GRAMMAR

Grammar is about how words and parts of words are combined to let us comprehend and make utterances. Lexicogrammar is concerned with the overlap between grammar and vocabulary (lexis). What does research tell us about how learners acquire grammar? How can this help us in day-to-day teaching?

Reading

Diane Larsen-Freeman’s article about myths of grammar teaching (Time: 10 minutes)

A 2019 paper by Takashi Oba about the psycholinguistic processes underlying grammar practice activities (Time: 15 minutes) NEW 6.3.23

Miroslaw Pawlak (2021) writes about approaches to grammar teaching and learning and the gap between research and classroom practice (Time: 20 minutes) NEW 4.5.23

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 (Time: 25 minutes)

A summary of recent research about how we should teach grammar from Language Teacher Toolkit (Time: 5 minutes)

The Natural Order Hypothesis: a summary from Language Teacher Toolkit (Time: 5 minutes)

Where lexicon and grammar conjoin. An interesting article about phraseology, lexicogrammar and emergentism (Time: 20 minutes)

Alessandro Benati examines the role of input and output tasks in grammar teaching (Time: 25 minutes)

Adele Goldberg writes about Construction Grammar (a relatively new way of looking at form-meaning relationships, grammar and vocabulary) (20 minutes)

Mike Swan warns of the limitations of chunking methods for teaching (Time: 5 minutes)

Mike Swan defends the explicit teaching of grammar (Time: 10 minutes)

A summary of a study by Nakata and Suzuki (2019) suggesting that interleaving can benefit grammar acquisition (Search in OASIS database) (Time: 3 minutes)

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 (Time: 2 minutes)

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 (Time: 20 minutes)

This paper from the University of Potsdam gives good background about how grammar is viewed in SLA theory. (Time: 25 minutes up to p.24).

In this blog I summarise and comment on a chapter by Pawlak from 2021. The topic is explicit and implicit grammar learning and teaching (Time: 5 minutes)

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? (Time: 40 minutes, but the key points are in the abstract)

Video

The interface: can consciously learned rules and practice become internalised? Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell of musicuentos.com gives an illustrated talk about the so-called interface between explicit and implicit knowledge (Time: 10 minutes)

What is grammar? A talk by Michael Swan (Time: 22 minutes)

Alessandro Benati delivers a lecture on the role of grammar instruction in second language acquisition (Time: 41 minutes)

Scott Thornbury takes aim at the traditional grammar syllabus (aka the “synthetic grammar syllabus”) (Time: 5 minutes)

This short video from TESOL Class explains the concept of interlanguage (Time: 2 minutes)