In most coursebooks and schemes of work adopted by UK MFL education providers, the exceptions to a given grammar structure are usually taught after the dominant rule governing that structure has been imparted. In the present post I argue that in many cases inverting the teaching sequence may have a more beneficial impact on acquisition. The rationale for this approach is rooted in the way the brain forms and revise the L2 Interlanguage system.

When a learner is taught a grammar rule, the brain creates a cognitive ‘structure’ that s/he will consolidate through much receptive exposure and production. As already discussed in my post on how L2 grammar ‘rules’ are acquired, when a grammar structure is in the process of being automatised, the brain tends to be extremely circumspect in accepting as ‘correct’ – and consequently ‘learnable’ – any use of that structure which does not match the declarative knowledge (or mental rule representation) stored in Long-Term Memory which refers to it. This is particularly true of the final stage in L2 grammar structure acquisition – Andersons’s (2000) Strengthening process. During this stage, the brain needs to be particularly impervious to any alteration to the rule system referring to that structure in order for that system to be stable and avoid encoding ambiguity. For any successful cognitive restructuring of an existing grammar rule to occur two conditions must be met:

• The grammar rule one wants to restructure must be fully acquired for any exception to it to be incorporated; only then will the brain be more likely to ‘see’ the exception to that rule as a separate subsystem which does not pose any ‘threats’ to the dominant rule system;
• The exception to the rule must be processed by the brain numerous times in salient and meaningful contexts; this entails that exceptions to a given rule which do not occur frequently in the language processed in classroom or out-of-the-classroom L2-based activities are less likely to be internalized as they will be ‘masked’ so to speak by the dominant rule.

Let us look at an example: teaching the Passé Composé in French. Coursebooks normally begin with the verbs forming this tense with ‘Avoir’ and after a few lessons move on to the ‘Etre’ verbs. Whilst some of the more able and focused learners can cope with this, in my experience many learners cannot. Very often, teachers may believe students have acquired mastery over the two sets of rules based on their learners’ ability to perform successfully at cloze tasks or other mechanical grammar activities. However, in less structured activities (e.g. spontaneous speech) errors in this area will be usually rife.

Issues in acquiring the exception to the dominant Passé Composé rule are exacerbated by the fact that very few of the verbs requiring Etre are high frequency verbs, hence the students do not usually receive great exposure to them when processing classroom or naturalistic French input. This will make restructuring of the ‘have + past participle’ rule more difficult.

In this case, teaching the ‘Etre’ verbs before the ‘Avoir’ ones is a more effective strategy; once acquired the exception (Etre + past participle) through extensive modelling and practice, the learners will find it easier to learn the dominant rule due to the very frequent occurrence of ‘Avoir Verbs’ in classroom or naturalistic target language input.

The same applies to any other grammar structure where the exceptions to the rule do not occur very frequently in the instructional or naturalistic target language input. Think about irregular past participle such as ‘reçu’, ‘vecu’, ‘su’, etc. which are notoriousy less easy for students to acquire than ‘pris’ or ‘fait’, for instance.

In conclusion, L2 teachers, curriculum designers and course-book writers may want to invert the traditional instructional sequence whereby irregular forms are taught after the regular ones. Moreover, before moving from the less dominant ‘X’ rule sub-system to the dominant one, they ought to ensure as much as possible that the former has been internalized through masses of practice; in other words, that the learners master the use of the target grammar structure not simply in terms of knowing the rule but also in terms of cognitive control over its use, under Real Operating Conditions (see my post on ‘Cognitive Control’ if not clear as to what I mean here).

Cognitive control, as I mentioned in previous posts, refers to the ability to perform a task in real operating conditions. For instance, an L2 learner of French who has had only a few lessons on the Passé Composé may be able to conjugate the verb ‘Aller’ perfectly in the context of a gap-fill exercise; however, when required to use it in spontaneous speech he will produce wrong utterances like ‘J’allé’ or ‘J’ai allé’. Most experienced teachers will be very familiar with this phenomenon – and with this specific mistake.

The reason for the mistake is that the learner has not yet acquired cognitive control over that specific form of the Passé Composé; he has a clear idea of how to form it, has the correct mental representation of the rule (or Declarative knowledge, as Skill theorists call it), but cannot apply it in real time when his brain has to juggle all of the following demands in the very short time available to him to ‘stay’ in the conversation:

1. Understand what the person he is talking to is saying;
2. Plan what to reply;
3. ‘Fetch’ from Long-term Memory the French words that match that plan;
4. Arrange the words into a syntactically correct sentence;
5. Store that sentence in Working Memory;
6. Modify word endings when necessary (i.e. verbs must be conjugated, feminine/plural endings added, etc.),
7. Evaluate its accuracy, which means monitoring the sentence whilst rehearsing it in Working Memory;
8. Pronounce it correctly.

This is a tall order for a novice foreign language speaker as it requires the ability to orchestrate many skills at the same time. Teachers often take it for granted as they are, after all, very good linguists and may not remember how they themselves struggled with that as learners…

To go back to the example I gave at the very beginning of this article, what is ironic is that what the student who gets the ‘je suis allé’ wrong in spontaneous speech will often get by his teacher is a reminder of the rule – that the boy already knows – and more gap-fill exercises – which will not prepare him for effective performance in spontaneous speech at all.

But how do we develop L2 learners’ high levels of executive control (also called ‘Procedural Knowledge’) over a given structure or skill? Surely not simply by getting them to memorize scores of conjugation tables and practice through gap-fill exercises. These activities can be useful as a starting point along the acquisition continuum, but ultimately, the only way to acquire the ability to apply a grammar rule in real operating conditions (i.e. spontaneous speech; essay writing under timed conditions; chatting on the web, etc.) is practice which starts with very easy recognition tasks and culminates several lessons later into more challenging unplanned communicative tasks (e.g. spontaneous conversation). This is an example of a sequence of (easy-to-prepare) activities to develop control in speaking for a year 9-10 class, which would take at least three lessons:

• Presentation / Modelling of the target rule: Explicit (e.g. typical Power Point presentation explaining the rule) or Inductive (e.g. students are given a text or sentences with examples of the target rule and they must work it out by themselves)
• Lots of receptive practice where students see examples of the target grammar structure’s application in the context of a written passage;
• Gap-fill exercises and/or audiolingual-style drills (e.g. students are simply required to repeat a set sentences but change a verb or adjectival ending)
• Easy (English to French) oral translations (e.g. students are given very basic role-plays in English to put into French orally);
• Picture-based tasks (i.e. given a very clear and simple picture, students have to briefly describe it using the target structure);
• Structured ‘narrow’ tasks eliciting basic responses containing the target structure (e.g. basic conversations, surveys or ‘Find someone who’ tasks including questions such as ‘Qu’est-ce que tu as fait hier soir au cinema?’);
• Challenging GCSE style role-plays with cues eliciting the target structure;
• Typical unstructured communicative tasks eliciting spontaneous speech (e.g. GCSE style conversation tasks)

As the above sequence clearly show, the implication is that the acquisition of high levels of executive control over any grammar structure requires a lot of practice through a model that goes from ‘easy’ receptive tasks, to gradually more challenging production tasks which are fairly easy and highly structured to start with and become increasingly demanding on Working Memory capacity. In my experience, learners are way too often required to skip steps and go much too soon from the gap-fill / easy permutation stage to fairly challenging GCSE conversation-like tasks. This is very much the equivalent, in real life, to showing a person how to drive in a motionless car and ask them a few minutes later to drive the same car flat out on a trafficked highway.

In conclusion, the notion of control that I have dicussed in this article should be heeded by language instructors to a much greater extent than it is currently done in many L2 classrooms. One would not claim to be able to play tennis after reading a book about it, or after having bounced the ball with one’s racket against a wall a few times. However, this is pretty much what many teachers do when they limit their teaching of grammar to a presentation of the rule, a few gap-fills and one or two rounds of questions around the class to check understanding – followed  maybe by a short essay or narrative eliciting the use of the target structure.

The achievement of high levels of procedural knowledge must be the ultimate goal of foreign language learning; hence, the development of effective cognitive control must be at the heart of everything we do in every lesson.

The following are some of the ‘mistakes’ common to many lessons I have observed in 25 years of modern foreign language teaching. I have been guilty of most of these myself in the past. Most experienced teachers will be aware of these pitfalls, so, I guess, this post is mainly aimed at less experienced colleagues.

1. Do not use the target language when the structure is complex and cognitively challenging

If the target grammar structure is complex and it is likely to cause cognitive overload to our students, it is preferable to avoid using the target language in order to prevent divided attention. After all, we want all of their attentional resources focused solely on understanding the grammar point(s) we are aiming to ‘teach’.

2. Do not use unfamiliar language in your examples of target-grammar-structure usage

This point relates to the previous one. When modelling the deployment of any given target grammar structure, we may want to prevent any potential source of divided attention from impairing the students’ focus on that structure. Hence, any sentence used to model or even practise the target structure at the early stages ought to occur within linguistic contexts that are very familiar to the students. Any new term or structure which the teacher will ‘throw’ in his/her modelling examples will be a potential source of confusion and distraction with very low surrender value. If one does want to use modelling sentences which contain new items, it would be good practice to provide the translation aside (e.g. in brackets) at least.

3. Do not make students go ‘productive’ straight away

In order to reduce the cognitive load in the first stages of acquisition of a given structure, students (especially the less able or confident ones) should be involved in receptive tasks and not, as often happens, ‘thrown’ straight into productive ones (e.g. translate  sentence into the target language). After a fair amount of receptive processing of the target structure through various modalities (see point 5, below) students will be better prepared for its deployment in the context of productive tasks. Thus, for example, before being asked to use the target morpheme in a structured or unstructured task, students may be involved in recognition tasks (e.g. scanning a text for examples of the target structure); grammaticality judgment tasks (where students need to evaluate how accurately the target structure has been used); multiple choice gap-fills; metalinguistic quizzes; L2 to L1 (fairly easy) translations; etc.

Of course this recommendation should not be over-generalised. There are indeed students who can ‘go productive’ straight away. However, as a norm, in every class there will be a fair amount of students who would benefit greatly from having receptive practice beforehand.

4. Do not just focus on intellectual knowledge and cloze tasks

Very often, in grammar teaching sessions, L2 instructors focus mainly on passing on intellectual knowledge about a structure and then practise that structure through masses of gapped exercises or other mechanical drills, including audiolingual-style ones. This is fine, but grammar instruction must endeavour to go beyond that by providing opportunities for the students, once they have become more versed in the use of a target structure, to use it in the context of less structured activities. The aim: to develop procedural knowledge – what skill-theorists call ‘executive control’.

Executive control is the ability to use any given grammar structure accurately in real operating conditions, i.e.: in real time, under time constraints and communicative pressure, not in a vacuum as a lot of grammar practice takes place, but in contexts in which there is negotiation of meaning between two individuals or between a student and an in-put source (e.g. radio or television). One’s degree of ‘executive control’ over a grammar structure will ultimately determine to what extent one can say one has acquired that grammar structure. So, for example, a student whose control over a given structure limits itself to being able to fill in gaps in a text accurately will be positioned at the very beginning of the acquisition continuum; conversely, someone who can apply the same structure flexibly and correctly across various semantic and syntactic contexts in unplanned speech, will be located at the opposite end of that continuum. Hence, although intellectual knowledge, gap-fills and mechanical drills can be a useful starting point in L2 structural acquisition (Anderson, 2000), grammar morphemes can only be acquired through unplanned communicative practice.

5. Do not forget there are four macro language skills, not just one or two

Often teachers practise and ‘test’ the uptake of a target grammar structure through the written medium (e.g. through translation). However, in real life, students are as likely to ‘hear’, ‘read’ and ‘speak’ that structure as they are to ‘write’ it. Thus, teachers ought to provide the students with plenty of opportunities to process that structure through all four modalities (Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing); to verify uptake of a grammar structure (at the end of a lesson or cycle of lessons) one should involve students in activities which require them to ‘recognize’ and ‘produce’ it in the context of spontaneous spoken or written text/production. For instance, at the end of a lesson or cycle of lessons on negatives, students may be asked to:

• Listen through a number of utterances containing the negatives and demonstrate understanding of the meaning of each utterance. N.B. teachers should ensure that the vocabulary contained in such utterances is as familiar as possible to the learners (as per point two);
• Read through a number of sentences containing the negatives and demonstrate understanding of the meaning of each sentence;
• Engage in structured (audiolingual-style mechanical drills) or semi-structured (communicative) speaking task in which the students are required to use the target negative structure(s).
• Deploy negatives in highly structured writing tasks (e.g. through translation) or less structured activities (e.g. producing negative sentences based on cues such as pictures).

Five common pitfalls of L2-grammar instruction

Most teachers nowadays agree that grammar instruction plays an important role in effective foreign language instruction. There are, however, a number of important factors that one has to take into consideration in the planning, delivery and evaluation of the effects of grammar instruction which are often overlooked, thereby undermining its efficacy. Such factors, which relate to both our epistemological assumptions about the nature of language learning and to neuroscience in general, can seriously undermine the effectiveness of our teaching as well as be important causes of daily teacher frustration. Here are five of the most common pitfalls of grammar instruction that I have witnessed in nearly three decades of MFL teaching.

Pitfall 1: too much focus on declarative knowledge 

A few years back I inherited from a colleague the ‘dream year 9 class’, a class that is, which included la crème de la crème of the students in my school. I was excited as I had taught some of these students before and I knew how keen and bright they were. On the first day of meeting them, one boy, Shaneel, told me ‘Sir, we have already learnt ALL of the (French) tenses!’. I was a bit skeptical but gave them the chance to show off their prodigious knowledge of the five tenses in question by asking them to translate sentences from English to French on mini-boards. The result was disastrous. ‘Wait, Sir’ this is not how we learnt it!’ protested Shaneel, we learnt them like this, and he recited to me  – fairly accurately – scores of verb conjugation tables much in the same way I had learnt Latin at Grammar School.

In other words, Shaneel had declarative knowledge of the Present, Perfect tense, etc. and all of the other grammar structures he had been taught, but was not able to transfer that knowledge to real life use (especially in the oral medium) across various semantic contexts. The reason? He had not been given enough opportunities in lessons, to acquire executive control over the target grammar structures across the following dimension of learning: (a) skills/modalities (L,R,S and W); (b) semantic areas; (c) communicative pressure.

The dichotomy Declarative/Procedural refers to the distinction between having intellectual knowledge about a target structure as opposed to the ability to apply the same knowledge subconsciously bypassing working memory’s attentional systems. According to many models of second language acquisition these two types of knowledge are completely separated, and several of them (see Stephen Krashen’s, for instance) posit that declarative knowledge can NEVER be converted into procedural knowledge. In other words, knowing a grammar rule, does not equate in the least with being able to use it spontaneously and automatically in unmonitored communication.

The obvious Implication for grammar instruction is that to assume that students have acquired a given structure based on their recall of grammar conjugation (by rote) or their effective executions of gap-fill activities is completely erroneous. The acquisition of a grammar structure takes a very long time and cuts across many dimension of morphology, syntax and meaning; hence, teachers should not feel as frustrated as in my experience often do at seeing structures that have been taught over and over again being deployed erroneously by their students in their oral or written output. It may simply mean that more extensive practice is required – not necessarily more intellectual knowledge.

In conclusion, online verb conjugation trainers (e.g. www.language-gym.com), Gap-fill exercises and all other activities aiming at enhancing morphological manipulation skills are useful but must be used in conjunction with translation and scores of real time communicative (oral and written) tasks.

Moreover, if we accept the notion advanced by most psycholinguists that intellectual knowledge about grammar (which is the one student obtain through correction and formative assessment) does not really impact acquisition, we will understand why error correction often has very little impact on our students’ mastery of the most complex structures (see the first article on this blog, below)

Pitfall 2: Developmental ‘unreadiness’

The Natural Order of Morpheme Acquisition Hypothesis is a theory based on a fairly large body of evidence which seems to indicate that humans acquire grammar in an order predetermined by nature. Although I do not espouse this theory of Language Acquisition, researchers working in this paradigm have gathered useful evidence indicating that there are some developmental constraints which limit our brain’s ability to learn the target language grammar structures. Such constraints are due to the challenges posed by such structures to the developing linguistic skills of the L1/L2 learner at given moments in time. To use an analogy: before teaching someone how to park, you would teach them how to start the engine, reverse, how to engage the clutch,etc. By the same token if grammar structure X requires the knowledge of grammar structure Y for its effective execution, one would have to be able to perform Y effectively before being able to learn X. The list below shows, for instance, the order of first language acquisition of English Morphemes in R. Brown (1973):

1 Present progressive (-ing)

2/3 in, on

4 Plural (-s)

5 Past irregular

6 Possessive (-’s)

7 Uncontractible copula (is, am, are)

8 Articles (a, the)

9 Past regular (-ed) 10 Third person singular (-s)

11 Third person irregular

12 Uncontractible auxiliary (is, am, are)

13 Contractible copula

14 Contractible auxiliary

Although I do not believe that the above order is necessarily correct and all of the evidence produced in its support valid, the Natural Order Hypothesis points to the importance of developmental readiness and has  one important implication for language learning: that without getting bogged down with which morpheme comes first or second or third, we need to sequence the order in which we teach grammatical structures  judiciously, based more on our cognitive empathy with the students and our experience of teaching equivalent groups of learners in the past rather than on the textbook or schemes of work provided by the Ministry of Education of Local authorities. Our presumptions of what constitutes an easy or challenging grammar structure for our students may not coincide with our student’s developmental readiness to acquire it. Grammar structures must be taught and corrected only when the students are developmentally ready to acquire them, in order for grammar instruction to be effective.

Pitfall 3: The rate of human forgetting / Poor recycling

Picture 1, below, shows the way us humans ‘forget’ the information we have been initially exposed to. As many studies have clearly proven, after only two days 70% of what we have been taught/processes on day 1, is lost. After seven days without any memory rehearsal, about 80 % of it is forgotten. Unless, through constant recycling, the modelling of effective revision strategies and continuous formative and summative mini-assessments teachers keep the memory traces alive, the human rate of forgetting is such that even the best grammar lesson will be forgotten.

Picture 1- Rate of human forgetting

Unfortunately, in my career I have rarely seen grammatical structures (or even vocabulary) being recycled constantly and in a principled way – fear of interference being often the obstacle, e.g. : if I revise the present tense now that I have just introduced the Perfect Tense, my students will be confused. Constant recycling, however, is absolutely imperative.

Poor recycling often also explains the inefficacy of a specific type of grammar instruction, correction, and why spending hours recording formative feedback on an App like Explaining everything may simply not impact learners much. The intellectual knowledge – which may not become procedural for the reason mentioned above – produced by these means will be mostly lost unless teachers provide constant recycling of that feedback over the five six weeks following the provision of that feedback (honestly: how many teachers actually do that?).

Pitfall 4: Low cognitive empathy

Cognitive empathy is a term I coined a couple of days ago during a discussion with a colleague. My point being that to be an effective teacher you must not simply be emotionally empathetic but also in sync with the learners’ thought processes and general cognitive development. AFL strategies do help a lot in terms of giving us an insight into how well our students our doing in learning what we are teaching them. However, they do not give us sufficient insight into the cognitive barriers to acquiring a specific target grammar structures. For instance, in the planning phase of teaching the Perfect tense in French one should think about all the possible obstacles posed by the following to the students cognitively (not just in terms of intellectual learning, but also in terms of acquisition as defined above):

• The learners’ grammar background (how well do they master the present tense of AVOIR and ETRE?; do they know how to pronounce ‘e’ with an acute accent?; etc.)
• The native language (does their native language have an equivalent of this tense? Will it cause interference?)
• The various steps needed to be able to master the perfect tense (deciding whether it is the correct context for Perfect Tense use, correctly choosing the required form of the correct auxiliary; deciding if the verb is regular or irregular, select the correct regular or irregular form of the past participle; pronouncing it correctly)
• The time available for it to be learnt DECLARATIVELY;
• The time available for it to be learnt PROCEDURALLY (i.e. automatized)

Another useful strategy to deploy whilst planning our lessons is to cast our mind back to the days when we learnt the same grammar structures as L2 learners of French: what did we find hard? What strategies did we come up with to facilitate our own learning? How long did it take us to learn that tense? Our (L1 English) students will have more or less the same issues, after all. This should enhance our cognitive empathy.

Finally, there are useful techniques that I have used several times to gain a better insight into our students’ learners cognitive processes. One of them is think-aloud protocols a very powerful (if time consuming process) tool to get into our students’ minds:  students perform a task (e.g. writing an essay) whilst verbalizing every single thought that goes through their heads. Getting them to write an account of a past holiday after a cycle of lessons on the Perfect tense in front of you while thinking aloud will provide you with a clearer understanding of how well they master the Perfect Tense in real operating conditions and of their problems with that tense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_aloud_protocol )

I have observed poor cognitive empathy in many lessons over the years. Students resent it as much as they resent lack of emotional empathy or humour. High levels of cognitive empathy are, in my opinion, the marker of an excellent practitioner.

Pitfall 5: Lack of a common metalanguage

If teacher and students do not share a common metalanguage, grammar instruction is less effective. Several studies have shown that students who do have a solid repertoire of metawords (adjectives, mood, tense, ect.) learn grammar more effectively both in and outside the classroom (independently). They also learn more effectively from corrective feedback. One anecdote I will never forget was when I inherited a class from my former colleague Gill Bruce and since she had taught her students the difference between an adverb and an adjective, I could –for the first time ever – very quickly get my students to understand the difference between ‘mal’ et ‘mauvais’ in French by simply saying: one is an adverb and the other one is an adjective.

The implications for teachers is that we need to use metalanguage from the very start and make constant reference to it (in our marking, too).

In conclusion, in planning and delivering our grammar lessons one has to be very mindful of all of the above factors. We are often reminded by scholars and educators of the importance to empathize with our students emotionally since, as my colleague Dr Michael Browning rightly said to me once: “if they like you a lot they will learn better anyway, regardless of which technique or technology you use”. However, empathizing cognitively in terms of truly attempting to (a) sync our teaching to their specific individual linguistic needs and (b) to the way their brain works when acquiring a foreign language (as posited by neuroscience) is imperative in order for us to pace our teaching effectively and to intervene effectively through adequate remedial instruction.