APPROACHES
TO GRAMMAR
TEACHING
PPP
the most widely practiced traditional approach to grammatical instruction
has been portrayed as the three Ps – present, practice, produce.
understanding of the
grammar point is provided • First Stage
students practice the • students are given “frequent opportunities
grammar structure using
oral drills and written
for communicative use of the grammar to
exercises. promote automatic and accurate use”
students are given
“frequent opportunities
for communicative use of
the grammar to promote
• Third Stage
automatic and accurate
use”
Criticisms
students fail to apply their knowledge of grammar when they
are communicating → “inert knowledge problem” → “non-
interface problem”
Refer to this video: Using PPP lessons for teaching English -
Intro to ESL Lesson Planning (Part 2) - Bing video
Non-interventionist
• According to Krashen, the only way for students to acquire grammar is
to get exposure to comprehensible input in the target language in an
affectively non-threatening situation, where the input is finely tuned
to students’ level of proficiency. (i+1)
• Krashen believes that if the input is understood and there is enough of
it, the necessary grammar will automatically be acquired.
• At best, students can use their grammar knowledge to monitor and
revise their spoken and written products after they have been
produced.
• the best way to learn a language . . . is not by treating it as an
object of study, but by experiencing it as a medium of
communication” (Long, 1991, p. 41). Interaction hypothesis
• Studies of French immersion programs in Canada, however,
show that when language is only used as a medium of
communication, with no explicit attention being paid to
grammatical form, the interlanguages of naturalistic learners
go through long periods of stability.
Input-processing
• VanPatten (1990) argued that the problem is that L2 learners have
difficulty attending simultaneously to meaning and form.
• Rather than working on rule learning and rule application, input
processing activities push learners to attend to properties of language
during activities where the structure is being used meaningfully.
• The examples the students focus on have been carefully chosen to
make salient the differences between the L1 and L2.
• Refer to this video (20) Input Processing Theory - YouTube
Example:
Focus on form
• Noting that some aspects of L2 require awareness and/or
attention to language form, and further, that implicit learning
is not sufficient for SLA mastery, Long (1991) calls for a focus
on form within a communicative or meaning-based approach
to language teaching, such as task-based (e.g., R. Ellis, 2003;
Pica, Kang, & Sauro, 2006) or content-based language
teaching.
• Long (1991, p. 47) hypothesizes that “a systematic, non-
interfering focus on form produces a faster rate of learning
and (probably) higher levels of ultimate SL attainment than
instruction with no focus on form.”
a. Input enhancement
• Sharwood Smith (1993) suggests that visual enhancement
(color-coding, underlining, boldfacing, enlarging the font) be
made to written instructional texts in an attempt to make
certain features of the input more salient.
• phonological manipulations such as oral repetition might
help learners pay attention to grammar structures in the
input.
• The oral equivalent is when a teacher stresses certain forms
when speaking with students.
b. Input flooding
• A second means of calling attention to form is flooding
meaningful input with the target form.
• For example, talking about historical events would give learners
abundant opportunities to notice the past tense.
• One possible function of input flooding, besides making certain
features in the input more frequent and thus more salient, is
that it might prime the production of a particular structure.
“Syntactic priming is a speaker’s tendency to produce a
previously spoken or heard structure” (Mackey & Gass, 2006, p.
173)
c. Output Production
• “Comprehensible output,” according to Swain, forces learners to move
from semantic processing of input to syntactic processing, in order to
produce target output. She also hypothesizes that comprehensible
output serves to have learners notice features of the target language,
especially “to notice what they do not know, or know only partially”
(Swain, 1995, p. 129).
• Long (1996) concurs about the importance of noticing.
“[C]ommunicative trouble can lead learners to recognize that a linguistic
problem exists, switch their attentional focus from message to form,
identify the problem, and notice the needed item in the input” (p. 425).
