EXPLICIT VS.

IMPLICIT INSTRUCTION
Although there is general agreement on the value of teaching grammar, for some time it
has been debated whether instruction should be explicit or implicit. In explicit grammar
teaching, the rules are explained to learners, or the learners are directed to find the rules by
looking at linguistic examples, that is, sentences that embody the rules. Implicit teaching, on the
other hand, "makes no overt reference to rules or forms" (Doughty, 2003, p. 265). Until recently,
arguments in favor of one or the other approach were not supported by evidence. But a careful
examination of Norris and Ortega's (2000) analysis of 49 studies, referred to earlier, has shown
that explicit teaching produces better and longer-lasting learning than implicit teaching.
Most English and foreign language textbooks use a style of explicit grammar teaching
called deductive instruction, in which different structures are presented and then practiced in
different kinds of exercises and activities including memorizing dialogs, reading simplified texts,
doing transformation exercises (in which one grammatical structure is converted to another), and
getting explicit negative feed- back (correction of errors by the teacher). Critics of this traditional
"presentation- practice" model believe that it does not result in learning. Long (1997), for one,
who refers to this method as focus on forms, claims that it teaches more than the learner needs,
does not present a realistic model of language use, ignores research findings that show learning is
not a "one-time categorical event," and ignores the role of developmental stages in learning. In
spite of this harsh criticism, the majority of textbooks today present grammatical rules using some
or all of the activities and exercises described above.
The alternative to deductive grammar presentation (within the explicit grammar teaching
framework) is inductive instruction. This involves having students formulate rules from natural
language, and it is perhaps more useful in teaching intermediate and advanced students. An
excellent example of how this is done can be found in Carter, Hughes, and McCarthy (2000),
Exploring Grammar in Context. In order to help students formulate the grammatical rule that
constrains the position of adverbs in English sentences, they are given two sentences and asked to
guess which one would occur in "real conversation." After judging several pairs like this, students
are asked, "What rules could you make for adverbs with going to in the future?", "What rules
could you make for adverbs with do / does / did questions?" Examples of actual language follow.
These are intended to help students formulate the rules that determine the position of different
kinds of adverbs in sentences and to relate these discoveries to the use of adverbs in conversation
as opposed to writing. To aid the process, the authors provide summaries throughout the book that
supply generalizations about the grammar of English adverbs.
It is now generally accepted that either form of explicit instruction is better than no
grammar instruction at all. The criticism that Long and others level at the use of explicit
instruction in current textbooks is that packaging materials into discrete units, i.e., chapters, gives
a misleading impression that students have "learned" a grammatical topic after they have
completed the chapter in which it was presented. Long and others know that the explicit
presentation and practice is just the beginning, and much more practice will be required before
students begin to approach competence. They have pointed to research showing that acquisition
of grammar is promoted by instruction that not only stimulates students to reflect on the nature of
grammatical rules, but provides opportunities for those rules to be used as part of meaningful
conversation in realistic contexts (DeKeyser, 1998). This type of instruction is what Long (1997)
has referred to as focus on form (as opposed to the focus on forms instruction used in many
ESL/EFL textbooks). We will now discuss approaches for teaching grammar that continue to
compete for teachers' attention.
*Retrieved from The Teacher's Grammar of English by Ron Cowan, CUP 2008 pp.31-32