Grammar

Can be acquired naturally from meaningful input and opportunities to interact in the classroom

Input hypothesis and the notion of intake: Learners receive information about language from a variety of sources

Noticing: Learners pick out specific features of the language and pay attention to them.


*Relates to the learner's common sense about basic functions of language

Reasoning deductively: Learners apply rules they already know to working out the meaning of what they hear or to the formulation of what they want to say

Analysing contrastively: A learner may compare the first and second language and work out their similarities and differences

Translating: Using English as a meta-language for getting the ideas straight on the structure and semantic range of the Foreign Language

Transferring: Ss apply knowledge of one language to the understanding or production of another

Errors are systematic and are the outward sign of an internally developing system of grammar

Automatizing: Learner can achieve regular and consistent responses in conversation to a certain type of input

Intake and eventual automatization will only occur as and when ss are ready

Implicit grammatical knowledge: Intuitive knowledge of grammar which develops in the same way as it does in young children acquiring their first language

Explicit knowledge: Can help learners to appreciate the gap that exists between the language which they and other ss produce and native speaker forms

Focus on grammar and the explicit learning rules can facilitate and speed up the grammar acquisition process

Linking signals: Singposts which signal what comes next

Linking constructions: Conjunctions used to co-ordinate and subordinate clauses

General purpose links: Participle and verbless clauses

Substitution and omission: Use of pronouns to refer back to noun phrases

Presenting and focusing information : The way in which we create contrastive focus in spoken language by using stress

Order and emphasis: Variations in presenting information in order to create emphasis

Pragmatics Ways in which we interpret the meanings of spoken or written language from the words spoken

Communicative ability involves knowing the different styles available

Order of presentation : Which forms of the item to teach and in what order, and in which forms to leave for the recycling stages

Use of terminology: Having a metalanguage may be useful for advanced learners particularly in discussing errors in writing or in helping them to understand difficult semantic relations

Degree of explicitness:Learners are engaged in raising their own awareness of how language works

Grammar consciousness-raising tasks can promote significant gains in acquiring the target grammatical structure.

There are patterns in the English language within which words typically occur

Presentation: To present new language in context so the meaning is clear
Practice: To help ss memorize the form
Production: To reduce control and encourage ss to find out what they can do

Learning grammar is a lot simpler than learning a language

Comprehensibility/ Acceptability