Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Focusing questions

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As Robert DeKeyser (2005) points out, it is almost impossible for researchers to agree
on which forms are more complex, which comparatively simple. When language use
and classroom tasks became more important to teaching, the choice of a teaching
sequence was no longer straightforward, since some way of sequencing these 
non-grammatical items needed to be found. SLA research has often claimed that there
are definite orders for learning language, particularly for grammar, as we have seen.
What should teachers do about this? Four extreme points of view can be found:
1 Ignore the parts of grammar that have a particular L2 learning sequence, as the
learner will follow these automatically in any case. Nothing teachers can do
will help or hinder the student who is progressing through the grammatical
morpheme order from plural ‘-s’ to irregular past tense to possessive ‘’s’.
Teachers should therefore get on with teaching the thousand and one other
things that the student needs, and should let nature follow its course.
2 Follow the L2 learning order as closely as possible in the teaching. There is no
point in teaching ‘not’ with ‘any’ to beginners ‘I haven’t got any money’,
because the students are not ready for it. So the order of teaching should follow
the order found in L2 learning as much as possible. Language used in the class
might then be geared to the learners’ stage, not of course by matching it exactly
L2 Learning of grammar and L2 teaching 37
Box 2.6 The grammatical sequence in Move (Bowler and 
Parminter, 2007)
1 articles and determiners
2 present simple
3 present continuous
4 countable and uncountable nouns
5 simple past
6 present perfect
7 comparative and superlative
processes of sentence production, to parameters about the presence of subjects.
Above all, grammar is knowledge in the mind, not rules in a book – Lang
5
in the
sense of language given in Chapter 1; the crucial end-product of much teaching is
that students should ‘know’ language in an unconscious sense so that they can
put it to good use. Teaching has to pay attention to the internal processes and
knowledge the students are subconsciously building up in their minds.
Grammar is also relevant to the sequence in which elements of language are
taught. Of necessity, language teaching has to present the various aspects of lan-
guage in order, rather than introducing them all simultaneously. The conven-
tional solution used to be to sequence the grammar in terms of increasing
complexity, say, teaching the present simple first ‘He cooks’, and the past perfect
continuous passive last ‘It has been being cooked’, because the former is much
‘simpler’ than the latter. Box 2.6 gives the teaching sequence for grammatical
items in Move (Bowler and Parminter, 2007), a recent beginners’ course. This is
typical of the sequences that have been developed for EFL teaching over the past
hundred years, based chiefly on the tense system. While it has been tested in prac-
tice, it has no particular justification from SLA research.

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since this would freeze the learner at that moment in time, but by being
slightly ahead of the learner all the time, called by Krashen (1985) ‘i
1’ (one
step on from the learner’s current language).
3 Teach the last things in an L2 learning sequence first. The students can best be
helped by being given the extreme point of the sequence and by filling in the
intermediary positions for themselves. It has been claimed, for example, that
teaching the most difficult types of relative clauses is more effective than teach-
ing the easy forms, because the students fill in the gaps for themselves sponta-
neously rather than needing them filled by teaching.
4 Ignore grammar altogether. Some might argue that, if the students’ goals are to
communicate in a second language, grammar is an optional extra. Obviously
this depends on the definition of grammar: in the Lang
5
sense that any speaker
of a language knows the grammatical system of the language, then grammar is
not dispensable in this way, but plays a part in every sentence anybody pro-
duces or comprehends for whatever communicative reason.
As with pronunciation, an additional problem is which grammar to use.
Typically the description seems to be slanted towards the grammar of written lan-
guage with its complete ‘textual’ sentences, rather than spoken language with its
elliptical ‘lexical’ sentences (Cook, 2003). For example, English teachers have
spent considerable energy on teaching students to distinguish singular ‘there is’
from plural ‘there are’, yet the distinction barely exists in spoken language, which
uses /
ðɘz
/ for both. The publisher of my first EFL coursebook objected to the sen-
tence ‘Good book that’ occurring in a dialogue, an unremarkable spoken form; of
course, the publisher won.
Traditionally for English the model has been taken to be that of a literate edu-
cated native speaker from an English-speaking country. This, however, ignores the
differences between varieties of English spoken in different countries. An
Irishman means something quite different from an Englishman by ‘she’s after
doing it’, and an Indian by ‘I am thinking it’; North Americans have past tenses
like ‘dove’ and past participles like ‘gotten’ that no longer exist in British speech.
Nor does it encompass variation between people in one country, for example, the
people of Norwich, who do not use the singular ‘s’ on verbs ‘he ride’, or the
Geordie who distinguishes singular ‘you’ from plural ‘yous’. And it treats English
as having a singular genre; you must always have a subject in the sentence, even
if it is perfectly normal to leave it out in diaries and emails, ‘Went out’ or ‘Like it’.
And similar issues arise in choosing a grammatical model for most languages that
are used across a variety of countries: should French be based on Parisians and
ignore the rest of France, along with the Frenches spoken in Switzerland, Quebec
and Central Africa?
No one would probably hold completely to these simplified views. The fuller
implications of the L2 order of learning or difficulty depend on the rest of teach-
ing. Teaching must balance grammar against language functions, vocabulary, class-
room interaction, and much else that goes on in the classroom to find the
appropriate teaching for those students in that situation. Teachers do not necessar-
ily have to choose between these alternatives once and for all. A different decision
may have to be made for each area of grammar or language and each stage of acqui-
sition. But SLA research is starting to provide information about sequences based
on the processes going on in the learners’ minds, which will eventually prove a
gold mine for teaching.
Learning and teaching different types of grammar