Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Language awareness
An alternative possibility is that raising awareness of language in general helps
second language learning. Eric Hawkins (1984) suggested that the learners’ gen-
eral awareness of language should be raised before they start learning the L2,
partly through grammar. If the students know the kind of thing to expect in the
new language, they are more receptive to it. Hawkins advocates ‘an exploratory
approach’ in which the pupils investigate grammar, for example, by deciding
where to insert ‘see-through’ in the sentence ‘She put on her cosy, old, blue,
nylon, blouse’. They invent their own labels for grammar, rather than being
taught a pre-established system. As Hawkins puts it, ‘grammar approached as a
voyage of discovery into the patterns of the language rather than the learning of
prescriptive rules, is no longer a bogey word’. It is not the teaching of particular
points of grammar that matters, but the overall increase in the pupil’s language
sensitivity. The textbook Learning to Learn English (Ellis and Sinclair, 1989) pro-
vides some exercises to make EFL learners more aware of their own predilections,
for instance, suggesting ways for the students to discover grammatical rules them-
selves. Philip Riley (1985) suggested sensitization of the students by using features
of the first language to help them understand the second, say, by discussing puns
to help them see how speech is split up into words. Increasing awareness of lan-
guage may have many educational advantages and indeed help L2 learning in a
broad sense. Raised awareness of language is in itself a goal of some language
teaching. It has no particular seal of approval from the types of grammar consid-
ered in this chapter, however.
The role of explicit grammar in language teaching 41

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