Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Explicit grammar teaching
This revives the classical debate in language teaching about whether grammar
should be explained to the students, as mentioned in Chapter 1. Usually the kind
of grammar involved is the traditional or structural grammar described earlier,
exemplified in books such as Basic Grammar in Use (Murphy, 2002); seldom does
it mean grammar in the sense of knowledge of principles and parameters such as
locality and pro-drop. Hence it has often been argued that the problem with
teaching grammar overtly is not the method itself but the type of grammar that
has been used. Most linguists would regard these grammars as the equivalent to
using alchemy as the basis for teaching chemistry.
Other types of grammar are hardly ever used. The pro-drop parameter, for exam-
ple, is a simple idea to explain and might well be a useful rule for students of English
from Japan or Greece, or indeed for learners of the vast majority of the world’s lan-
guages; yet it is never mentioned in materials that teach grammar. If the grammar
content were better, perhaps explicit grammar teaching would be more effective.
The use of explicit explanation implies that L2 learning is different from L1
learning, where it never occurs. The belief that L2 learning can potentially make
use of explanation underlies distinctions such as those made by Harold Palmer
(1926) between ‘spontaneous capacities’ for acquiring speech and ‘the studial
capacity’ through which people study language, and by Krashen (1981a) between
‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ (the latter being conscious and available only to older
learners), as well as by many others.
The main issue is the connection between conscious understanding of a rule
and the ability to use it. Any linguist can tell you facts about languages such as
Japanese or Gboudi that their native speakers could not describe. This does not
mean the linguists can say a single word, let alone a sentence, of Japanese or Gboudi
in a comprehensible way. They have acquired a pure ‘academic’ knowledge of the
languages. In their case this satisfies their needs. Grammatical explanation is a way
of teaching facts about the language – that is to say, a form of linguistics. If the
aim of teaching is academic knowledge of language, conscious understanding is
acceptable as a form of L2 learning. But students who want to use the language
need to transform this academic knowledge into the ability to use it, going
beyond the Lang
5
mental sense to the Lang
4
social sense of ‘language’.
Grammatical explanation in the classroom has relied on the assumption that
rules which are learnt consciously can be converted into unconscious processes of
comprehension and production. Some people have questioned whether academic
knowledge ever converts into the ability to use the language in this way. The
French subjunctive was explained to me at school, not just to give me academic
knowledge of the facts of French, but to help me to write French. After a period of
absorption, this conscious rule was supposed to become part of my unconscious
Learning and teaching different types of grammar
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ability to use the language – unfortunately not so much enabling me to use it eas-
ily as making me freeze whenever I anticipated a subjunctive coming over the
horizon.
Stephen Krashen (1985), however, has persistently denied that consciously
learnt rules change into normal speech processes in the same way as grammar that
is acquired unconsciously, sometimes called the non-interface position, that is, that
learnt grammar does not convert into the acquired grammar that speech depends
on. If Krashen’s view is accepted, people who are taught by grammatical explana-
tion can only produce language by laboriously checking each sentence against their
conscious repertoire of rules, as many had to do with Latin at school – a process that
Krashen calls ‘monitoring’. Or they can use it for certain ‘tips’ or rules of thumb,
such as ‘i before e except after c or before g’. Conscious knowledge of language rules
in this view is no more than an optional extra. This mirrors the traditional teach-
ing assumption, summed up in the audio-lingual slogan ‘teach the language not
about the language’, more elegantly phrased by Wilma Rivers (1964) as ‘analogy
provides a better foundation for foreign language learning than analysis’, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 13.
Convincing as these claims may be, one should remember that many graduates
of European universities who learnt English by studying traditional grammars
turned into fluent and spontaneous speakers of English. I asked university-level
students of English which explicit grammar rules they had found useful; almost
all said that they still sometimes visualized verb paradigms for English to check
what they were writing. This at least suggests that the conversion of conscious
rules to non-conscious processes does take place for some academic students;
every teaching method works for someone somewhere.