Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom

The question of whether there is or is not an interface between language instruction and the development of unconscious language knowledge is a topic of ongoing debate.

Some research conveys an optimism that unconscious L2 knowledge may be affected by explicit instruction. In the case of most of the properties treated in these papers, knowledge of the properties under investigation is evident by advanced proficiency levels, and the authors are suggesting that explicit instruction could speed up and make instruction more efficient.

However, if it turns out that unconscious L2 knowledge is, in fact, impervious to instruction, then it would be all the more crucial that instruction materials are as accurate as possible in terms of their linguistic descriptions. It is by no means straightforward to create teaching materials that are both as fully linguistically accurate as possible and also suitably accessible for the learners. Nonetheless, as language learners would be well served by such an endeavour, we conclude with an exhortation for further collaboration by language teachers and linguistic researchers, to make findings from generative linguistics available for language teaching.

Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom. Language Teaching Research.

Researchers: Heather Marsden and Roumyana Slabakova. 2019.

Find out more about this project: Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom: introduction