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The role of grammar in communicative language teaching
Dr. Carl Blyth
University of Texas at Austin


Dr. Carl Blyth is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin where he also serves as Coordinator of Lower Division French. Dr. Blyth has published articles and chapters in the areas of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and computer assisted language learning. His recent book, "Untangling the Web: Nonce's Guide to Language and Culture in the Internet" explores the pedagogical applications of the Internet.

"Language instruction has long been plagued by an on-going debate concerning the proper role of grammar instruction. Unfortunately, the debate has fostered a dichotomous approach to grammar instruction and a naive view of the nature of grammar. In one approach, the so-called traditional approach-grammatical phenomena are assumed to be wholly amenable to explicit presentation and practice. In the other approach, teachers maintain that such linguistic analysis is largely irrelevant to acquisition. What is all-important is comprehensible input.

While these two approaches are opposites in many ways, they actually share an important commonality-they both are based on a conception of grammar that is monolithic: either grammar can be taught or it can't. Such an either/or conception of grammar that underlies both approaches is equally untenable.

The Focus-On-Form approach, the so-called middle ground between these two extremes, is based on a more realistic conception of grammar as heterogeneous, that is, comprised of qualitatively different phenomena: Some grammar points are axiomatic-easy to describe, easy to apply. Other items are essentially probabilistic statements about language use--difficult if not impossible to apply. Teachers intuitively understand that not all grammar points are created equal and yet there is still a wide-spread one-size-fits all mentality.

Another fallacy that has been fostered by the "great grammar debate" is the belief that grammar instruction is synonymous with explicit techniques. The real problem is that grammar instruction in both approaches is limited to a small set of pedagogical practices. In contrast, a Focus-On-Form pedagogy profitably mixes explicit and implicit techniques depending on the grammar item and the communicative task.

In short, a Focus-On-Form pedagogy is more complicated than the other two approaches. It requires the teacher to think about the nature of each grammatical item and to ask some very difficult questions:

• Is this form amenable to instruction?
• Can this form be learned without pedagogical intervention?
• What combination of implicit and explicit techniques gives the best results?

Admittedly, teachers and researchers may not always know the answers, but at least we can begin by asking the right questions."