An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Sociolinguistics, and Chapter 12, Speaking and Pronunciation.) They would also have 
to learn what it means, that is, that it signals the present tense and that the subject 
is third person and is conceived of as a single entity. This being the case, usually, 
singular subjects go with singular verbs and plural subjects with plural verbs. 
However, to show that the meaning contribution is independent from form, we 
only have to think of a case where there is a departure from this convention. For 
example, a sentence such as ‘Ten miles makes for a long hike.’ shows us that even 
a plural subject can be conceived of as a single entity. Here again, as we showed 
earlier, there are times when the rule of subject–verb agreement does not apply. 
Teaching students when to use it and when not to, then, becomes an essential 
element in grammar instruction.
The same analysis holds for a formulaic utterance. A greeting, such as ‘Good 
afternoon’, for instance, can be described in terms of its form, a noun preceded 
by an attributive adjective. Its meaning is a greeting at a particular time of day. 
Learning to use it would involve, for example, students’ learning when to use it as 
opposed to learning to use a more informal greeting such as ‘Hi’. Another example 
of learning to use greetings is the need for learners of English to learn that ‘Good 
night’ is used only for taking leave. ‘Good evening’ is appropriate for a greeting, no 
matter what time of night it is. This is different from other languages in which 
the equivalent of ‘Good night’ is used as a greeting. This last point highlights the 

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Grammar
influence of the L1. Because the patterns of the native language are so entrenched, 
many believe that grammar teaching is the only, or certainly the most efficient, 
way to help learners master new patterns.
Teaching Grammar
As mentioned above, the prevailing view today is that students must notice what 
it is they are to learn. Although this has traditionally been accomplished by a 
teacher presentation, often of an explicit rule, a greater variety of means, some 
far more implicit or interactive, is favoured these days. An example of an implicit 
means of promoting student noticing is the use of some sort of input enhancement 
(Sharwood Smith, 1993). It might take the form of ‘input flooding’, that is, 
increasing the number of times that students encounter the target structure in a 
particular text. Another possibility for enhancing the input is for the teacher to 
modify the text features in some fashion, such as boldfacing the target structures 
to make them more salient to students. An example of encouraging noticing 
through interaction is accomplished through guided participation (Adair-Hauck, 
Donato and Cumo-Johanssen, 2000), in which the teacher carefully leads students 
to awarenesses that they did not have before – it is neither an inductive nor a 
deductive process, then, but rather teacher and students collaborate to produced a 
co-constructed grammar explanation. Awareness may also be heightened through 
peer interactions, as research by Donato (1994) and Swain and Lapkin (1998) has 
shown.
Peer interaction has also been used effectively in promoting noticing through 
the use of specific ‘consciousness-raising’ tasks (Fotos and Ellis, 1991) in which 
students are given data, such as a set of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, 
and are encouraged to discover the grammatical generalization for themselves. 
For example, they may be given the following sentences in order to figure out the 
rule about English word order with regard to indirect and direct objects.