Principles of instructed language learning revisited: Guidelines for effective grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom

Authors:

• Mirosław Pawlak

Abstract

Although there is now a consensus that grammar instruction is facilitative or even necessary in some situations, questions remain as to how it should most beneficially be conducted, with answers to these questions hinging to a large extent upon the contexts in which form-focused instruction takes place. In fact, theorists and researches have put forward a number of principles that should guide practitioners in teaching formal aspects of language, but many of those proposals are general in nature, they are not sufficiently comprehensive and detailed to inform everyday instruction, or they include solutions which may be of questionable utility in foreign language contexts, where limited in- and out-ofclass exposure as well as educational traditions dictate that points of grammar are systematically covered. The present chapter represents an attempt to fill this unfortunate gap by offering a tentative model of grammar teaching in the foreign language classroom, which comprises principles that, on the one hand, are grounded in research findings but, on the other, are sensitive to the specificity of this setting.