“Research has shown that teachers who focus students’ attention on linguistic form during communicative interactions are more effective than those who never focus on form or who do so in decontextualized grammar lessons.“ (Spada and Lightbown, 1993)
Odlin (1994) proposes that grammar lessons for second language learners be designed on the basis of their communicative needs, considering the language functions they will encounter. It is therefore essential to teach students that meaning can be expressed in a variety of ways using various grammar forms, and often there is no single “correct way” to express a particular meaning.
Communicative Grammar Lesson Using Explicit Instruction
English Now! operationalizes the four-part framework proposed by Fotos (2001), which promotes acquisition through meaning-focused use of the form in communicative activities.
Step 1: Using an advance organizer (Ausebel, 1968), the teacher announces the objectives and links the new grammar lesson to what the students already know. She then presents the new grammar content using either a deductive or inductive approach. (pre-task phase)
Step 2: Students work in pairs or in groups to perform a structure-based communicative task which contains multiple uses of the structure. (task phase)
Step 3: The teacher reviews the target structures, commenting on her observations, correcting errors, and clarifying misunderstandings that she observed. (task phase)
Step 4: Students practice the structures, transferring what they learned to a different context or to a different language domain. Frequently, this is in the form of an “extension task” which is to be performed with peers or adults outside of the classroom. (post-task phase)
The “spiral” review of recently instructed material within increasingly broader contexts, has been found to be an important memory strategy for the successful development of explicit knowledge and an awareness of form-meaning relationships (see Cohen, 1998).
