CHAPTER 27

Grammar Instruction
Richard Cullen

I n t r o d u c t io n
The teaching of grammar has always been a subject of controversy in the TESOL pro­
fession, both with respect to the most effective methodological procedures to use, and to
the extent to which we should focus on it at all. In the 1980s, the writings of Krashen
(1981 and elsewhere) and Prabhu (1987) promoted the view that the most effective form
of grammar instruction was no overt instruction: learners would acquire the grammar
of the language implicitly through exposure to comprehensible input roughly tuned to
their level and engagement in meaning-focused tasks. While it is probably true to say
that this position, characterized by Ellis (1995) as the “zero option” on grammar teach­
ing, has been superseded by the recognition, supported by research, that some kind of
focus on form (Long 2001) in the language classroom is necessary both to accelerate
the processes of grammar acquisition and raise ultimate levels of attainment (Nassaji
and Fotos 2004; Ellis 2006), the issues of when and how to provide this focus are no
less contentious. In this chapter, I shall explore some of these issues by examining two
different approaches to grammar instruction, one product-oriented and the other process-
oriented, which are evident in much current classroom practice and in published teaching
materials.

Ba c k g r o u n d

W HAT DO WE UNDERSTAND BY GRAMMAR?

Grammar instruction means different things to different teachers, related to the perceptions
they have about what grammar is. Thus for some, grammar may be viewed essentially as
the underlying knowledge of the system of rules which speakers apply in order to form
correct sentences in spoken and written production, while for others it is perceived as
more of a skill (cf. Larsen-Freeman 2003) which speakers deploy creatively in acts of

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 Grammar Instruction

communication to achieve intended meanings. Differences of this kind will be reflected

in the kind of grammar instruction with which the teacher will feel most in tune, with
regard to instructional materials, classroom activities, and teaching methods. At the level
of materials, the first view, which emphasizes grammar as a knowledge-based system of
rules, is typically reflected in exercises and test items, often at sentence-level, that reward
the correct application of those rules for the achievement of accuracy, whereas the second
view, which sees grammar as a skill, will find expression in exercises and test items which
reward the learners’ ability to make appropriate grammatical choices for the achievement
of meaningful texts. Teachers of course may find there is a conflict between their own
views about the nature and purpose of grammar and those reflected in the course books and
materials they are required to use, or the examination tasks they are required to prepare
their students for. Nevertheless, teachers will inevitably bring their own perceptions to bear
on the way they approach the task of teaching grammar in their own classrooms, and on
the way their learners approach the task of learning it.
A central theme of this chapter is that grammar, along with the systems of lexis and
phonology, is a communicative resource (Widdowson 1990) that speakers use to compre­
hend and interpret language they receive as input when reading or listening and to produce
language as output in speech or writing for communicative purposes - the skills of decod­
ing and encoding messages. When producing language as output, the speaker’s use of the
grammatical code - is a matter of choice (cf. Larsen-Freeman 2002). Speakers choose from
their linguistic repertoires the grammatical form or forms they consider to be the most
appropriate and effective for expressing what they want to say. The difference between an
intermediate level learner, for example, and a proficient speaker is that a proficient speaker
has a wider repertoire to choose from, and can access it more quickly. Nevertheless, the
process of choosing - and matching choice to meaning and context - is the same. Grammar
is thus at the service of the language user, and the teaching of grammar in a genuinely
communicative approach to language teaching needs to reflect this.
The notion of grammar as a system of choices that speakers exploit for their own
purposes is connected with two other properties of grammar which have important impli­
cations for teaching. Firstly, the grammatical choices that speakers or writers make - for
example, whether to use an active or passive verb form, or whether to use the modal can
or could when making a request - are not made in a vacuum, but in a context of language
use. They are thus text-based, not sentence-level, choices made in the act of participating
in a communicative event, whether it be a conversation with friends or writing an e-mail
to a colleague. In each situation there is a “text” being created and an audience. It would
be difficult to reconcile a text-based view of grammar with teaching and testing techniques
which focus predominantly on displays of grammatical accuracy in sentence-level exer­
cises: learners need opportunities to observe, explore and practice the use of grammar in
spoken and written discourse. Secondly, the view that grammar is at the service of the user,
rather than a “linguistic straitjacket” (Larsen-Freeman 2002, 103) he or she is forced to
wear, carries with it the notion of grammar as a dynamic system, which permits adaptation
of its rules by speakers for their own communicative purposes, and which is consequently
subject to change over time.
The process of exploiting the grammatical resources of language “for making meaning
in context appropriate ways” is described by Larsen-Freeman (2003, 142) as “grammar-
ing,” a term that I will return to when discussing process-oriented approaches to teaching
grammar. A good example of grammar being exploited in this way can be seen in the gram­
mar of speech. As corpus studies of informal conversational English have shown (see, for
example, Carter and McCarthy 1995,2006, and elsewhere; and Biber et al. 1999), we adapt
the rules of syntax in creative ways to meet the needs of real time processing of language:
thus, we do not observe sentence boundaries as carefully as we do when we are writing, we
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Richard Cullen

tend to string together sequences of noun phrases, and make use of syntactical structures
which are rarely found in writing. These include “head” structures (see example 1 below),
where an extra noun phrase is inserted as a preface to an utterance, to orient the listener to
the topic we are introducing, and “tail” structures (see example 2 below), where a phrase
may be appended to the end of an utterance, as a reminder to the listener of the topic we
are referring to:

1. That car over there, it’s parked on a double yellow line, (head structure)
2. It’s a pleasant place to live, Canterbury, (tail structure)

Learners, particularly those studying English to interact with native speakers of the
language, will encounter such phenomena and will arguably need to be made aware of them.
Yet, as Cullen and Kuo (2007) have shown, contemporary published EFL course books
tend to base their grammatical syllabi predominantly on written grammar, and either ignore
distinctive features of spoken grammar altogether or relegate them to incidental points of
interest for advanced level students.

LEARNING GRAMMAR
In the previous section, I looked at some of the characteristics of grammar that ought to
inform our practice as teachers and designers of pedagogic materials. In the same way, our
practice needs to be informed by what we know about how grammar is learned. In this
section, I will draw attention to three processes involved in language learning, which have
been well established by research studies in second language acquisition, and discuss some
of the implications for teaching.

1. Learners need to be able to notice features o f grammar in natural, realistic contexts o f

use.
Noticing refers to the process of the learner picking out specific features of the target
language input which she or he hears or reads, and paying conscious attention to them so
that they can be fed into the learning process. This involves making connections between
grammatical features noticed and their associated meanings, functions and contexts of use.
The importance of noticing is associated in particular with work of Schmidt (1990) who
concluded that noticing was the process by which input was converted into intake. While
noticing is a natural process of language acquisition that happens through sufficient exposure
to language, one of the main purposes of classroom instruction is to speed up this process.
This can be done in a variety of ways using classroom techniques which overtly draw the
learners’ attention to the target forms. These techniques include input enhancement, where
the features to be noticed in a text (e.g., a new verb tense form, or comparative forms of
adjectives) are made more salient, perhaps by using bold font in a reading text, or through a
gap-filling task to accompany a listening text, and input flooding, where lots of examples of
the target form are provided in the input (DeCarrico and Larsen-Freeman 2002). In the first
case, however, it should be noted that learners cannot attend to meaning and form in the
input at the same time (VanPatten 1990), a point that has implications for the sequencing
of input processing tasks, while in the latter case, it is important that the texts used for
input remain reasonably natural, so that the learners can make the necessary connections
between form and function in realistic contexts of language use.
Another aspect of noticing is noticing the gap (see Swain 1995, 2000; Thombury
1997), where learners notice gaps that exist between their current state of knowledge (their
interlanguage) and the target language system. They do this by comparing features of their
 Grammar Instruction

own output with the input they receive, for example through the texts they encounter in
class and the feedback they receive from the teacher or fellow students. This process is
seen as particularly important for pushing learners’ own language development forward
and has been influential in task-based approaches in teaching grammar where learners
compare their output in a written task with that of more proficient users (see “Approaches
to Teaching Grammar,” below).

2. Learners need opportunities to form hypotheses about how grammar works

Forming hypotheses about how grammar works is part of the wider cognitive processes
of structuring and restructuring (McLaughlin 1990; Batstone 1994a), whereby learners
discern patterns in the forms of language they have noticed and form working hypotheses
about how the system works, hypotheses which they modify and refine over time. In
this way, input becomes internalized as intake. Grammar instruction can accelerate the
process by helping the learner form useful working hypotheses through various kinds
of consciousness-raising (CR) tasks. CR tasks can take a variety of forms ranging from
metalinguistic questions about underlying rules to exercises where learners apply their
understanding by choosing appropriate grammatical forms to complete the gaps in a given
text (see Swan and Walters 1997 for examples).
Consciousness raising, “the deliberate attempt to draw the learner’s attention specif­
ically to the formal properties of the target language” (Rutherford and Sharwood-Smith
1985, 274), can be done either inductively, where learners attempt to discover the under­
lying rules of grammar themselves, guided by the examples of language data in the input
and the teacher’s “concept questions,” or deductively, where the learners are provided with
explicit explanations. Very often a combination of inductive and deductive approaches is
used, with the explanation of the rule provided as a confirmatory support to the learner after
an initial inductive exploration of the target grammatical structure (see Thombury 1999).
Inductive, discovery-oriented approaches are arguably more in tune with contemporary,
learner-centered approaches to teaching and are also claimed by some researchers to aid
retention (Ellis 1997), but different approaches are likely to suit different learners and
different learning styles. Interestingly, a study by Mohamed (2004) into the preferences of
learners at different levels found that the learners showed no strong preference for either
inductive or deductive task types, regarding them both as equally useful.

3. Learners need opportunities to practice using grammar in meaningful contexts.

The role of practice in the learning of grammar has attracted controversy due to its
associations with decontextualized, sentence-level pattern practice favored by the audio-
lingual method of teaching in the 1950s and 1960s, and which can still be found in exercises
in the “practice” stage of the PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) model of teaching,
a model which underlies the way grammar is introduced in many contemporary course
books (see “Approaches to Teaching Grammar,” below). However, while it is probably true
that practice of a grammatical pattern before the learners have had sufficient opportunity
to understand how it works is of little use for meaningful, long-lasting learning (see
Ellis 1995), practice is still an essential element for the process of automatization or
proceduralization (see Hedge 2000; Johnson 1994). This is the process of acquiring the
ability to access language more or less automatically without undue attention or conscious
thought. Automatization is mediated through practice, though not through decontextualized
pattern practice, which, as Johnson 1994 argues, is too remote from the conditions of real
life to allow transfer from practice to actual use, but through practice which is “meaningful
and engaging” (Larsen-Freeman 2003, 117), or in Batstone’s words (1994b, 227), which
involves “a genuine focus on meaning and self-expression.” This view chimes well with
the notion of grammar as a resource for choice, at the service of the user.
262 Richard Cullen

In the next section, I shall look at ways in which grammar instruction can be organized in
the classroom to facilitate the learning processes discussed above.

APPROACHES TO TEACHING GRAMMAR

Batstone (1994a and 1994b) draws an important distinction between product and process
approaches to teaching grammar, a distinction akin to that made by some SLA researchers
between focus on forms (plural) and focus on form (singular) (Fotos 1998; Ellis 2006).
In a product (focus on forms) approach, the emphasis is on the component parts of the
grammatical system, which are divided up and taught one after another. An item of grammar
is preselected for attention in any given lesson, or for practice in a given exercise, and thereby
becomes “the target structure” - the object, or product, of learning. In a process approach,
on the other hand, the emphasis is on grammar as an element in the process of language use,
so that the focus of a given lesson is not on a particular preselected grammatical structure,
but on the learner’s own skills in applying his or her grammatical repertoire in doing a
given task. A “focus on form” stage may occur after the task in response to any gaps or
difficulties noted in the learners’ performance: it is thus “reactive,” rather than preemptive
(Doughty and Williams 1998).
A widely practiced product approach to teaching grammar has become known as
PPP. In this approach, the learning processes of noticing, structuring, and automatizing
are developed through an ordered sequence of three stages of presentation, practice, and
production. In the presentation stage, examples of a new grammatical stmcture are presented
in a situation or context (e.g., a short dialogue, a text, an oral demonstration by the teacher)
which aims to make the meaning and form clear, and to illustrate a typical use of it. In
the subsequent two stages there is a transition from controlled practice exercises (e.g., oral
drills, written gap-filling tasks) where the focus is on accurate reproduction of the structure,
to freer practice activities (e.g. role play, discussion, guided-writing tasks) with a focus on
communicative use of the structure. In this stage, the students are given the opportunity
to express their own meanings and ideas, and to combine the newly learned form with
other language items they have learned over time. The approach adopts an “accuracy first”
model of learning: the learners are expected to achieve a degree of accuracy in forming the
structure at the Practice stage before being “let loose” in the production stage, where the
focus shifts from accuracy to fluency. In spite of criticisms that PPP is over-controlling, in
that it discourages learners from taking risks with language and hence restricts opportunities
to “notice the gap,” it remains the predominant approach for presenting new grammar in
many, if not most, internationally published EFL course book materials, as Nitta and
Gardner (2005) have shown.
In a process approach to teaching grammar, the transition from accuracy to fluency is
reversed, as is the case in many task-based learning approaches to teaching grammar. The
overt focus of grammar typically comes at the end of a lesson or a learning sequence, and
arises out of a free production task the learners have done previously, a task in which they
use whatever grammatical resources they have at their command, rather than grammatical
structures that have been preselected and pre-presented by the teacher. A crucial part of
the process for the acquisition of grammar is the post-task stage where learners compare
their performance in production with that of more proficient users (e.g., through studying
a reading text or a tapescript of a conversation) and as a result notice gaps or shortcom­
ings in their use of language. This then becomes the consciousness-raising stage of the
lesson: the teacher’s role at this stage is to help draw attention to these gaps by giving
corrective feedback with supporting explanation, exemplification, and follow-up practice
as required. Tasks that lend themselves to this kind of work are text reconstruction tasks
(Thombury 1997; Storch 1998; Cullen 2008) where learners individually or collaboratively
 Grammar Instruction 263

reconstruct a “battered,” or reduced, text consisting mainly of lexical items by adding

appropriate grammatical features - function words, appropriate verb forms etc. They then
compare their texts, first with those of their peers and then with the original text. Such
tasks include dictogloss (Wajnryb 1990), where learners note down key words as they
listen to a text read aloud before trying to reconstruct it, and grammaticization (Thom-
bury 2005), where learners map grammar onto “lexicalized” texts, such as newspaper
headlines.
It can be seen that a process approach to teaching grammar is more in line with
the notion of grammar as a resource for choice, discussed earlier in the chapter, than a
product approach, and also with Larsen-Freeman’s notion of “grammaring,” the skill of
using grammatical resources creatively for self-expression. It is also likely to respond more
closely to the learner’s actual language-learning needs, and to make them more self-aware
of gaps in their knowledge and what they need to attend to. However, in spite of these
benefits, it is unlikely that an exclusively process-oriented approach would be able to
provide the same coverage of grammatical features which a product approach provides
through preselection of target structures, and in particular, coverage of those features which
learners find they can avoid through circumlocution and substituting other, easier structures.
Learners may also need a more product-oriented approach in the initial and early stages of
learning in order to build up a base of grammatical forms to communicate with, although
Ellis (2006) questions this view and favors a more robustly task-based approach at lower
levels. Nevertheless it is probably the case that, as Batstone suggests, “a combination of
product and process teaching. .. can give their learners both a focus on specific grammatical
forms and opportunities to deploy these forms in language use.” (1994a, 99)

TESTING GRAMMAR
When it comes to assessment, the separate testing of grammar, and the identification of
specific grammatical items to test, is more consistent with a product approach to teach­
ing than with a process approach, where grammatical ability would be assessed through
integrated tests of language skills. In other words, ability to understand, interpret, and use
grammar accurately and appropriately would only be assessed in a process approach as
part of the overall assessment of the candidate’s performance in tasks of listening, reading,
speaking, and writing. If grammar is to be separated out for testing, which may be the
norm in achievement tests based on syllabi which list the grammatical structures to be
taught, it is important, as Hughes (2003,173) points out, “not to give such components too
much prominence at the expense of skills.” It is also important, from the point of view of
construct and content validity, that the kind of test items we design to assess grammatical
competence are consistent with our view of what grammar is and with the kind of tasks
and activities we have used to teach it. Thus, in order to reflect the principles outlined
in “Learning Grammar,” above, it is important that the focus should be on assessing the
candidates’ ability to use the grammatical items they have learned as a communicative
resource. To this end:

a. candidates should be asked to make choices, not simply between correct and incorrect
forms, but between pragmatically appropriate and inappropriate uses of grammar;
b. these choices should be made in contexts of language use: sentence level test items
should generally be avoided in favor of the use of complete texts, in which standard
testing techniques such gap filling, completion, and multiple choice can be used;
c. the texts to contextualize the target grammar items should be realistic, i.e., reflecting
the way grammar is used in the real world, and varied in terms of text type.
Richard Cullen

C o n c l u s io n
In this chapter, I have tried to show how the methods and materials we use for teaching
and testing grammar in TESOL are (or should be) intimately connected with, and arise
from, our conceptualization of what grammar is and our knowledge of the processes by
which it is learned. While the latter is informed by the results of research, including the
attested experience of learners and teachers of English as a second language, the former is
a more philosophical matter, and is informed by a range of factors including our reading,
our discussions with colleagues and our professional experience as language teachers. It
is perhaps in the way we think about language, and the role and function of grammar in
language, rather than in a specific set of methodological precepts, that the communicative
revolution in TESOL of the 1970s and 1980s has had the most significant and lasting
impact.

Key readings
Batstone, R. (1994). Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cullen, R. (2008). Teaching grammar as a liberating force. ELT Journal 62 (3): 221-230.
Ellis, R. (2006). Current issues in the teaching of grammar: an SLA perspective? TESOL
Quarterly 40(1): 83-107.
Hinkel, E., & S. Fotos. (Eds.). (2002). New perspectives on grammar teaching in second
language classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2003). Teaching language: From grammar to grammaring. Boston:
Thomson Heinle.
Nunan, D. (1998). Teaching grammar in context. ELT Journal 52 (2): 101-109.
Thornbury, S. (1999). How to teach grammar. London: Longman.
--------- . (2005). Uncovering grammar. 2nd ed. Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann.

References
Batstone, R. (1994a). Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
--------- . (1994b). Product and process: Grammar in the second language classroom. In
M. Bygate, A. Tonkyn, & E. Williams (Eds.), Grammar and the language teacher
(pp. 224-236). Hemel Hempstead, UK: Prentice Hall.
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, & E. Finegan. (1999). Longman grammar of
spoken and written English. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Carter, R., & M. McCarthy. (1995). Grammar and the spoken language. Applied Linguistics
16(2): 141-158.
--------- . (2006). Cambridge grammar o f English: Spoken and written English grammar
and usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cullen, R. (2008). Teaching grammar as a liberating force. ELT Journal 62 (3): 221—
230.
Cullen, R., & I. Kuo. (2007). Spoken grammar and ELT course book materials: A missing
link? TESOL Quarterly 41 (2): 361-386.
DeCarrico, J., & D. Larsen-Freeman. (2002). Grammar. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), An introduction
to applied linguistics (pp. 19-34). London: Arnold.
 Grammar Instruction 265

Doughty, C., & J. Williams. (1998). Pedagogic choices in focus on form. In C. Doughty
& J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition
(pp. 197-261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ellis, R. (1995). Interpretation tasks for grammar teaching. TESOL Quarterly 29 (1):
87-105.
--------- . (1997). SLA research and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
--------- . (2006). Current issues in the teaching of grammar: An SLA perspective? TESOL
Quarterly 40 (1): 83-107.
Fotos, S. (1998). Shifting the focus from forms to form in the EFL classroom. ELT Journal
52 (4): 301-307.
Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and learning English in the language classroom. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Hughes, A. (2003). Testing for language teachers. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­
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Johnson, K. (1994). Teaching declarative and procedural knowledge. In M. Bygate, A.
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Hemel Hempstead, UK: Prentice Hall.
Krashen, S. (1981). Second language acquisition and second language learning. Oxford:
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Larsen-Freeman, D. (2002). The grammar of choice. In E. Hinkel & S. Fotos (Eds.), New
perspectives on grammar teaching in second language classrooms (pp. 103-118).
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--------- . (2003). Teaching language: From grammar to grammaring. Boston: Thomson
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Long, M. (2001). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology.
In C. Candlin & N. Mercer (Eds.), English language teaching in its social context
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McLaughlin, B. (1990). Restructuring. Applied Linguistics 11 (2): 113-128.
Mohamed, N. (2004). Consciousness-raising tasks: A learner perspective. ELT Journal 58
(3): 228-237.
Nassaji, H., & S. Fotos. (2004). Current developments in research on the teaching of
grammar. Annual Review o f Applied Linguistics 24:126-145.
Nitta, R., & S. Gardner. (2005). Consciousness-raising and practice in ELT coursebooks.
ELT Journal 59(1): 3-13.
Prabhu, N. S. (1997), Second language pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rutherford, W„ & M. Sharwood Smith. (1985). Consciousness-raising and universal gram­
mar. Applied Linguistics 6 (3): 274—282.
Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Lin­
guistics 11 (2): 129-158.
Storch, N. (1998). A classroom-based study: Insights from a collaborative text reconstruc­
tion task. ELT Journal 52 (4): 291-300.
Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook
& B. Seidlhofer (Eds.), Principles and practice in applied linguistics (pp. 125-144).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
266 Richard Cullen

--------- . (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through col­
laborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language
learning (pp. 97-114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Swan, M., & C. Walters. (1997). How English works: A grammar practice book. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Thornbury, S. (1999). How to teach grammar. London: Longman.
--------- . (1997). Reformulation and reconstruction: Tasks that promote noticing. ELT Jour­
nal 51 (4): 326-335.
--------- . (2005). Uncovering grammar. 2nd ed. Oxford: Macmillan Heinemann.
VanPatten, B. (1990). Attending to form and meaning in the input: An experiment in
consciousness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12 (3): 287-301.
Wajnryb, R. (1990). Grammar dictation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (1990). Aspects o f language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.