How to teach grammar in EFL classes. Explicit versus implicit and deductive versus inductive teaching

Philipp Jacobs

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783346142115
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Grammar, Style, Working Technique, grade: 1,3, University of Hildesheim (Englische Sprache und Literatur), language: English, abstract: The aim of this work is to examine the areas of explicit versus implicit teaching and deductive and inductive teaching, with a focus on teaching grammar in EFL classes. Over the past 20 years and more, a great deal of interest has been paid to grammar teaching in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Much of the research has been into which methods and approaches offer the learners the greatest opportunities to learn the target language. However, according to Motha, "[O]pinions on the right approach to learning a language differ as widely as the languages themselves". This helps to describe the discussion that this work covers. In Section 1, the dichotomy between explicit and implicit teaching is analyzed by investigating the effectiveness of either approach. Section 2 covers an existing interface between explicit and implicit knowledge and presents the three dominant concepts. Section 3 continues with a comparison between grammar teaching approaches that includes a "focus on form" and a "focus on meaning" with the overall aim of connecting these two distinct terms in order to discuss the theory and related practice for language teachers to refer to while planning their lessons. Section 4 presents empirical evidence from two meta-studies by Norris and Ortega and Spada and Tomita, arguing in favor of explicit over implicit instruction. When considering how grammar is to be taught both efficiently and effectively, the underlying target structure and its theoretical characteristics need to be taken into account in determining whether or not this specific structure is a suitable to be either explicitly or implicitly taught. Section 5 discusses several aspects that are related to the target structure. Grammar can be taught, for example, through deductive or inductive teaching methods. Therefore, these two concepts are introduced in Section 6 and 7 as is the PPP- model as an example of deductive teaching (and which is further discussed in Section 9). Section 8 analyzes empirical data of several studies which have investigated the effectiveness of deductive and inductive grammar teaching. The results, as is demonstrated, are contradictory because of differences in terms of measurement, underlying target structure and/or the participants.