Mourad EL HANAFI | MENA English
The current essay looks at the research contributions to teaching grammar. In so doing, it should firstly be assumed that the related works are not necessarily reviewed chronologically. At the outset, a synopsis of the principles and trends the teaching of grammar has drawn on will be given. That is, the status of teaching grammar prior to and in post-Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is to be considered as the basis here to keep the thread of the discussion. In talking about the premises that underpin the teaching of the language aspect in question, the pedagogical frameworks (i.e. PPP, ARC, ESA, etc) that have emanated through the interaction of different teaching methods will be touched upon. Since technology has, in a way, transformed the way grammar is approached and taught, the essay also tackles the provided opportunities and posed challenges in this regard. As to the teaching of grammar in EFL contexts, an interesting study on an evaluation of grammar lessons in selected Moroccan EFL second-year baccalaureate textbooks will be reviewed in light of the evolving approaches and methods.
Prior to CLT, different teaching methods had gone in and out of fashion. The common ground between these theories is that they, overtly or covertly, underlie the behaviorist understanding of language teaching and learning, and function counter to the natural way of learning a language. The Grammar Translation Method (GTM), for instance, believes that students develop grammar competency in a foreign language by comparing its parts to those in their L1. However, going back and forth between the two languages fails to give students authentic and meaningful input. Likewise, the Audiolingual Method draws heavily on drilling, a technique that seeks to help learners develop positive habits in the target language. However, the teaching of grammar is purely mechanical as the focus is solely on form. “Methodologists were also concerned that in Audio-lingualism students were not exposed to real or realistic language, and were therefore unlikely to produce natural-sounding language themselves” (Harmer, 2010). In this context, the emergence of the PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) paradigm explains the dominant structuralism at the time. In other words, from the PPP paradigm’s linearity, it is apparent that grammar learning is believed to be linear, a fact that is defied by post-CLT approaches to teaching grammar as will come later in the essay. Some of these traditional ways of teaching still hold sway though not as the way they first appeared.
In the heyday of CLT, grammar was considered purely semantic and functional, especially in Halliday’s writings. Following this view, there was a shift in concepts. That is, meaning replaced form, and performance replaced competence. The fact that CLT strongly advocates teaching grammar inductively consolidates the misconception that it does not include any teaching of grammar, but this did not persist longer. While the strong version (i.e., the deep-end approach) of CLT insists that the natural learning of grammar necessitates teaching it implicitly, the weak version, referred to as the shallow-end approach, claims otherwise. The latter “is based on the thought that in order to make the learner use language in a communicative situation it is necessary first to learn the grammar rules and then apply them in that communicative situation.” (Thornbury, 1999 cited in Rama & Agulló, 2012). Though the CLT deep-end approach draws mainly on the natural approach and principles advocated by Krashen in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most post-CLT approaches to grammar, namely task-based language teaching, focus-on-form teaching, and content-based instruction agree that grammar should be taught explicitly, with focus on both form and meaning. One of the limitations of teaching grammar implicitly is that there is always a risk that the students will not interpret the textual cues appropriately unless they are sufficiently well established (Ellis, 2008). Shmidt (2001) also notes that “people learn about the things they attend to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to.” Deductive and inductive ways of teaching grammar somehow come as a response to implicit and explicit views of teaching this skill.
Within the evolving teaching methods emerged different frameworks of teaching grammar. To start with, the PPP procedure still enjoys popularity in today’s language classrooms, especially for teaching simple language at lower levels. Thanks to its simplicity, most modern coursebooks integrate PPP grammar and vocabulary teaching, which reflects structural- situation methodology and Audio-lingualism. The problem with PPP is that it “takes no account of other ways of learning and understanding; it is very learning-based and takes little account of students’ acquisition abilities” (Harmer, 2010). Other similar models to PPP include Scrivener’s (1994) ARC (Authentic Use-Restricted Use-clarification) and Harmer’s (1998) ESA model (Engage, Study, Activate). It is true that these models serve teaching in general and teaching grammar, but they are rigid and prescriptive in a way. Moreover, the line between the given stages in these models is sometimes fuzzy, which may confuse teachers – not knowing exactly where to provide remedial instruction when teaching a certain language aspect falls flat at some point. As a reaction to this, Kurzweil and Scholl (2004) propose ECRIF (Encounter, Clarify, Remember, Internalize, Fluency Use), a quite detailed model that sees learning from the perspective of learners themselves. Once adopted, ERCRIF clears a teacher’s vision of the lesson, and they can easily spot where to rectify what is infelicitous. With the limitations they have, such models still help ELT practitioners, especially novice teachers, to map out their lessons at the least cost.
Principled grammar teaching (Ellis, 2012) has come as an alternative to specifying a sequence of activities (prescriptive modeling/linearity). As its name suggests, it identifies a set of principles that guide the selection of specific instructional procedures. It also seeks to create mappings between form and function. The first principle, The Given-to-New Principle, links what students already know about the world to the newly presented grammatical form. For instance, Arabic does not include equivalents of past and future perfect tenses. Therefore, Arab speakers of English must build on what they know as a start to introduce this linguistic aspect to their linguistic system. Ellis (2012) here hints at Vygotsky’s scaffolding and Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, also referred to as i+1. According to the second principle, The Awareness Principle, learners are exposed to different kinds of raising-awareness instructional activities so that they recognize how particular meaning is encoded by a particular grammatical form. The Real-operating conditions Principle, on the other hand, suggests that learners should be engaged in meaning-focused interaction. The problem here lies in feedback. If it is corrective, then it is not authentic, and once it is provided by means of recasts, students may not perceive them as corrective. Unlike previous models, this approach is flexible and theoretically informed that it is built on the premise that effective grammar teaching must complement the process of L2 acquisition.
Nunan (1998) has a different take on grammar teaching. As a reaction to the lexical approach that advocates chunking and the atomistic, block-by-block approach to grammar, Nunan (1998) believes that learning is organic. It is unfair, for instance, that students who join a course late may miss out on a grammar lesson altogether! According to Nunan, learning grammar is analogous to growing a garden – and not constructing a wall. That is, students do not learn grammar in a linear way, but rather in a cyclic, recursive manner. The structures that do not ‘grow’ the first time you ‘water’ them may need a second or even third watering. Additionally, with this way of teaching grammar, learners, especially beginners, start with the sentence level before they go beyond that to the supra-sentential level. Nunan also supports the idea of contrasting forms as a way for better learning of grammar. This notion of contrasting in grammar teaching is mostly advocated in Standards-based Approach.
Textbook evaluation has contributed to the teaching of grammar in the Moroccan context. One of the interesting studies you stumble upon while looking at how grammar is taught in the Moroccan context is an evaluation of grammar lessons in selected second-year baccalaureate textbooks by Ait Bouzid, Erguig & Yeou (2019). Such studies provide Moroccan practitioners with a basis that they can refer to once textbooks’ comparison is brought up in teacher gatherings. Sometimes, teachers prefer a textbook to another because they are professionally ‘dependent’; that is, they always look for textbooks that tell them what to do, and still, they think they make legitimate claims and pedagogically-sound decisions. Also, one’s teaching style can be a motive for preferring a certain textbook and not the other. While it is normal that teachers’ textbooks preferences differ, they should be theoretically informed. The study found out that the three textbooks succeeded in presenting challenging grammar content that suits the needs and interests of the learners. However, the relevance of visual aids, gradation of grammar lessons, and authenticity of grammatical examples were found to be questionable and sometimes problematic. The study’s abstract mentions that the textbooks contain problems related to the authenticity of grammatical examples, but the study does not cite any examples nor mention what stage they are provided in. In Batstone and Nunan’s (2009) Principled Grammar Teaching, for instance, it is no harm if contrived (inauthentic) teaching materials are used at the level of the Given-to-New principle. Moreover, how can the researchers infer that the presented challenging grammar contents suit the needs and interests of the learners when the study does not include any needs analysis? However, the study leaves us with interesting recommendations that may help improve the status of teaching grammar in the Moroccan context and increase the quality of textbooks accordingly.
Technology has, in a way, transformed the way grammar is approached and taught. It equally offers opportunities and poses challenges to grammar teaching. Computers could offer little more than drill, cloze, or multiple-choice activities. While these activities “are useful for memorizing forms, they lack the ability to engage students in grammar related to meaning or use” (Bikowski, 2018). With the advances in technology, teachers are provided with a wide range of tools to structure grammar lessons creatively. Some of these tools are not specifically designed for educational purposes. Thus, “training becomes increasingly important as teachers choose among a variety of quickly-changing technologies to meet the specific needs of their students and the curriculum.” (Bikowski, 2018, p. 3). It should also be noted that Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) offers opportunities where real-life language learning takes place. However, excessive use of technology can be counter-productive. Drawing on experience in the Moroccan context, students whose teachers use technology as a mere replacement for the board or the coursebook report their boredom of the instruction they are offered on a daily basis in the EFL classroom. This reflects a huge chasm in the use of ICT caused by a lack of/poor training provided by pre-service teaching training centers. What can be taken from this is that there should always be a credible rationale for using technology in the classroom.
Concerns about grammar teaching rise within the endeavor to make learning as effective as possible. Approached from different areas, teaching grammar remains one of the linguistic aspects that has generated a considerable body of literature where different theories, methods, models, and techniques interconnect and interact to help teachers develop well-informed instructional beliefs and tendencies as to teaching in general and grammar instruction in particular.
References
Ait Bouzid, H., Erguig, R., & Yeou, M. (2019). An Evaluation Of. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 3(2), 249–263. doi: 10.17509/ijal.v7i1.6879
Batstone, R., & Ellis, R. (2009). Principled grammar teaching. System, 37(2), 194–204. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2008.09.006
Bikowski, D. (2018). Technology for Teaching Grammar. The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, 1–7. doi: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0441
Ellis, R. (2008, August 15). The Study of Second Language Acquisition (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Ellis, R. (2012, March 13). Language Teaching Research and Language Pedagogy (1st ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Harmer, J. (1998). How to teach English. Harlow: Longman.
Harmer, J. (2010). How to teach English. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Kurzweil, J., & Scholl, M. (n.d.). Seeing Learning. Retrieved November 17, 2019, from https://www.ecrif.com/
Nunan, D. (1998). Teaching grammar in context. ELT Journal, 52(2), 101–109. doi: 10.1093/elt/52.2.101
Rama, J. L., & Agulló, G. L. (2012). The Role of The Grammar Teaching: From Communicative Approaches to The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Revista De Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, 7(1). doi: 10.4995/rlyla.2012.1134
Scivener, J. (1994, October). Learning Teaching. A Guide for Language Teachers (1st ed.). Macmillan Books for Teachers.
Schmidt, R. (2001). Attention. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction (pp. 3-32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524780.003