the
design of classroom procedures and materials. Mose teachers would concur
with the view chat it is difficulc to teach a language without a knowledge of
its structure and its functioning, but there exist many descriptions of these,
each with its own method of analysis and metalanguage. Teachers and textbook
writers turn co pedagogical grammars for information about the language
system. These derive language data from scientific descriptions of language.
These data are then selected and organized in terms of the learning needs of
students of English. Pedagogical grammars therefore ace as 'filters' or
'interpreters' between the detailed formal grammars of linguists and the
classroom (Candlin 1973). This means chat they are structured according to
the age and level of proficiency of the learners and in terms of their objectives
for learning English.
There are several points to bear in mind when reviewing the content and
presentation of a pedagogical grammar, or of the grammar component of a
coursebook. One is to remember chat attempts to describe the formal system
of English can only be idealizations as the system is less precise than most
people imagine. le is actually very difficult co give rules for some aspects of
grammar. Batstone (1994) comments on the notorious case of 'some' and
'any' for which a very simple formulation is often found in textbooks; chat
'some' is found in affirmative sentences and 'any' is found in interrogatives
and negative sentences, except in making offers or requests where 'some' can
be used.
With the help of computers, we are now able co undertake large-scale
surveys oflanguage as it is actually used, and co reformulate some (or
any) ill-conceived idealizations. One such program has revealed
beyond all doubt chat the above regulation for some and any is
incorrect, and chat 'the use of any in an affirmative sentence is in face
 Grammar 153

much commoner than its use in interrogatives' (Willis 1990: 49) as

with 'Anything you can do I can do better' or 'Any fool knows that!'
(Batstone 1994: 13)
Other considerations in the selection of materials are to do with changing
approaches to the description of English. Contemporary ELT has been much
influenced by developments in language description in the last twenty-five
years which see language as more than a formal system. These developments
view grammar from three main perspectives, which we will now examine in
more detail.

5.3.1 Grammar as meaning

The first perspective views grammar as meaning.
Linguistic meaning covers a great deal more than reports of events in
the real world. It expresses ... our attitudes ... towards the person we
are speaking to, how we feel about the reliability of our message, how
we situate ourselves in the events we report, and many other things that
make our messages not merely a recital of facts but a complex of facts
and comments.
(Bolinger 1977: 4)
Here 'linguistic meaning' covers lexis as well. An example of how we situate
ourselves (in other words, how we express subtle shades of meaning) can be
found in the ways we have of expressing compulsion and obligation, as in:
1 I must get in touch with my mother this week.
2 I have to complete this report by tomorrow.
3 I ought to phone John today.
4 I'd better complete this report by Friday.
Many native speakers would see differences in meaning in this set where each
sentence has a first person subject. Number 1 implies a sense of responsibility
or duty and relates to a speaker's personal authority to make decisions while
number 2 implies compulsion from an external authority. Number 3 suggests
that the implied obligation may not be fulfilled, and number 4 implies that
something is advisable but as yet undecided. How would the meanings change,
though, if numbers 1 and 4 were put into the third person?
He must get in touch with his mother this week.
He'd better finish this report by Friday.
These examples demonstrate how meaning can change when the same modal
verb is used with different items in the grammatical set of 'person' and
illustrate the complexity of the learning task for students if they are not to
misunderstand or to be misunderstood.
154 Teaching the language system

A second example will highlight the role of intonation and how it links with
grammar to express attitudes. Consider the following utterance and how it
appears to provide objective information about the speaker's intentions:
I would like to respond to Brian's comments with a point that I feel is
important to the debate and then offer a further, relevant argument
which might take us forward.
But if spoken with stress placement on is, relevant and finward, the attitude
to what the previous speaker has said would be unmistakable.
As can be seen, consideration of grammar as meaning will influence the ways
in which grammatical forms are presented as expressing concepts such as
obligation. And teachers will need to keep in mind the link between grammar
and intonation.

5.3.2 Grammar in discourse

The sense of the example above, of course, could only be fully appreciated if
presented within the context of the debate and its developing discourse, and
this is another perspective which can be taken towards grammar: how
sentences can be combined in written texts and how utterances link in
speech.
... the consideration of use requires us to go beyond the sentence and
to look at larger stretches of language. Normal linguistic behaviour
does not consist in the production of separate sentences but in the use
of sentences for the creation of discourse.
(Widdowson 1978: 22)
Rules, therefore, might be seen to operate across the boundaries of sentences
as well as within them. This is the perspective taken in A Communicative
Grammar ofEnglish (Leech and Svartvik 1975) which devotes one section to
'Meanings in connected discourse' and looks at how meanings can be put
together in spoken or written discourse. They present six ways of organizing
connections which can be exemplified as follows:
1 Linking signals
These include familiar 'signposts' which signal what comes next, for
example incidentally for changing the subject or that is to say to signal an
explanation.
2 Linking constructions
These include conjunctions used to co-ordinate and subordinate clauses,
for example and, or and if, because, and adverbial links such as however for
contrast.
 Grammar 155

3 'General purpose' links

These include participle and verbless clauses, for example:
Being a farmer, he has to get up early.
He stared at the floor, too nervous to reply.
4 Substitution and omission
This includes the use of pronouns to refer back to noun phrases, for
example:
I like this coat better than the one (='the coat') you showed me before.
and the auxiliary do to refer back to verb phrases, for example:
He can cook as well as she does. ('as she cooks')
It also includes omission of infinitive clauses as in:
A Why don't you come and stay with u·s?
B I'd love to (do so).
or omission through co-ordination, as in:
Peter ate the food but left the drink. (= 'Peter ate the food but he left the
drink.')
5 Presenting and focusing information
This includes the way in which we create contrastive focus in spoken
language by using stress, for example:
One of the parcels has arrived. (but the other one hasn't)
It also includes the way in which we can focus on important information
in writing through placing it last in a sentence, for example:
Arguments in favour of a new building plan, said the mayor, included
suggestions that if a new shopping centre were not built, the city's traffic
problems would soon become unmanageable.
6 Order and emphasis
This includes variations in presenting information in order to create
emphasis, using such devices as 'it-clauses', for example:
It was by train that we reached Istanbul.
and fronting, for example:
Never have I seen him so angry.
(adapted, with examples, from Leech and Svartvik 1975: 156-81)
These categories are to do with the more global aspects of grammar, how
ideas are organized and ordered, and linked and developed through a piece
of discourse.
156 Teaching the language system

One problem with looking at grammar in discourse is that spoken discourse

in particular simply uses the rules of grammar as it wishes to and by no
means conforms to them on all occasions to present the idealized forms of
the grammar book. This can be seen in the following conversation:
A Got any long-life milk?
B Whole, semi skimmed, or skimmed?
A Skimmed.
B Tastes better, don't it?
A Much better.
B Wanta bag?
A Thanks.
This is a real conversation, as opposed to some of those found in textbooks
which model grammatical structures for learners. It is characterized by omission
of many items, but not in the way that omission is described in idealized
ways in a pedagogical grammar such as A Communicative Grammar ofEnglish.
Omission is possible because the participants, involved in a customer-
shopkeeper transact-ion, are dealing with physical objects so they do not need
to be explicit. A question that arises from this observation is how to keep a
balance between presenting learners with language data containing examples
of idealized grammar rules which they can process for intake and exposing
them to authentic language data with which they will be confronted outside
the classroom. If shared context frequently makes it unnecessary to
textualize meanings explicitly, authentic language is hardly the most effective
vehicle for demonstrating grammar.
Another problem with looking at grammar in discourse is that discourse
does not keep to conventional meanings. This can be seen very clearly in the
use if irony. Both of the following sentences:
Kate is always so kind to me.
Thank you so much for your help, John.
as part of discourse could mean the reverse of what they appear to say, for
example, if they were used as ironic comment on Kate's unkindness or John's
failure to help with the washing-up. In the second case, the listener would be
able to interpret meaning from the context. The first may not be so
immediately interpretable and a learner would need to be aware of the way in
which language can be used ironically, with whom it might be advisedly used
in this way, and the degree of offence, amusement, or resentment this might
provoke.
This last point takes us beyond grammar into the area of pragmatics and the
ways in which we interpret the meanings of spoken or written language from
the words spoken, the forms used, the context of the discourse, and the
situation in which it occurs. The following set of sentences, although they do
 Grammar 157

not contain any of the formal links listed above, do contain an easily
interpretable message when spoken by one neighbour to another at the front
door at seven o'clock in the morning:
Sorry. It's freezing. Do you have any jump leads? I've got to get to the
airport.
There is a cultural element involved here as well. This message constitutes a
request for help and such requests can be made in a number of ways, both
indirectly as above, and directly as in:
Please could you help me with my car?
You couldn't give me a hand with starting my car, could you?
For some learners the indirect way may relate to what happens in their first
language and will therefore be a more comfortable choice. For these learners,
a direct request may be a new way of using language to learn as well as a new
grammatical form.
If context is so important for interpreting meaning, there is a clear implication
here for the contextualization of grammar in learning materials, and it is not
surprising that current materials try to provide learners with rich sources of
input in which they can notice contextualized grammatical items.

5.3.3 Grammarandstyle
Where English gives us a choice of grammatical structures for a particular
purpose, the different grammatical structures available are often not
equivalent, since they belong to different 'styles' or 'varieties'. We
believe that the appropriate choice is as important as it is difficult ...
(Leech and Svartvik 1975: 11)
In A Communicative Grammar ofEnglish, Leech and Svartvik discuss varieties
of English, using the term 'variety' to denote differences according to
geography and situation, the latter covering a number of things: written and
spoken language; formal and informal style; impersonal, polite, and familiar
language; tactful and tentative language, and literary or rhetorical style.
Using their set oflabels, the same message can be conveyed in these ways:
I suppose he's quite a nice little boy, isn't he? (tentative, polite)
Nice kid. (informal, spoken)
In all, he was a pleasant child. (formal, written)
A cheerful child of pleasant disposition. (literary)
Notice that there are lexical variations as well: style is as much a matter of
lexis as of grammar. One task for the teacher is to help students to become
aware that English consists of many styles. Some of these may only need to
be recognized and understood but others are crucial for production, such as
158 Teaching the language system

the tactful style needed to avoid giving offence. For our learners, commun-
icative ability involves knowing the different styles available, being able to
recognize their characteristics sufficiently for comprehension, and making
useful grammatical choices for effective interaction appropriate to the
situation. For teachers and materials designers there are, therefore, careful
choices to be made in what is to be selected and presented for awareness-
raising, and what is to be selected and presented as a model for production.
One of the ways in which an understanding of the structure and use of the
language system can help teachers is in providing insights for contextualizing
grammar when it is offered to students in spoken or written texts. As we have
seen, contemporary attempts to describe grammar do not view it as a
separate formal system but link it to social use, and to its functioning within
discourse. These descriptions can assist teachers in their attempts to develop
learners' grammatical competence as part of their sociolinguistic and
discourse competence (see 2.2). This brings us to a point where we need to
look more closely at the implications for pedagogy of our knowledge of
grammar and its acquisition.

5.4 What principles can guide us in the

teaching of grammar?
Before looking at current approaches to teaching grammar it is worth
summarizing what seems to be our state of knowledge about grammar
acquisition, and the major implications of this.
First, the concept of 'readiness to learn' appears to be important. If, as
research seems to show, learners pass through a developmental sequence and
that sequence is determined by the complexity of processing involved in
relation to a particular grammatical structure, then teachers cannot expect
learners to acquire that grammatical structure until they are ready to do so.
Second, the amount of time it takes to learn a new structure varies among
learners as they link forms to functions and to their stylistic use. One
implication of this is the need to recycle structures in a course, each recycling
presenting new functions and possible uses. Third, the process is not a
lockstep one, with progressive and complete mastery of structures in sequence.
As the interlanguage system develops and restructuring occurs, learners may
suddenly start to make errors in an item the teacher thought they had learned
to produce accurately. The experienced teacher will wait for accuracy to
return. And fourth, learners are able to learn inductively, drawing on the
knowledge of English they have already acquired along with knowledge of
their first and any other languages, to formulate hypotheses, test these out,
and gradually restructure and refine their grammatical knowledge.
 Grammar 159

These insights clearly hold implications for the role of grammar instruction.
There is now a strong consensus that the presentation of grammar to learners
can facilitate learning in a number of ways: it can provide input for noticing
language forms; it can help students see the difference between their own
output and accurate forms of English; it can present high-frequency grammatical
items explicitly to speed up learning; it can provide information about the
communicative use of language structures by contextualizing them in
spoken and written texts; it can give information implicitly through exposure
to examples or explicitly through instruction on the stylistic variation of
language form.
The value of providing grammar instruction may not be in question but, as
implied in the earlier sections of this chapter, its effectiveness may-be contingent
on certain factors, and one of these may well be the careful contextualization
oflinguistic forms in situations of natural use.

5.4.1 Presenting grammar

Contextualizing grammar
In 5.3 we suggested three perspectives which need to be taken into account
when presenting grammar: grammar as meaning, grammar in discourse, and
grammar and style. The importance of contextualizing a grammatical structure
in relation to these three perspectives can be demonstrated with some
examples of the present perfect tense:
She has attended the ante-natal classes regularly.
You haven't forgotten my birthday again, have you?
I haven't been to Paris for four years.
Have you had dinner yet?
Oh no, they've just scored another goal!
The management has decided to make thirty staff redundant.
Which of these shows habit in a period leading up to the present time and
which shows indefinite events in a period leading up to the present time?
Which show attitude as part of meaning? Which functions as a complaint
and which as an invitation? Which is stylistically formal and which informal?
Ideally, the context will clarify who is speaking to whom, in what kind of
setting, with what kind of purpose, in what style, with literal meaning or
otherwise, and within what kind of discourse.
The contexts in which grammar is embedded need to be generally useful and
appropriate to the needs of the learner group. In this way grammar becomes
generative and students can transfer it to relevant situations. Contexts can be
created through visuals, through the teacher miming or demonstrating in
the classroom, through a dialogue, a text, a song or a video, or through a situation
set up by the teacher. The particular context chosen will relate to the learners
160 Teaching the language system

in view. For example, Materials extract 5.B first uses an authentic text in the
genre of a certain kind of joke which usefully repeats the structure, and then
a spoken dialogue which is relevant co students' personal lives, while
Materials extract 5.H in section 5.4.4 uses visuals in cartoon format for
younger adolescents.

Order of presentation
How to contextualize a grammatical item is one decision chat must be taken
in grammar teaching. Another is which forms of the item to teach and in
what order, and which forms to leave for the recycling stages. For example,
Discussion topic 4 (page 180) invites you to look at a set of present continuous
forms and to decide on the criteria you would use for sequencing chem in a
teaching unit.

Use of terminology
A third decision concerns the degree to which grammatical terminology is
useful in the presentation of grammar. Having a metalanguage may be useful
for advanced learners, particularly in discussing errors in writing or in helping
chem to understand difficult semantic relations. And analytical learners may
respond well to terminology. However, it is sometimes more appropriate
simply to guide students into seeing the patterns.

Degree of explicitness
There is also a decision to be taken about how explicitly grammatical
information is provided to the learner. For example, we can cake Materials
extract 5.A, which presents rules in some detail along with illustrative
materials and opportunities to work with the rules. This is one way of
tackling grammar with adult learners who have learned English formally in
previous learning careers and can activate their grammar. This approach can
be compared with Materials extract 5.B which presents learners with
simulated authentic written and spoken texts. These are carefully structured
to display the target tenses and to give learners the task of working out their
different uses and discovering the rules. In other words, learners are engaged
in raising their own awareness of how language works. Many materials now
take this latter, inductive, approach.
The popularity of the inductive approach, sometimes known as 'discovery
learning' has received theoretical support in the work of Rutherford (1987)
and Sharwood Smith (1988) who present slightly varying models of the role
chat 'grammar consciousness raising' can play in foreign language acquisition.
Rutherford, for example, says:
The role of C-R [consciousness raising] ... is ... one in which data chat
are crucial for the learner's testing of hypotheses, and for his forming
 Grammar 161

Materials extract 5.B

Test your grammar

2 T.33 Read and listen to the dialogue between
John (J) and Anna (A).
T.32 Read and listen to the joke. Underline the verb
forms that refer to the future. What is the difference J I'm going to the shops soon. Do you want
between them 7 anything?
A No, I don't think so. Oh , hang on. We haven't got
any sugar left.
A Penguin Joke! It's all right. It's on my list. I'm going to buy some.
One day a man and his wife were walking down A What about bread? We haven't got any bread.
the street when they came across a penguin. J OK. I'll go to the baker's and I'll buy a loaf.
'Oh!' exclaimed the man. 'What a surprise! What A I'll be at work when you get back .
shall we do with it?' J rll see you later, then . Don't forget Jo and Andy
' I know,' said his wife. 'We'll ask a policeman.' are coming round for a drink tonight.
So they found a policeman and explained what A Ah, right. Bye.
had happened. Bye, honey.
'Mmm,' said the policeman, 'I think the best
thing is to take it to the zoo.'
'What a good idea!' said the woman. 'We'll go • Grammar questio ns
there straight away.'
I'm going to buy some (sugar).
I'll buJ• a loaf
- Why does John use different future forms?
What's the difference between will and going to to
express a future intention?
- We don't usually say going ro go or going to come.
Find the examples in the dialogue where these form
are avoided.

The next morning the policeman was walking

down the same street when he saw the couple PRACTICE
again with the penguin. 'I thought I told you to
take that penguin to the zoo,' the policeman said. Dialogues
'Well, we did,' said the man. 'We took it to rhe
zoo and we all had a really good time. So this John said , /'II go to the baker's and /'II buy a loaf
Look at the list of items. What would Anna ask?
afternoon we're taking it to the cinema, and
What would John say?
this evening we're going to have a meal in a
fish restaurant.' Example
- some stamps
Anna Could you get some sra,nps?
John OK. /'II go to the post office and buy some.
- a newspaper - some shampoo
- a bottle of wine - a tin of white paint
- a joint of beef - a video
PRESENTATION (1) - a film for her camera - some felt-tip pens

going to and will

2 Listening
John always writes himself a list at the beginning of
every day. What 's he going to do today? What's he T.34 Listen to the conversations.
going lo buy? Say what's going to happen.

Example
He's going to fill up the car with petrol.

Tu"m1b~o 'lhi"js -ra b!AY'

~-m.l s~,.,,.
[Link] -l>ill
P4"«+iM,~o ...
~ .
eh~~
-Ille 'Mlvel "-'CAt
i\\c libr,iry }'b_,l.,.rt
"h.,.,;..a.r Z 4V11<111,los

~""".(;,,." w,.tl<
"J>P"• Example
"'~'°" A Have you seen the air tickets?
B Yes. They're with the travellers' cheques.
A And do you have the address of the hotel?
162 Teaching the language system

Example
A Have you seen the air tickets? ~ They're going to catch a plane. )
B Yes. They're with the travellers' cheques.
A And do you have the address of the hotel? -:::<_ They're going to stay in a hotel .)
B No. I've just got the name. Do we need the address?
A No. Maybe not. The taxi driver will know.
B What about the milk? Have you cancelled the milk?
A Yes. No milk for a fortnight. Right? Th ey're going to be away
B That's it. Well done. for two weeks.

48 Unit 6 On the move

3 I think I'll ... 4 Grammar

Use the prompts in A to make sentences with/ think Underline the correct verb form in
. will. Match them with a sentence in B. the sentences.
Example Example
I think Jeremy will win the match. He 's been playing 'Oh. dear. I'm late for work.'
really well recently. 'Don't worry. /'m going to give/
/'II give you a lift.'
A
a ... Jeremy/win the match a 'I've got a headache.'
b ... iVbe a nice day tomorrow ' Have you? Wait a minute. /'II
. I/pass my exams get/I'm going to get you an
d ... you/like the film aspirin.'
... we/get to the airport in time b 'It's Tony's birthday next week.'
. you/get the job ' Is it? I didn't know. /'II send/I'm
B going to send him a card. ·
D But we'd better get a move on. c 'Why are you putting on your
coat?'
~ He's been playing really well recently.
'Because /'II take/I'm going to
D The forecast is warm and dry. take the dog for a walk.'
D You've got all the right qualifications. d 'Are you and Alan still going out
0 It's a lovely story, and the acting is superb. together?'
D I've been revisi ng for weeks. 'Oh, yes. We'll get married/ We're
going to get married next year.'
2 Now make sentences with / don't think ... will with the e (a telephone co nversation)
words from A in Exercise I. Match them with a 'Would you like to go out for a
sentence in C. drink tonight?'
Example '/'II watch/I'm going to watch the
I don't think Jeremy will win the match. He hasn't football on television .'
pract i.<ed for ages. 'Oh! I didn't know it was on.'
'Come and watch it with me!'
C 'OK. /'II come/I'm going to com e
0 There's too much traffic. round at about 7.30.'
0 I haven't done any revision at all. ' Did you phone Peter about
D The forecast said rain and wind. tonight?'
'No, I forgot. /'// do/I'm going to
~ He hasn't practised for ages.
do it now. What's his number?'
0 You're too young and you've got no experience.
Roleplay
D It's not really your cup of tea.
Work in pairs. Your teacher will give you a role card.
Study the information on it carefully. Have telephone
Make true sentences about you. conversati ons similar to the one between Alan Middleton
and Nina Kendle's secretary.
Example
I/bath tonight Remember the following expressions.
I think /'II have a bath tonight/I
don't think /'II have a bath tonight. ( Could I speak to ... ? r< I'm afraid ... )
- it/rain tomorrow
- I/go shopping this afternoon ( What time will .. be back? J ~ At about ... )
- I/be a millionaire one day
- I/eat out tonight ( Is ... free at lunch-time? ?"_f'11 check. No, she's
- we/have a white Christmas having/seeing/going .
- the teacher/give us a lot of
homework When's a good time
to try again?
~
(n1 phone back. j ~

(Soars and Soars: New Headway Intermediate SB, from pages 45, 46, 47, 48)
 Grammar 163

generalizations, are made available to him in somewhat controlled and

principled fashion.
(Rutherford 1987: 18)
Consciousness-raising tasks ask students to try to formulate rules about
English through meaningful negotiation. The basic idea is to give students

Materials extract 5. C

These pairs of adjectives ending in -ed and -ing describe how something feels or
how something makes someone feel.

surprised/surprising interested/interesting
bored/boring excited/exciting
tired/tiring confused/confusing
Work in a pair and write down other pairs of words like this. Then show your
words to another pair.

2 Look at the underlined words in these sentences. First write down those which
the -ing words refer to.
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)
Then write down those which the -edwords refer to.
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)
(a) Tom is interested in sport. He thinks football is the most interesting .
(b) My sister looked frightened as the film we were watching became more
and more frightening.
(c) We all felt disappointed about the dreadful and disappointing news.
(d) Some of my classes are very boring. I get most bored in history lessons.
(e) I felt very annoyed. The most annoying thing was his smile.

(Author's material)

sufficient examples so that they can work out the grammatical rule that is
operating. A useful activity for introducing intermediate students to
inductive learning is to give them examples of a simple grammatical
distinction to work out, as in Materials extract 5.C.
Simple activities such as this can persuade students to use their cognitive
abilities and give them confidence about using discovery learning.
Consciousness-raising reasserts the role of metalinguistic activity in language
learning, but in a very different way from the grammatical explanation and
application activity of the traditional deductive approach. It is still an issue as
to whether talking and thinking about grammar in this way requires a
technical metalanguage or whether it can be done in non-technical ways.
There is now some evidence from classroom research, for example a study by
Fotos (1994) , that grammar consciousness-raising tasks can promote significant
gains in acquiring the target grammatical structure, at least with the kinds of
learners studied. But we still need information across a wider range of ages,
164 Teaching the language system

levels of proficiency, backgrounds, and learning styles. However, where it

seems to be appropriate, consciousness-raising provides teachers with a
procedure which helps learners to develop their grammatical competence in
a way which fits the culture of the communicative classroom.

Linking grammar and vocabulary

A final point we need to consider on the presentation of grammar takes us
back to the link between grammar and vocabulary. There are patterns in the
English language within which words typically occur. For example, there is a
pattern: It + link verb + adjective + infinitive with 'to' , as in 'It's difficult to
make up your mind' or 'It's easy to say that', used commonly for comment.
A Finnish friend of mine picked up this pattern very quickly, producing
some idiosyncratic and creative examples such as 'It's combustive to express
that point of view' . He found that using them kept him in the conversation
and kept the conversation going. We need to consider presenting such
patterns to our students as well as the time-honoured modals and tenses.
They are typical of the lexical phrases used by native speakers (see 5.2.4).

5.4.2 Practising grammar

A widely prevailing approach to the teaching of grammar, which developed
in the 1970s and 1980s and is still popular with many teachers, is to present
a grammatical structure to learners, to ask them to practise it in controlled
activities which focus on accurate reproduction of the structure, and then to
set up freer activities in which students produce the target form. This
Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) model is the one followed in the
lesson plan on pages 32-3. The latter two stages can be seen in Materials
extract 5.D .
In these two activities students move from controlled practice of a conditional
form in designing the questionnaire and in answering the questions to the
freer group discussion of activity 2. The purposes of each stage of activity in
the PPP model are summarized in Table 5.1 on page 166.
As far as the roles of the teacher at each are concerned, teacher correction is
considered to be of importance during presentation and practice, though
self-correction and peer correction are encouraged. During production the
usual policy is non-intervention during the attempt to produce, with
feedback given afterwards.
It is the production stage of this model in particular which has caused
controversy, given our growing knowledge of grammar acquisition. Experienced
teachers will be aware that some learners will perform the second activity in
Materials extract 5.D with accurate production of the conditional in that
 Grammar 165

Materials extract 5.D

t@ Imaginary situations

If I found £5 in the street . I'd give it to 1hc police.

I . Make up a personality quiz for a magazine.

In pairs or groups think of three questions for each section and write them
down .
Then choose somebody else in the class to answer the questions.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO? FIND OUT WHAT SORT OF PERSON YOU ARE
(a) . . . . . . . . . . . ..... . .... .
If you found £5 on the street
ARE YOU HONEST ? (b). . . .. .• . . . . .....•. . ..
(c) . . . • . • . . . . . •.• .•. •. . .

(a) . . . . •.•. . .
Yo ur fri end has bought a new
(b ) ... .
coat which you don 't l_
i ke. If he
(c) . . .. .
asked you for your opinion
(a) ....... . . . . .•. •.• .
If you saw an accident in the
ARE YOU PRACTICAL? (b )
street (c) .. . .• . •. . .

(a)
If you woke up in the ni ght and
(b) ..
saw you r curtai ns o n fire (c) . ..•.•. . . . . . ... .• .• - • . . • ..

(a) .... • . •... . . ... . . . .• . . ....

If you arri ved at the airport to go
(b) ..
o n ho liday and found that you
(c) ...• .• .• . .
didn ' t have your passport
(a) ....•.•. • . .....• .• .•...
ARE YOU IMAGINAT IVE? If you won £1000
(b ) . .
(c) ....• . •. . .• . ...

(a) . . . . ..• . •.•.•.

If you cou ld take a year off wo rk (b) . .•. . . .... .• .
(c)

2, In groups, discuss any measures you would take if you were Minister
for:
Education Social Services lhe E nvironment Finance Foreign Affairs in your country.

(Abbs and Freebairn: Developing Strategies SB, page 57)

lesso n but will then cease to use it, or produce it inaccurately. Others, as the
following extract demonstrates, will not necessarily use the conditional at all:
Ana I think I can establish some new school . . . experimental
schools ... English will be the language for all lessons.
Carmen Yes, a good idea, but I prefer to change teacher training . ..
166 Teaching the language system

Table 5 .1: The purposes ofeach stage ofactivity in the PPP model
Stage Purpose Teacher's roles

Presentation to present new language in context so Instructor,

chat meaning is clear corrector
co present the new form in a natural
spoken or written text so chat students
can see its use in discourse
to link the new form to what students
already know
co check comprehension
to elicit the form from students where
possible and exploit their existing
knowledge
Practice to help students memorize the form Manager,
to help students produce the word order evaluator,
to give intensive practice through corrector
repetition
to provide opportunities for feedback
and error correction
to give practice in pronouncing
new forms
to develop confidence
Production to reduce control and encourage students Monitor,
to find out what they can do resource,
to encourage students to use the forms diagnoser
in expressing their own content
to help students see the usefulness of
what they have learned
to check what has been learned and
diagnose problems

Both speakers communicate their intentions clearly, but both avoid using
the conditional. There may be reasons for this to do with their readiness to
learn it, but one factor is they can legitimately use alternative forms, as here,
if they imagine themselves into the role of Minister of Education. Ellis ( 1993b)
expresses the problem inherent in the PPP model in this way:
You can design an activity hoping that learners will produce a certain
feature, but the reality is that, if they do treat it as a piece of genuine
communication, there is a very good chance that they will not use the
grammatical feature that you intended them to use. In other words,
you can devise activities that make the use of a feature natural, and
useful, but it's extremely difficult to make the use of a feature essential
(Ellis 1993b: 6)
 Grammar 167

For this reason, it has become more usual to provide controlled practice and
then to provide unfocused communicative activities within the wider
syllabus (see 2.4.1) . The implications of this approach for overall syllabus
design are taken up in 10.2.4.
The controlled practice stage is less controversial. This usually includes a
variety of activities with a conscious focus on form which address the range
of purposes summarized in Table 5.1. A number of arguments can be offered
for the value of such practice. One is chat, as students produce a form in
controlled activities, they provide further, extensive input for each other and
more chances to notice the structure. This can be seen in Materials extract
5.B where practice activities 1 and 2 require extensive repetitions of the 'will'
and 'going co' forms.
A further argument is chat practice of this kind obliges students to pay
attention to syntax. It is perfectly possible to understand meaning on the
basis oflexis without paying much attention to syntax. For example, a learner
hearing the three lexical items, 'earthquake', 'thousands', and 'homeless'
could use knowledge of word-meaning and knowledge of the world to
reconstruct the message. In controlled practice, st~dents would be obliged to
string together words in the correct order using grammatical devices to
convey coherently the cause-effect relationship chat links the three words.
This is seen in Materials extract 5.B in the activity where students make true
sentences about themselves, and is followed up in the 'Role Play' where
students have to produce more of the content themselves and use the
appropriate syntax. There is a case, too, for varying the practice between
speech and writing since writing is a slower and more conscious process and
students can monitor what they produce more carefully.
These arguments suggest chat practice can contribute to implicit grammatical
knowledge by providing frequent occurrence of a particular form for students
to notice. Extensive exposure and opportunities for varied and intensive
practice also allow learners to test out hypotheses as they become familiar
with available forms and begin to work out the rules involved. At the same
time, practice can also contribute to explicit knowledge about language forms
and begin the process oflearners gradually developing the ability to use a rule
accurately and automatically in production.
Another type of practice can be seen in the dictogloss activity in Materials
extract 5.E. At the preparation stage, the teacher works with learners in a
'warm-up' to the topic and to prepare relevant vocabulary. The text is then
read twice and, on the second reading students note down the words they
catch. Working in groups, they then pool their notes to cry to reconstruct the
text. In doing so, they use the grammar they know and consider the possible
alternatives. This means that students must justify to each other the choices
they proffer. Swain argues 'This results, at minimum . . . in a context sensitive
168 Teaching the language system

Materials extract 5.E

1.10 Miracle plunge

TOPIC Human interest story
Accidents
Domestic violence

LANGUAGE Simple sentence structure

POINTS Past simple tense
Articles
Prepositions and prepositional phrases

WARM-UP 1 Tell the class that they are going to hear a story about a 'close
shave' in an accident.
2 Explain what a close shave is .
3 Give an example of a close shave, e.g. a slate or tile falls off a roof
just in front of some passers-by, but does not hit them; a car skids
across a road into oncoming traffic, but miraculously skids back
onto the correct side of the road; and so on.
4 · Ask the students if they have ever experienced a close shave. List
these on the blackboard.
S If the students seem interested, they may want to discuss whose
close shave was the most interesting/horrifying/terrifying/
incredible.

PRE-TEXT high-rise (adj ) very tall (building)

VOCABULARY floor (n ), storey (n) one level of a high-rise building
argument (n) a quarrel or disagreement
to throw (v) to send something through the air
to plunge (v) to fall
passer-by (n) a pedestrian
to survive (v ) to manage to stay alive
bruise (n) a painful, discoloured mark on the skin

TEXT 1 A two-year-old girl lived with her mother in a high-rise

building. 2 They lived on the fourth floor . 3 One day the
father came to visit and an argument started. 4 The father got
angry and threw the girl at a window. S It broke and the girl
plunged towards the ground . 6 At the last moment she fell into
the arms of a passer-by. 7 She survived with only a few bruises
and doctors called it a miracle.

NOTES Sl two-year-old - Note that there is no finals on year. The

construction (number)+year+old is a fixed adjectival phrase
qualifying the noun that follows (in this case girl ).
S2 on - Note that on is the correct preposition in this place phrase
(not in or at ).
S3 the father-That is, the girl's father.
S3 came-That is, came to the home.
SS it-That is, the window.
SS towards - This is a preposition indicating motion.
S7 it- That is, the girl's survival.

(Wajnryb: Grammar Dictation, pages 36-7)

 Grammar 169

knowledge of a grammatical rule because form, function and meaning are so

intimately linked ... ' (Swain 1995: 135). The diccogloss technique is an
interesting example of how learners can be encouraged to reflect on
grammar. Swain comments on this metalinguistic function of output which
is a kind of 'explicit hypothesizing' (ibid.: 135). The focus of this activity is
language form, although the forms are contextually embedded in a situation
and within a short piece of discourse. The pairwork mode necessitates
reflection and decision-making. Swain gives dictogloss as an example of a
technique which encourages what she terms 'negotiation of form' (ibid.: 131).
The point was made in sections 5.1 and 5.2 chat grammatical knowledge
does not develop separately from other types of knowledge in the acquisition
process, and one of these other types is lexical knowledge. Arguments chat
we should pay attention to the links between grammatical and lexical
knowledge have resulted in some interesting ideas for classroom practice.
Batstone (1994), for example, describes the tension he perceives between
learning and teaching grammar:
the learner gradually reaches out for grammar from a secure basis in
words, while the materials writer starts from a basis in target grammar
and encourages the learner to reach out for different lexical items as she
manipulates the grammar.
(Batstone 1994: 104)
His own solution, motivated in part by the work of Rutherford (1987) and
Widdowson ( 1990a), is to help learners 'grammaticize'; to apply their emerging
Materials extract 5F

1 Work with a partner. Sort out the following words and phrases into the
categories shown below.

saved their parents a young woman today

two children rescue the beach this afternoon
the west coast four o'clock a rubber dinghy swam
strong wind heroine blown out to sea

PEOPLE
PLACE
TIME
EVENT
OUTCOME
2 Now work with your partner to prepare a newspaper report.

3 Read your report to the class.

(Author's materials)
170 Teaching the language system

knowledge of grammar by choosing what to add to words in order to create

meaning. Following this idea, a 'grammaticization task' might look like the one
in Materials extract 5 .F (stages 1 and 2 could involve use of the first language) .
Given the range of ideas, opinions, and controversies raised in this section, it
is not surprising that many teachers and textbook writers see the most practical
approach to grammar as an eclectic one, but the precise mix and match will
depend on the needs oflearners.

5.4.3 How can we design the grammar component of

a course?
Two types oflinguistic comparison have been useful in suggesting appropriate
grammatical items to be selected and sequenced in a course. The first is between
the learner's native language and the target language, and is known as
contrastive analysis. The second is between the learner's interlanguage and the
target language and is known as error analysis.
Contrastive analysis was popular in the 1960s and 1970s as a method of
predicting difficulty for students. It assumed that areas of difference between
two language systems would be sources of difficulty and that a set of difficult
grammatical features could be drawn up to form a basis of a syllabus. In
reality, however, the predictive power of the contrastive analysis hypothesis
proved not to be very strong. Areas of substantial difference can prove relatively
easy to learn while areas of little difference can be difficult. It has not been
possible to formulate scales of difficulty for learners from various language
backgrounds and contrastive analysis has therefore fallen into disfavour.
Error analysis has provided teachers with insights into the main problems
which learners seem to have with English, and there are useful descriptions
of these available. For example, Swan and Smith (1987) took eighteen
language groups and itemized the frequently occurring errors in their
production of English. Such descriptions form a database for the selection of
items in courses for upper-intermediate and advanced learners where the
aim of the grammar component is to give students further opportunities to
refine the accuracy of their production.
However, for beginner and elementary students, the grammar component of
a syllabus is usually selected and sequenced on the basis of received wisdom
about what is simple to learn and what is complex. Hence the typical sequence
of tenses to be found in many coursebooks: present simple of the verb 'to be';
present simple of main verbs; past simple; future with 'going to' , and so on.
It is probably true to say that grammar, selected and sequenced by using the
procedures of contrastive analysis and error analysis, or chosen on the basis
of what is perceived as simple, has for many years been the main basis of ELT
course design. However, a number of criticisms have been levelled at the
grammatical syllabus as a basis for course design.
 Grammar 171

The first cnt1c1sm queries whether, in fact, the grammatical dimension

should be the major organizing principle in the type of syllabus which sets
out a list of items to be taught. If we are concerned with language as
communication, the argument goes, then our primary focus should be on
the purposes for which the language is being used and our secondary task
should be to choose the forms to express those purposes. Following this
argument, many current courses for students at intermediate level and above
specify first a list of functions, such as 'making suggestions', and then select
exponents from a range of possible grammatical forms according to the
needs (for example, formal or familiar English) or proficiency level of the
students.
The advantage of this re-prioritization is that it makes the language dimension
subservient to, rather than dominant over, the needs of learners. It is not
without its problems, however. These courses assume students have already
acquired a working knowledge of English grammar. It is more problematic
to make the functional dimension primary in a syllabus for elementary students
for, unlike grammatical items, functions are not amenable to sequencing. In
other words, it is much harder to apply a simple to a more complex order. fu
Wilkins ( 1979) points out:
It is essential for the learner to achieve some degree of generalisation in
what he has learned and one of the essential elements of generalisation,
and I cannot stress this too much, is the grammar of the language itself.
I am not suggesting in any way that the learner does not have to learn
the grammar of the language. The learner does still have to master the
grammatical structure. There is no way that one can 'know' a language
without knowing its grammatical basis. What the new ideas amount to
is that the grammatical foundation can possibly be presented in new
ways which also take the communicative purposes of language into
account ...
(Wilkins 1979: 7)
A second criticism relates to the notions of simple and complex and the sequence
of grammatical items presented to learners on the basis of this criterion. We
have always been concerned to understand why learners fail to learn items
which have been presented and extensively practised in the classroom.
Research studies of the last twenty-five years have increasingly lent support
to the idea that there is a relationship between the amount of mental processing
needed to perceive and produce a new rule and its learnability; moreover that
learnability will determine the order in which grammatical items are learned.
A much-quoted example of this is the third person singular '-s' in the simple
present which learners acquire quite late. An explanation might be that its
use is decided by the person ('he/she/it', as opposed to 'I/you') and number
('he/she/it' as opposed to 'they') of the noun phrase which has just been
172 Teaching the language system

spoken and the speaker has to hold this information in short-term memory
in order to produce the accurate inflection. There is also the point that there
is little to be gained from learning this rule as meaning is signalled by the
chosen pronoun.
These considerations have led researchers to set up the natural order hypothesis,
which claims that language rules are acquired according to ; predictable
sequence and that the sequence remains the same whether or not classroom
learning is involved. The details of the natural order were suggested by a set
of studies known as the 'morpheme studies'. The original studies, such as
Brown (1973), investigated how children acquiring their first language
learned certain grammatical morphemes, for example, inflections such as the
third person singular '-s' in the simple present, the present progressive '-ing',
the regular past '-ed', and grammatical words such as the articles 'a' and 'the' .
The studies showed that children acquired these in similar sequence, although
the process in some children was slower than in others.
Later research has shown that both children and adults acquiring a second
language in natural settings acquire grammatical morphemes in a similar
kind of developmental sequence, though the details of this may be affected
by prior knowledge of another language through the process of transfer
described in 5.2.2. Extensive work on developmental sequences has now
been undertaken by Pienemann, Johnston, and Brindley ( 1988). They claim
to be able to provide details of these for various learners.
The issue for second and foreign language teachers is whether this work
yields reliable and useful insights for the design oflanguage teaching syllabuses
for classroom settings. Could a syllabus simply follow the natural order? If
so, it would seem to resolve the difficulties experienced in finding criteria for
ordering the presentation of grammatical structures. Unfortunately, as yet,
there is no easy application of these ideas. Classroom factors complicate the
situation. For example, in order to set up classroom interaction which provides
input and practice, some structures, for example various question forms , will
need to be taught early on. Other factors create the same kind of problems as
do syllabuses based on grammatical notions of simplicity and complexity.
Learners may pass through the same developmental stages but they do not
proceed at the same rate, and groups of learners will be heterogeneous in
terms of existing language proficiency. As yet we have insufficient information
about the effects of instruction or how the classroom can influence and
improve on natural processes.
This last point relates to a further criticism of the grammatical syllabus (and,
indeed, of any course design which attempts to present and sequence
linguistic items as a way of organizing learning). This issue is taken up and
discussed in 10.2.3 and 10.2.4, but it is worth remarking on here, as it relates
to the role of grammar in a course. The natural order hypothesis provided
 Grammar 173

further fuel for an ongoing debate about the need to provide learner-
centered teaching. If it is the case that learners will acquire the grammatical
system according to their own internal syllabus, it has been argued that
teachers should pay less attention to structuring learning through imposing
an external syllabus and more attention to facilitating learning by creating a
classroom environment which is rich in varied input and which provides
learners with opportunities to acquire language by performing a range of
learning tasks. This, as we shall see in 10.3.2, has been termed a process
approach to course design as its main concern is with the process of learning.
Textbook writers have responded variously to these ideas about the selection
and ordering of grammatical items and to queries about the value of teaching
grammar. For example, in Materials extract 5.G Michael Swan and Catherine
Walter, the authors of The New Cambridge English Course, draw two points
out of the knowledge we have on how language is learned.
Materials extract 5. G

Most people seem to learn a foreign language more effectively if it is 'tidied up'
for them. This helps them to focus on high-priority language and to see the
grammatical regularities.

However, learners also need to encounter a certain amount of 'untidy' natural

language (even if this seems to be difficult for them). Without some unstructured
input, people's unconscious mechanisms for acquiring language may not
operate effectively.

(Swan and Walter: The New Cambridge English Course 1 TB, page vii)

Precise decisions about the grammar component of any course will depend
on the needs of the particular group oflearners for which it is being prepared.
We now turn to these.

5.4.4 How can we suit approach to learner needs?

The ways in which learners respond to our choice of approach in teaching
grammar will depend in part on their individual cognitive style. As we saw in
1.3 .2, one dimension of this style is to do with whether a learner prefers to
gain a global impression of something new or prefers to analyse its details.
The latter type of student may well prefer to deal with grammar formally, in
'studial learning' (Ellis 1989), to look for rules and relationships, to work out
the underlying system of language explicitly, and to try and apply the rules
thus derived. This analytical learner is in contrast to the global learner, who
might prefer experiential learning through classroom communication which
encourages guessing and structuring.
174 Teaching the language system

There is evidence to suggest that a clash of styles between teacher and students
can frustrate both, but in a multicultural classroom some clashes are
inevitable. One solution is for the teacher to use different approaches and
provide a variety of access to grammar to cater for different learning styles.
This would need to be accompanied by learner training which encouraged
learners to extend their styles by pointing out the advantages of different
activity types.
Other factors will also determine both the extent to which grammar receives
explicit attention in class and the approach chosen. Celce-Murcia (1993)
provides a useful set of six variables to guide a teacher in appropriate focus on
form (see Figure 5.1) .
Figure 5.1: Variables relevant to focus on form (Celce-Murcia 1993: 294)

Less
- Focus on Form - ~ore
Important ortant

Learner variables
Age Children Adolescents Adults
Proficiency level Beginning Intermediate Advanced

Educational background Preliterate, Semiliterate, Literate,

no formal some formal well educated
education education
Instructional variables
Skill Listening, reading Speaking Writing
Register Informal Consultative* Formal
Need/use Survival Vocational Professional
communication
* Joos (1962) defines the consultative register as the language we use with people we deal
with frequently-perhaps every d ay-but with whom we are not close on a personal level.
This register is between formal (the language for public lectures or academic articles) and
informal (the language used among peers who know each other well) .

Celce-Murcia's 'rule' would be: 'the more factors the teacher identifies on the
left side of the grid, the less important it is to focus on form; the more factors
the teacher identifies on the right, the more important the grammatical
focus .'
This rule can easily be appreciated with regard to the instructional variables
listed. In writing, for example, not only is accuracy of form in more subtle
features such as parallelism important (see 9.5.3), but also the ability to use
 Grammar 175

complex grammatical devices such as fronting through negative inversion

for emphasis, as in these examples:
Not only did the company make five hundred workers redundant, but
it ...
Hardly had the new government come into office when ...
So formal writing of a professional kind places substantial demands for accurate
use of a range of complex grammatical devices on the writer. In informal
spoken English for survival communication, comprehension of the message
by the listener is the main priority and this makes fewer demands on
accuracy.
With regard to learner variables, it is perhaps more a question of finding a
suitable approach than seeing a focus on grammar as more or less important.
To illustrate this we can compare two sets of materials. Materials extract 5.H
is taken from a course for beginners in the 11 to 14 age group in secondary
school. The grammatical focus is on simple forms, demonstrated in concrete
ways through stories and visuals and a problem-solving approach is applied.
In other words, the pupils are helped to see language patterns for themselves.
Exercise 2 can therefore be used in either of two ways depending on the
complexity of the structure and on the growing familiarity of the pupils with
this type of cognitive exercise:
to consolidate knowledge of a structure that has been introduced
- to get pupils to establish the structure for themselves without an introduction
from the teacher.
The procedure for both ways is for pupils to work in pairs or groups to copy
and complete the table. One group then completes a table which the teacher
has drawn on the blackboard and other groups check. Disagreements will
need to be supported by examples noticed in the texts in the unit. Pupils
then write down as many true sentences as they can and answer challenges to
their truthfulness by describing, in the first language, an occasion when the
sentence would be true. In this way, the first language is used to explore
understanding of the second-language structure. Exercise 3 is for pairwork
with role-play of the completed dialogue. Exercise 4 is a team game with
pupil A choosing a word for pupil B, and provides substantial opportunity
for correction and feedback. Exercise 5 elicits a blackboard chart from which
pupils can derive sentences for part (b). Notice that 3 and 5 constitute
further contextualization of the structure and provide practice of a game-like
nature in small groups, which reduces anxiety and gives further input and
feedback, and more opportunities to notice and take in the form in focus.
Materials extract 5.H can be contrasted with the sequence of activities in
Materials extract 5.1, in a course for adult students who are literate and well-
176 Teaching the language system

Materials extract 5.H

Exercises 3 Copy and complete this story with

're are aren 't 'm not Is
1 n ,9 Listen . Answer the questions.
Example
o Are you eleven?
• Yes, I am. (or No, I'm not.)

Cues: twelve I thirteen I a boy / a girl I

strong I stupid

2 Competition
Copy this table. Add:

1111111111111
'm
'mnot
a boy.
4 A sentence game 5 Who am I?
He
She
a girl. a n 20 Listen to !his radio
from Britain. IS what not programme: 'Who am I?'
It
strong.
o Hello and welcome lo 'Who am I?'
We in the kitchen. she your his Our first speaker, please.
You
Are you from America?
They this are am • Yes, I am .
o Are you from New York?
A Choose a word from the word • No, I'm not.
square. o San Francisco?
8 Make a sentence wilh lhe word. • Yes.
o How old are you? Are you
You get one point for a correct fourteen?
sentence. • No, I'm not.
o Fifteen?
• Yes.

b Now write about the speakers.

Example
The first speaker is a girl . She 's from
San Francisco.
She's fifteen .

(Hutchinson: Project English One SB, page 11)

educated. In this course, grammar receives explicit focus in the Language

Study sections. Students are introduced formally co the more complex
structures of English and encouraged to reflect on how the language works.
 Grammar 177

Materials extract 5.1

LANGUAGE STUDY Example • • •

What made it an army was discipline and organization.
Practise saying the sentences in pairs.
Ways of adding emphasis
2 Restructure the following statements to make them more
The followi nµ se ntence"' arc ..,im ila r to li nes fou nd in the emphatic . Try to use patterns la , 2, and 3.
tex t o n war .
a. We doubt his sincerity.
Co mpare them with th ese lines and work out the way~ in b. I admire the efficiency of the Swiss.
wh ich the write r gives em phas is 10 the poi nts she is ma kin g. c. She hates having to get up at 6 o'clock every morning .
D1st1pli11e and orgaw::arion made it an army . d. His approval of the scheme is important.
(l ines 14 I :\) e. Their self-righteousness is annoying .
These men \\'t're trwl.\formed ... into an arm y hy drill. f. You should go to Spain for your holidays.
(li nes 25-8) g. I like London because it has beautiful parks.
. . . pairs of i11 d11·idua/J thrn.\·t at each miler with spears. h. Nobody likes losing .
(lines 42 - 1) 3 Join each of the following sentence-pairs using the way or
The re arc mc1 ny ways of emph asizin g a part of a se ntence . the fact , and beginning with What .
He re are :,. ome further se nt e nces ha:-.t'd o n th e three a. He never makes a fuss. I admire this.
patt e rn ,;, fro m the tex t . b. She's always on time. I appreciate this.
c. This government has treated the Health Service so
la

-1· -· ---1 -
badly . This irritates everybody.

l:
111ade it an anm·
. \\'{l'I
d. The Health Service wastes less money than it used to .
ar I like aho111 John I\ ·
This is of no consequence.
a111in_nmemost
- . - - - - - · - - - -- 4 Look at this sentence, based on lines 66- 9 of the text on
or war. What device has the writer used to make the point

~l
more emphatically than it is made here?
lb

made"
I I J..
a~,,,,,,:,.
j
·1-1rns tl,~ ~;y;;:,,,,-~~ganized.
the fact rhat lw ,,. so hone'if.
The . .. anonymous mass slaughter of civilized warfare is
worse than ... taking part in a ritual 'battle' with a small
" ·er, 1WIit 1 O 111
1
if the way some pt•nple are ... element of risk .
] WIIIO\ '.\ me mrHr a/1,·ayfi late .
. -- --- - - - - - - -·- - ---- ---- Restructure the following statements using the same
device .
a. Working until midnight occasionally is fine , but
working until midnight every night isn 't.
b. Being woken by a pneumatic drill is worse than being

. - -- I
woken by birdsong.
c. I like living in a caravan when I'm on holiday , but I

r-
[I I '-; ,~m wouldn't like to live in one permanently.
wm· pwn ofmd11 1d11al~ J hr Ja, a1
theeach
i aseother S Work in pairs.
I
I\" John ~~ 1;;; 111;:k,,, tlw 1, orld go Prepare to talk for one minute on one of the topics
IIO/l(' \ round
. - ---~ below , or any other topic that you feel particularly
strongly about. Try to use some of these patterns for
what - th e 1hing whi ch / th a t
emphasis:
who th e pe r~o n wh o / that
where th e pl ace whic h / that What really annoys me about.
What is most surprising .
It is the way some people ... that .
Practice What most people don 't realize is the fact that .
I [JJ[J It is important to make such sentences sound litter badly-behaved children
emphatic when you are speaking. You will hear the first two smoking the weather
sentences only from each of the four boxes above. Listen bad drivers learning English
and mark the main stresses, then decide where the stresses politics people who wear fur coats
are in the third sentence. football teachers who set too
exams much homework

(Soars and Soars: Headway Advanced SB, pages 58-9)

Notice that, in the example given, the grammar is derived from reference to
its place within a piece of discourse and the need for that discourse to move
emphasis within sentences. As the last stage in the sequence of exercises,
number 5 returns the student to discourse after a set of sentence-based or
I"

178 Teaching the language system

sentence-pair exercises. It is planned discourse with careful preparation, as

appropriate to a presentation, with a conscious focus on use of the form .
Notice that the practice here involves the element of sentence stress as this
has a significant role in the use of this particular grammatical feature and is
an essential part of a communicative approach to grammar.
Adults can be encouraged to think about the strategies they use for learning
grammar. An early step would be to encourage them to reflect on the ways in
which English grammar differs from that of their first language, as shown in
these learners' comments:
'I find the relationships between time and tense particularly difficult to
grasp; even the aspectual system in Russian I still find difficult to
understand. '
(Pickett 1978: 62)
'English and Swedish are very similar in general, but I had a lot of
problems with "do" , "don't", "does" and "doesn't". Somebody once told
me I sounded like a character in aJaneAusten novel who says "don't" all
the time.'
(M. B. Edstrom: personal communication)
Part of reflecting on how grammar can be tackled is probably a realization
that parts of grammar can be learned systematically, for example, the question
words 'What?', 'Why?', 'Who?', 'Where?', and 'How?', or the past simple
and past participle, as in 'fly-flew-flown' . Other, less obvious, parts can also
be picked out and learned as paradigms, for example, the set of possible tag
endings:
It's terrible news, isn't it?
He's new in the job, isn't he?
They're moving house, aren't they?
She shouldn't go to work, should she?
I haven't got a chance, have I?
Adults can also be invited to think about self-help strategies and a useful
activity would be to introduce students to appropriate grammar reference
materials. In ideal circumstances this might involve taking a set of various
grammars into the classroom and setting a task which invites learners to
explore the different contents and layouts to see which grammar suits them
best.
Adults can also be encouraged in self-correction. In writing, for example, the
marking strategy of simply underlining a mistake and giving a student the
chance to self-correct can make the point more memorable, particularly
when the problem is something which can be easily checked in a reference
book such as irregular plural forms, for example, 'woman-women'. Discerning
 Grammar 179

and identifying errors is a skill which can be developed through regular

practice, and it can help students to notice differences between their own
production and the target form.
By considering the needs of any specific group of learners, their reasons for
learning English, and factors ofindividual difference such as age and educational
background, it should be possible for teachers to determine an appropriate
approach to the teaching of grammar.

5.5 Conclusion
Unfortunately, looking at our current state of knowledge about how grammar
is acquired, and at the possible roles of various classroom approaches, poses
more questions than it resolves. In the face of such uncertainty, this chapter
has attempted to do a number of things. First, it has tried to show that there
is a complex of insights from the field of second language acquisition studies
which provide description and explanation of the processes by which learners
acquire English grammar. These insights suggest a framework to support the
building of classroom procedures, though the framework is partial and
under continual reconstruction. A number of approaches are currently in
use in ELT, each of which relates to some part of the framework and which
are appropriate in the context of communicative language teaching. And we
are currently in the process of finding new and better ways of developing our
learners' grammatical competence.
It therefore seems sensible that teachers choose eclectically from among
those approaches available, in line with the needs of learners, and always
remembering the need to cater for individual differences in style. There should
be room for variety. Teachers can also carry out their own observations and
explorations to discover what students prefer and report as useful. It is surely
the case that learners will apply themselves better to the task of learning
when they feel positive about the approaches used.
The main focus of discussion in this chapter has been on modes of presentation
and the value of practice. However, this is only part of the picture. The other
part is to provide classroom experiences which encourage interactive, realistic,
message-focused output. Chapters 8 and 10 will return to this issue and
provide further perspectives on it.

Discussion topics andprojects

1 Review two coursebooks designed for intermediate students which have a
grammatical component to the syllabus and compare them.
180 Teaching the language system

(a) To what extent do you find similarities and differences in the selection
and sequencing of structures?
(b) Is an explanation given (for example, in the teacher's book) for the
grammatical content and its order?
(c) In what ways would the grammatical content of either of the books be
suitable for your own intermediate learners?
2 Review this chapter and design a set of criteria for evaluating the suitability
of grammar activities for a group of your own learners. Examples of possible
criteria might be:
Is the language contextualized for meaning, social context, and within
discourse?
What is the role of practice?
3 Consider the three grammar activities in Materials extracts 5.J, 5.K, and
5.L and evaluate each one. With what type oflearner could you use each?
4 In courses which present and practise grammatical items, there is not only
the issue of how to sequence these items in the overall syllabus, but also
the issues of which specific forms to teach at different levels of learning
and in what order to teach them. Consider this set of forms for the present
continuous tense to express current actions:
What are you doing?
What is she doing?
I'm writing to John.
She's writing to John.
Is she writing to John? Yes, she is.
Is she writing to John? No, she isn't.
Are you writing to John. Yes I am.
Are you writing to John? No, I'm not.
Imagine you are going to prepare a forty-five minute lesson for a group of
beginners who are unfamiliar with the present continuous.
(a) Which of these forms would you teach?
(b) What order would you present them in?
Design a suitable lesson plan.
5 In Materials extract 5.M, John and Liz Soars, authors of Headway, give a
list of reasons to teachers to explain the prominence of grammar in their
materials. Which of these would concur with your own views? Are there
any with which you would disagree? Would you wish to add further
reasons for teaching grammar explicitly in your own classes?
 Grammar 181

Materials extract 5.]

Focus on form 2 Ten se and t ime
Work in groups. Each group chooses an area
of grammar.
1 the present simple
2 the present continuous
3 the present perfect simple and con tinuous
4 the simple past and the past continuous
5 the past perfect simple and continu ous
6 ways of talking about the future
Draw a diagram to show the different uses
of the area you chose and give an example
sentence for each. Include grammar notes
after your diagram.
Example:

I'l l remember to
wr ite to Auntie
Jane. I'll be rea lly
angry if you
forget.

prom ises

spontaneous confident
decisions pred ictions

' There's someone

at the door. - I'l l I'll be famous
answer it. one day.

Positive: I will see you to morrow.

Negative: I will not go (I won't go) to John's tomorrow.
Questions: Will you go to John's tomorrow?
Note: Will is followed by an infinitive without to

Show your diagram to people from other

groups. Explain the different uses of the
verb forms and point out any special
features.

(Downie, Gray, and Jimenez: Freeform 4SB, page 91)

182 Teaching the language system

Materials extract 5.K

What's on in London
Dance
Anna and Steve Boris Nureyev
World Disco Champions at The Royal Ballet
Tramps Mon-Fri 10.00pm Fri-Sat 8.30pm

Music Art
Madonna The paintings of David Hackney
Wembley Stadium National Gallery
Wed-Thurs 8.00pm Daily 10.00 to 17.00

Placido Domingo Salvador Dali Exhibition

Covent Garden at The Tate Gallery
Tues only 7.30pm Sun-Sat (closed Mon) 10.00 to 17.30

GRAMMAR
Adverbs of manner
wonderful is an adjective. It gives information about
the noun or pronoun.
e EXAMPLE
She's a wonderful singer.
beautifully, well and badly are adverbs. They give
information about the verb.
e EXAMPLE
They dance beautifully.
Most adverbs of manner are formed by adding -ly
to the adjective.
See page 107.

2D Practice

Work in pairs. Use these verbs and adverbs to

talk about the people and the events in the
programme in 2C.
VERB S ADVERBS
act beautifully
sing well
dance wonderfully
paint
e EXAMPLES
A There's a H ockney exhibition at the National
Gallery.
B He paints really well.

(Nolasco: WOW2SB, page 57)

 Grammar 183

Materials extract 5. L

3 Every picture tells a story

Past progressive and past simple

Work in pairs or groups. Look at the drawings 4 When all the stories are complete, read them to
below. For each of the four pictures write two the whole class. Correct any mistakes.
'background' sentences on a piece of paper
using the past progressive. Leave plenty of
space underneath the sentences for each
picture. Examples: The sun was shining.
Geraldine and Mike were coming home from
work.
2 Under the two background sentences, write the 3
beginning of each of the four stories (two or
three sentences each) using the past simple.
Example: Geraldine heard a loud noise.
3 Numberthe stories I to 4, then pass your work
to another pair or group to continue the
stories. Pass the paper on after you have written
two or three sentences each time.
2 4

(Dean: English Grammar Lessons, Upper-intermediate, page 22)

Materials extract 5.M

It is the mechanism that generates the infinite number of sentences that we

produce and receive.
It is a tangible system, and can provide one element of a systematic
approach to teaching a language.
It develops students' cognitive awareness of the language. Language is
rule-based , and conscious or sub-conscious knowledge of the rules is the
key to 'generalizability' and creativity.
It conforms to students' expectations of language learning, and meets an
often-heard request for 'more grammar'.
It will be of assistance to teachers in the planning of their lessons.

(Soars and Soars: Headway Upper Intermediate TB, page iv)

Further reading
Batston.e, R. 1994. Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This book has been written for the practising English language teacher. It
begins by exploring the nature of grammar, looking at both issues in the
description and use of grammar and issues in grammar acquisition . The
184 Teaching the language system

second part of the book discusses three approaches to the teaching of

grammar: grammar as product, grammar as process, and grammar as skill.
The discussion is illustrated by analyses of examples from a variety of
coursebooks. The third part suggests small-scale research projects which
teachers can use to explore the teaching and learning of grammar in their
own classrooms.
Bygate, M., A. Tonkyn and E. Williams (eds.). 1994. Grammar and the
Language Teacher. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International.
In the introduction to this book, Tonkyn characterizes Sections One and
Two as focusing on grammar as an object for teachers and learners. These
sections look at the nature of pedagogical grammar and at teachers'
knowledge of grammar. Sections Three and Four are described as focusing
on grammar as a process. They look at the acquisition of grammar and the
ways in which teachers can assist this process. This collection of sixteen ~

papers reflects the recent debate about the role of grammar in language
teaching.
Celce-Murcia, M. 1993 . 'Grammar pedagogy in second and foreign
language teaching' in S. Silberstein (ed.): State of the Art TESOL Essays.
Alexandria, Va.: TESOL. pp. 288-309
This can be described as a state-of-the-art paper which provides a perspective
on the role of grammar as language teaching moved into the 1990s. It gives
an historical overview of grammar teaching, looks at current challenges, and
suggests pedagogical strategies.
Ur, P. 1992. Grammar Practice Activities: A Practical Guide for Teachers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This is a useful resource book for teachers who wish to use interesting
grammar practice activities in a communicative approach. The first part of
the book presents principles and practice for grammar teaching and the
second part contains nearly 200 activities for practising aspects of grammar.
These include detailed classroom procedures and photocopiable texts and
visuals.