Grammar

Grammar is about how words and parts of words are combined to let us comprehend and make utterances. What does research tell us?

Diane Larsen-Freeman's article about myths of grammar teaching

Diane Larsen-Freeman

10 min

A 2019 paper by Takashi Oba about the psycholinguistic processes underlying grammar practice activities

Takashi Oba

15 min

An Oasis summary of Kim and Godfroid (2023) about how conscious and unconscious grammatical knowledge are mutually supportive.

3 min

Miroslaw Pawlak (2021) writes about approaches to grammar teaching and learning and the gap between research and classroom practice

Miroslaw Pawlak

20 min

Aleidine Kramer Moeller and Olha Ketsman address the question "Can we learn a language without rules". Their article covers plenty of research ground in the grammar versus no grammar debate

Aleidine Kramer Moeller and Olha Ketsman

25 min

A summary of recent research about how we should teach grammar from Language Teacher Toolkit

5 min

The Natural Order Hypothesis: a summary from Language Teacher Toolkit

5 min

Where lexicon and grammar conjoin. An interesting article about phraseology, lexicogrammar and emergentism

20 min

Alessandro Benati examines the role of input and output tasks in grammar teaching

Alessandro Benati

25 min

Adele Goldberg writes about Construction Grammar (a relatively new way of looking at form-meaning relationships, grammar and vocabulary)

Adele Goldberg

20 min

Mike Swan warns of the limitations of chunking methods for teaching

Mike Swan

5 min

Mike Swan defends the explicit teaching of grammar

Mike Swan

10 min

A summary of a study by Nakata and Suzuki (2019) suggesting that interleaving can benefit grammar acquisition (Search in OASIS database)

Nakata and Suzuki (2019)

3 min

Summary of a piece of research looking into whether grammar is better acquired through listening or reading. The study was by Kim and Godfroid (2019) and the summary is from the University of York OASIS database

Kim and Godfroid (2019)

2 min

This 2014 study by Nina Spada and colleagues looks at whether it's better to teach grammar isolated from other tasks, or integrated with communicative activity

Nina Spada and colleagues

20 min

This paper from the University of Potsdam gives good background about how grammar is viewed in SLA theory.

up to p.24

25 min

In this blog I summarise and comment on a chapter by Pawlak from 2021. The topic is explicit and implicit grammar learning and teaching

5 min

This 2018 paper by Hartshorne, Tenenbaum and Pinker examines whether younger learners acquire grammar more easily than adults. Is there a critical age for grammar acquisition?

Hartshorne, Tenenbaum and Pinker

the key points are in the abstract

40 min