The Role of Grammar Instruction in a Communicative Approach

Author(s): Tracy David Terrell

Source: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 52-63
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers
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The Role of Grammar
in a Communicative
Approach
TRACY DAVID TERRELL
Department of Linguistics
Universityof California
San Diego, CA 92093
INPUT AND ACQUISITION
THE DOMINANT MODEL FOR SECOND LAN-
guage instruction in the United States in the
seventies and early eighties has been described
as a "cognitive" approach. The theoretical
model that underlies the approach is that a lan-
guage consists of a "set of rules" with an asso-
ciated lexicon. It follows logically from the
model that foreign language students must
learn rules of grammar. The suggested se-
quence is: study a rule (usually with instructor
explanation), practice a rule (in grammar exer-
cises), and then apply the rule in meaningful
interactions in the target language.
Krashen (13) has proposed a model of second
language acquisition in which the processing
of input, rather than grammar instruction,
plays the pivotal role. His hypothesis is that
acquisition occurs when learners process input
in a low anxiety context. Learners presumably
make use of a mental language acquisition
device that allows them to store and produce
utterances in the target language. Krashen does
not attempt to specify how the acquisition
process unfolds, but rather describes the con-
ditions necessary for it to take place. He posits
that the learner must be relaxed (have a low
"affective filter") and be focused on meaning
rather than form. The input must be compre-
hensible and in addition be at an "i + 1" level,
that is, slightly more complex than the learner's
current level of knowledge. An explicit knowl-
edge of grammar by adults is said to be useful
in only one way --as a "monitor" for self-cor-
rection under certain circumstances, to wit, that
the learner "know the rule" to be applied,
that the learner be focused on correctness, and
TheModernLanguage Journal, 75, i (1991)
0026-7902/91/0001/052 $1.50/0
?1991 TheModernLanguage Journal
Instruction
that the learner have time to think about apply-
ing the rule to the output. Krashen has also
suggested that grammar study may lower the
affective filter for some adults and indirectly
contribute to the acquisition process.
The major implication of this "input model"
is that learners' output is supposedly based
directly on the input they process and store.
Children acquiring a first or second language
seem to do what Krashen's model predicts:
there is usually a silent period in which chil-
dren appear to "build up" competence which
is later displayed in their speech.
While this model appears to describe in
broad terms how children acquire language,
adult second language learners vary greatly in
the strategies they use for second language
acquisition. Some adult learners indeed do
seem to rely heavily on input for their output.
They experience a rather long silent period and
do not attempt much speech until they have
built up some competence. As an example,
consider DC, a Spanish-speaking learner of
English living in San Diego for the past two
years. DC has had a great deal of input in Eng-
lish, but little of it is comprehensible (for
example, he watches a great deal of television
in English), and he has had even less input at
i (his level of comprehension) or i + 1. He has
rarely attempted to speak English, preferring
instead to rely on other more bilingual speakers
of Spanish to translate for him. However,
recently he has begun to speak some rudimen-
tary English, and it is clear that his output
consists of words and phrases he has heard at
work (in a restaurant).
Other adults appear to take a different ap-
proach to acquisition. As an example, consider
RV, a native speaker of Dutch who has lived
in the United States since he was fourteen. RV
has managed to acquire a fair amount of com-
petence in Spanish on a social basis solely
TracyDavid Terrell
through informal conversations with native
speakers of Spanish, most of whom are only
superficial acquaintances. RV did not allow
himself a silent period to build up some com-
petence, but rather from the beginning tended
to initiate conversations with native speakers
himself. His primary strategy has been to think
of something he wishes to ask or say and ask
a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English,
"How do you say X in Spanish?" He then uses
his best imitation of the utterance with the
native speakers. RV understands enough of the
input to continue the conversation, but rarely
does he use any elements in the input in his own
output.
As another example of an acquisition
strategy not based on input, consider my own
attempts at learning Arabic during a five-week
stay in Morocco. I knew no Arabic on arrival
and soon found that even the simplest input was
incomprehensible. I soon switched to an out-
put strategy practically identical to the one used
by RV described above. I would ask (in
French) how you say X in Arabic and then
repeat the response several times, trying to
memorize it. Then I would try out the new
word or phrase as often as I could. I learned
to count, to purchase pastries, to order tea in
the morning, and to use a few other routines.
Clearly, I acquired some words and phrases in
Arabic, but what I acquired was my own ver-
sion of these words and phrases based on my
output, not on the input since I rarely heard
these same phrases in the input directed to me.
Indeed, I was rarely able to identify any indi-
vidual words in the input and mostly deter-
mined the meaning of utterances directed at me
through contextual guessing.
In summary, some informal evidence exists
that adults do not automatically use input to
develop competence in the way Krashen has
suggested. The question then naturally arises
as to the role of grammar instruction in adult
second language acquisition. If some adults do
not process input as Krashen suggests then it
may also be the case that a conscious knowledge
of grammar may play a greater (or even lesser)
role in language acquisition and processing
than Krashen posits.
GRAMMAR AND METHODOLOGY
I use the term "explicit grammar instruction"
(EGI) somewhat loosely to mean the use of
instructional strategies to draw the students'
53
attention to or focus on form and/or structure.
The role of EGI in a second/foreign language
class in the United States has changed drasti-
cally in the last forty years--as the favored
methodology changed from grammar-transla-
tion to audio-lingual, then from audio-lingual
to cognitive, and finally from cognitive to
communicative approaches.
The grammar-translation approach concen-
trated on grammar skills, in particular the
ability to use grammatical terminology to
describe the various morphological and syntac-
tic principles of the target language. With the
advent of audio-lingualism, instructors were
not supposed to spend a great deal of time talk-
ing directly about target language grammar
rules. The oral input available to the students
in the form of dialogues and pattern drills, how-
ever, was highly structured, following a strictly
ordered grammatical syllabus; and, in fact,
most of the students' time in an audio-lingual
course was spent drilling grammatical forms
and structures. Proponents of the "cognitive
approach" stressed that students should under-
stand the rules for using target language forms
and structures before they attempted to use
them for communication.'
With the advent of the popularity of various
communicative approaches, especially in ESL
classes in this country and also in foreign lan-
guage classes in Europe based on a notional-
functional syllabus, the predominant role of
grammar as the organizing principle in a lan-
guage class has been called into question. In
most communicative approaches direct and
explicit grammar instruction has been accorded
a somewhat peripheral position in the total
course design. The central position of com-
municative (or at least meaningful) activities
in the class is supported by research such as that
reported in Bialystok, who found that "func-
tional practice facilitated performance on all
four tasks examined. . . . formal practice was
effective only to a limited extent."
The disfavor of a heavy grammar focus in
the class is at least partially due to the influ-
ence among language instructors of Krashen's
"monitor" hypothesis, which posits that the role
of explicit grammar knowledge is limited to that
of a "monitor," or editor, which some speakers
are able to use in writing or prepared speech,
but which is not very useful in ordinary con-.
versation. According to Krashen, current
second language acquisition research supports
the notion that an explicit knowledge of how
54
forms and structures function in the target lan-
guage is neither a necessary nor sufficient con-
dition for their "acquisition." In a similar vein,
Garrett (p. 133) takes note of the following
apparent paradox: "grammatical competence
must be an integral part of communicative
competence, but learning grammar does not
seem to help students achieve either."
In his insightful review of The Natural Ap-
proach, Krahnke (p. 598) suggests that "much
of the effort spent arguing against the teaching
of grammar might be better spent on convinc-
ing true believers in grammar instruction that
grammar has a newly defined but useful role
to play in language teaching and in showing
them what it is." The purpose of this paper is
to do exactly what Krahnke suggested. I will
suggest ways in which an explicit knowledge
of grammatical relationships in the target lan-
guage can be helpful to some learners in the
acquisition process itself. Pienemann formu-
lates the question this way: "Can the processes
of natural acquisition be influenced by formal
instruction?" This same question has been for-
malized as the Pedagogical GrammarHypothesis
(28; rpt. 29: p. 109): "Instructional strategies
which draw the attention of the learner to spe-
cifically structural regularities of the language
as distinct from the message content, will under
certain conditions significantly increase the rate
of acquisition over and above the rate expected
from learners acquiring that language under
natural circumstances where attention to form
may be minimal and sporadic."
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
The research literature has focused on five
major areas (19): 1) does formal classroom
instruction help in the acquisition process? 2)
what effect does grammar instruction have on
fluency/accuracy? 3) what effect does grammar
instruction have on the rate of acquisition? 4)
what effect does grammar instruction have on
the order of acquisition of grammatical mor-
phemes and structures? 5) what effect does
grammar instruction have on ultimate attain-
ment in second language acquisition?
Effects of LanguageInstruction. The first ques-
tion makes sense only in a '"naturalistic" envi-
ronment since for foreign language learners the
classroom is the only source for comprehensible
input and meaningful oral interaction. Re-
searchers have tried to establish whether or not
formal instruction is valuable for learners who
The Modern LanguageJournal 75 (1991)
live in the target language culture. In my
opinion the controversy surrounding this ques-
tion has become exaggerated. Clearly, lan-
guage instruction can have positive effects on
language acquisition even in naturalistic situa-
tions: the goal is to determine what kinds of in-
struction are most beneficial to which students.
Fluency/Accuracy.If one asks whether EGI
automatically leads to an immediate increased
fluency or accuracy in ordinary speech, the
answer is clearly "no." But if we ask whether
EGI contributes in the long run to increased
fluency or accuracy in ordinary speech, we
simply do not have enough evidence to give a
definitive answer. On the other hand, research
evidence, such as that reported by Spada,
seems to support the notion that EGI is not the
major factor in the accurate use of grammati-
cal morphemes or structures in normal conver-
sation. Other factors that appear to be of more
importance are: 1) amount of comprehensible
input; 2) kinds and amount of interaction with
native speakers; 3) type of motivation for learn-
ing the target language, and so forth.
Strong evidence exists that the ability to
demonstrate grammatical knowledge on a dis-
crete-point grammar exam does not guarantee
the ability to use that knowledge in ordinary
conversation, be it spontaneous or monitored.
In one illustrative study (35), Terrell, Baycroft,
and Perrone showed that in spite of concen-
trated instruction on the forms and uses of the
Spanish subjunctive, first-year university stu-
dents were unable to use the mood correctly in
free conversation. Although correctness levels
on a written test averaged above ninety per-
cent, students only rarely surpassed ten percent
accuracy levels in conversation. Not only were
students not able to use the subjunctive in spon-
taneous conversation, apparently they were
also not able to monitor their speech with the
grammatical information they had learned.
Similarly, Scott showed that neither "explicit"
nor "implicit" instruction was of much help in
increasing students' ability to use the French
subjunctive on an oral exam. On the other
hand, as predicted, students receiving EGI did
much better on a discrete-point grammar test
than students receiving only comprehensible
input containing the target structures.
Rate. Long (19: pp. 127-28) reviews research
relevant to the issue of whether language
instruction affects the rate of acquisition. His
conclusion is that formal instruction can be
more efficient than just informal "street"input.
Tracy David Terrell
Since the research Long examines includes lan-
guage classes in which both input/interaction
activities as well as EGI were included, it is not
possible to conclude anything about the specific
contribution of EGI. Language instruction
could increase the rate of acquisition by increas-
ing the amount of comprehensible input and
opportunities for meaningful production of the
target language.
Let us assume that in the foreign language
class there will be provision for comprehensible
input and meaningful interactional activities.
Several important questions arise concerning
the relationship between the rate of acquisition
and EGI that we do not yet have answers for:
1) does EGI speed up the acquisition of gram-
matical forms and structures at all? 2) what
kinds of EGI are helpful in increasing the rate
of acquisition? 3) which forms and structures
are aided by EGI? 4) which sorts of students
are aided by EGI?
Order. The research evidence from many
sources supports Krashen's contention that EGI
is not a major factor in the order of acquisition
of grammatical forms or structures.2 One of the
clearest research findings is that "learners of a
given second language (apparently regardless
of the first language) tend to pass through cer-
tain transitional states of grammatical compe-
tence" and that this path appears to be relatively
unaffected by EGI (37). In one pertinent for-
eign language acquisition study, VanPatten
(36; 38) found that learners of Spanish pass
through five stages in the acquisition of the
ser/estarcopula contrast and that the five stages
did not match the instructional sequence used
by the instructor. In a follow-up study,
VanPatten (39) looked at the acquisition of clitic
pronouns, asking: ". .. does the order of emer-
gence (or, better, the accuracy scores) reflect
instructional sequence?" As in previous studies,
the answer was clearly negative: direct object
clitics were the first studied and the last to be
acquired. He concludes: "Like the data from
ESL, then, instructional sequence and presen-
tation is not a good predictor of accuracy or
emergence of form in spontaneous, conversa-
tional speech."
Long's view, which coincides with Krashen's,
is that "acquisitional sequences may well be
immutable" (19: p. 125). In his review of the
research literature, Long speculates that al-
though certain studies might superficially
appear to show an alteration of acquisitional
sequences, such changes are probably tempo-
55
rary. The position that the order of acquisition
of morphology and syntax is pretty much unaf-
fected by grammar instruction is also supported
by Pienemann's work with Italian children
learning German as a second language.
UltimateAttainment.After looking at the small
amount of research bearing on the question of
long-term gains through grammar instruction,
Long (19: p. 131) concludes that "more in-
structed learners had gone further or reached
higher levels of SL attainment." Pica's research
is pertinent to the issue. She studied the mor-
pheme use of three groups of learners of Eng-
lish: naturalistic (no formal instruction), formal
(living in Mexico City), and mixed. She found
that there were interesting differences between
the "formal" and "naturalistic" groups. The
instruction-only group scored higher than the
other two groups on both the plural -s and the
third person singular -s. Pica points out that
in both cases these morphemes have easy to
understand form-function relationships and
that instruction may have its greatest effect in
such cases. Pica also finds that learners who
have had no formal instruction tend to use pro-
duction strategies of omission, e.g., Youhave
book?I havejob tomorrow,more than learners with
formal instruction. On the other hand, learners
with formal instruction tended to overgen-
eralize and over-apply morphological marking,
e.g., I don'tunderstandingthesepeople. Long (19:
p. 123) emphasizes that "the tendencies to over-
apply grammatical morphology and to avoid
pidginization strategies distinguished instructed
from totally uninstructed learners at nearly all
proficiency levels in her (cross-sectional) study"
and concludes that "this could signal long-term,
even permanent, differences between the two
types of learners."
In summary, research to date has not found
EGI to be the most important factor in second
language acquisition.3 It may work by speeding
up the entire acquisition process and it may
help learners to avoid certain learning produc-
tion strategies such as omission and reduction.
However, it is likely that no simple answer
exists to the question of the effects of EGI on
adult second language acquisition. Rather, it
is more probable that instruction about forms
or structures of the target language is benefi-
cial to learners at a particular point in their
acquisition of the target language.
Given that the preliminary findings do not
support a direct link between EGI and the
ability to use grammatical structures accurately
56
in meaningful and spontaneous speech, the
purpose of this paper will be to suggest ways
in which EGI can indirectly support the normal
acquisition process. In the next section I will
describe one model of L2 acquisition and in the
subsequent section will examine possible inter-
actions of EGI with the acquisition process as
predicted by this model. There are other ways
EGI might influence second language acquisi-
tion. For example, grammar instruction may
be affectively positive for some literate adults
(for some evidence see 10). EGI may be of help
in learning to read and write. In this paper I
will concentrate on the possible interactions
between grammar instruction and the acquisi-
tion process itself.
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE
BINDING/ACCESS FRAMEWORK
To hypothesize possible contributions of EGI
to the acquisition process, we need to examine
the processes and the product involved in
acquisition: 1) what psycholinguistic processes
are utilized in input processing? 2) how is the
resulting information organized and accessed
by the learner? For the sake of illustration I will
concentrate in this section on the acquisition
of words, and in particular on the acquisition
of morphology. In the case of the three foreign
languages commonly taught in the United
States, Spanish, French, and German, most
EGI at beginning levels involves morphology
or morphosyntax: tense, plurality, case, mood,
and so forth.
In an earlier essay (33) I suggested that lan-
guage acquisition consists of at least two paired
components: comprehension strategies and
binding and production strategies and access.
Comprehension strategies are the processing
principles used by the learner to make sense of
the stream of target language forms in the oral
input. One of the central comprehension strate-
gies successfully employed by beginners
involves the use of key words and context to
assign an interpretation to an utterance. I use
the term binding to refer to the psycholinguistic
linking of meaning to a new form in the target
language, where form can be a monomorphemic
word (e.g., tree), a polymorphemic word (e.g.,
running), or a grammatical marker (e.g., will).
Production strategies are those used by the
beginner to put the forms in a linear string to
constitute an output. Some anecdotal evidence
The Modern LanguageJournal 75 (1991)
exists that L2 learners primarily make use of
two production strategies as beginners: 1)
nominate a topic and then make a comment
on it; and 2) string forms together in approxi-
mately the native language word order. Access
refers to the retrieval and production of a form
to express some intended meaning in the tar-
get language.
Based on a framework that includes the
notions of binding and access, the acquisition
of a form in the target language is defined as
establishing a connection between concept and
form. A meaning-form connection implies that
when the form is used in a normal communi-
cative context, learners can understand its
meaning. And it also means that when learners
wish to express a meaning, they can access and
produce the correct form without undue delay.
In this view, the acquisition of forms consists
of the positing and storing of pairs of meaning-
form relationships and the restrictions on the
appropriate access of these forms to express an
intended meaning. It follows from the model
that the learners' task in the acquisition process
is to use the input to posit and store correct
meaning-form relationships.
The simplest example of the binding process
would be the binding of a monomorphemic
word to its prototypical meaning. For example,
an English speaker learning Spanish would
have no problem using normal input to link the
concept "table" to the Spanish word mesa since
the referents and the prototypical range of use
of the two words are practically identical in both
languages.
The binding of a new target language poly-
morphemic word to a prototypical meaning
(and the acquisition of its accompanying struc-
tural relationships and restrictions on use) is
undoubtedly more complex. For example, to
acquire the Spanish adjectives bonito/ bonita,
"pretty-masculine/pretty-feminine," learners
have to bind both words to the concept "pretty,"
and in addition the word bonitomust be linked
to the grammatical concept "masculine" and the
word bonita to "feminine." Learners have to
access these words so that bonito is used to
describe masculine nouns such as autoand bonita
to describe feminine nouns such as mesa. To do
this learners posit a grammatical connection of
gender between bonitoand bonita,between bonito
and other masculine adjectives, and between
bonita and other feminine adjectives. A rough
illustration of such a network of psycholinguis-
TracyDavid Terrell
tic connections is found in the following
schema:
"pretty"
bonita alta
bonito alto
nuevo nueva
To talk about these meaning-form relation-
ships and co-occurrence restrictions, linguists
use metalinguistic terminology and speak of
semantics and grammar rules: in this case
adjectives in Spanish must be made to agree
in gender with the nouns they modify. How-
ever, in the binding-access framework, the
actual cognitive processes which function dur-
ing speech comprehension and production are
different from our popular concept of rule use.
My hypothesis is that what must be perceived
and stored in the acquisition process are the
individual meaning-form pairs, not a gram-
matical rule. Consequently, the ability to gen-
eralize patterns to new forms and contexts is
not due to the learner's having formulated (sub-
consciously) a rule, but rather is based on a net-
work of meaning-form associations. For
example, native speakers of Spanish are able
to generate a nonexistent form like *purema
(*it pureems) from an equally nonexistent
infinitive *puremar (*to pureem), not because
they have acquired some morphological "rule"
but, rather, by analogy with the hundreds of
other infinitive-third person singular connec-
tions already stored. According to this view,
then, second language learners may understand
the concept of gender agreement in Spanish,
but acquisition depends on positing meaning-
form connections for individual items. L2
learners learn to react to a phrase such as mesa
bonito as incorrect, not only because they
explicitly "know" it to be a violation of the
gender agreement rule in some abstract lin-
guistic sense, but because the words themselves
are bound psycholinguistically to meanings
with different restrictions on their occurrences.
The model of morphological processing and
storing described above views the lexicon as
organized with meaning-form associations as
the building blocks of a network of linguistic
association.4 Each word is connected to both
its meaning and to other words by connections
of various sorts: semantic, syntactic, morpho-
57
logical, phonological, and so forth. For ex-
ample, the word dog is connected semantically
to the word puppy and phonologically to the
word log. It is connected morphologically to its
plural dogs.
Let us now consider briefly how the binding-
access model as described would function as a
psycholinguistic model for the acquisition of
morphology. In the earliest stage of natural
acquisition, a learner processes and stores mor-
phologically complex forms as a single unit with
no internal analysis. For example, some
Spanish words are acquired by English
speakers first in their singular forms, words like
carro (car), botella (bottle), casa (house), and
some first in the plural forms, words like ojos
(eyes), manos (hands), pies (feet). The plural
forms are bound to a semantic feature "plural,"
but the forms themselves are unanalyzed and
"plural" does not correspond to any particular
part of the word. As the number of words which
are stored in pairs of singular/plural forms in-
creases, however, the chances for the association
of the sequence stem + (V)s with the meaning
"plural" also increase. As learners store an
increasing number of identical connections all
tied to forms which end in the morpheme -(V)s,
they increase their ability to understand and
generate new forms analogically based on the
existing singular-plural and plural-plural
connections.
The learner's morphological development is
seen in this framework as a continuous process:
new forms are processed from the input and
stored along with their connections to other
related forms. At first, the communicative
demands made on learners will exceed the
quantity of items stored, and they will be forced
to produce many new forms by a process of
analogy to known items. This analogical
process of generation is not perfect, since the
connections themselves may be both imperfect
and tenuous and the network itself too simple.
Thus overgeneralizations and various sorts of
regularization and "irregularization" may
occur. For example, a learner of English never
having heard the past tense of mend may
hypothesize that it belongs with the known
group of connected verbs, lend, bend,send, rather
than the correct group tend,fend and produce
a supposed past form "ment."Or, bring may be
incorrectly associated with the sing group of
connections, resulting in a past form "brang."
In any case, for the acquisition of a complex
58
morphological form to take place, the follow-
ing steps are essential: learners must process
the input in such a way that they: 1) isolate the
form; 2) ascertain its meaning; and 3) establish
various sorts of associations between the two.
The next section examines how EGI might con-
tribute to this binding process.
EXPLICIT GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION
If we take the task of the learner when con-
fronted with input to be one of positing mean-
ing-form connections, there are two logical
positions with regard to EGI. A non-interven-
tionist position would claim that learners do not
need EGI if they receive enough comprehen-
sible input in a low anxiety environment. Such
input would constitute the only necessary and
sufficient condition for binding and presumably
later access. This is clearly true for some
learners. I have recordings of two native
speakers of English who currently live in the
Dominican Republic and who claim to have
never studied Spanish grammar. Both women
speak Spanish quite well, and one is often taken
for a native speaker of Dominican Spanish. (I
played thirty seconds of a recording of E's
speech for a group of twenty-three native-
speaker Spanish instructors and only three of
the group judged E to be a non-native speaker.)
However, their acquisition has been spread out
over a number of years (E = three years;
C = eighteen years) with quality input and
interaction with native speakers. Both women
are married to Dominican men and speak
Spanish with their husbands and children.
An interventionist approach would argue
that given the low number of input/interaction
hours in typical foreign language college
(70-150 hours) or high school (100-300 hours)
instruction, EGI can serve to speed up parts
of the acquisition process. As an example, let
us use Spanish as the target language of speak-
ers of English. Suppose that in early input the
students hear utterances such as Mi hermanoes
alto. Tiene el pelo largoy hoy Ileva una camisa azul.
(My brother is tall. He has long hair and is
wearing a blue shirt today.) We assume that
all of these sentences are part of the input in
a communicative context with enough intona-
tional cues and extra-linguistic information to
allow the students the opportunities to isolate
and to bind meaning to key lexical items such
as hermano(brother), alto (tall), pelo (hair), largo
(long), camisa (shirt), azul (blue). A non-
interventionist approach would ignore the ques-
The Modern LanguageJournal 75 (1991)
tion of gender and continue to give the students
comprehensible input waiting for the acquisi-
tion process to run its natural course. The inter-
ventionist would consider various teaching
techniques that could aid the learners in specific
ways in making correct gender connections in
the acquisition process. In this case, EGI might
involve: 1) explicitly pointing out the phenome-
non of gender agreement; 2) giving a special
sort of input in which many examples of gender
agreement are concentrated; or 3) doing exer-
cises that focus on gender agreement.
In the following sections I propose that EGI
can affect the acquisition process in three dif-
ferent ways: 1) as an "advance organizer" to aid
in comprehending and segmenting the input;5
2) as a meaning-form focuser that aids the
learner in establishing a meaning-form relation-
ship for morphologically complex forms; and
3) by providing forms for monitoring, which,
in turn, will be available for acquisition in the
output.
Advance Organizers.The idea of an advance
organizer is to give learners information about
target language forms and structures that will
aid in processing the input. An advance or-
ganizer for grammar can provide comprehen-
sion strategies that highlight key grammatical
elements learners should attend to (or con-
versely ignore).
Initial encounters with a new language pro-
duce a great deal of anxiety and tension. Trying
to make sense of input in the target language
is difficult, especially when the learners know
little or nothing about the target language and
culture. Careful manipulation of the input
coupled with the use of appropriate gestures
and visuals can help the learner identify indi-
vidual words in the input utterances. But often,
even in the case of simplified input, the learner
is only able to grasp the main ideas, without
being able to segment the utterance and begin
the binding of meahings to specific forms. A
reasonable hypothesis is that any information
about how the input is organized might aid the
learner in this segmentation process.
The question, viewed in this way, becomes:
"What sort of information about the target lan-
guage would be useful to the learner in seg-
menting the input?" The exact presentation and
wording of an advance organizer will of course
depend on the grammatical level and sophisti-
cation of the students. The following advance
organizers have been written for college-level
students who have some measure of grammar
background.
 TracyDavid Terrell
* Spanish uses a device called grammatical
gender for nouns and adjectives. What this
means is that the endings of some adjectives
like the Spanish words for big, old, and pretty
will change. For example, the Spanish word
for pretty is bonitoor bonita, depending on the
grammatical gender of the word being de-
scribed as pretty.
* Italian adds endings to its verbs to tell who
is doing the action. For example, the verb
parlo ends in -o and means I speak while
parliamo ends in -iamo and means we speak. At
first you will want to concentrate on listen-
ing for the verb stem to understand what
someone is saying to you. Later you will find
that these endings are quite helpful in under-
standing exactly who is doing what.
* In German there are six words which corre-
spond to the meaning of the English word
"the":der, die, das, den, dem, des. For example,
the following sentence reveals three different
words for "the": Das Kind gibt dem Mann den
Bleistift. (The child gives the man the pencil.)
There are reasons for the choice of one or the
other, and you will begin to learn them
shortly. For now, remember that all six Ger-
man words correspond approximately to the
meaning of English "the."
Meaning-FormFocuserfor ComplexMorphology.6
Some grammatical meaning-form relationships
are both salient and essential to understanding
the meaning of an utterance, for example, the
Spanish interrogatives que (what?) and quiin
(who?). Other grammatical meaning-form rela-
tionships such as grammatical particles and
inflections are frequently neither salient nor
essential. None of the function words such as
articles are salient in normal input. Likewise,
learners usually have difficulty attending to
inflections that mark grammatical meanings
such as tense and number, in part because of
their low perceptual saliency. Grammatical
morphemes are usually redundant in a dis-
course context. For example, if the learner
knows the French word for "yesterday," then
in the utterance Hier nous sommesallis au cinema
(Yesterday we went to the movies) both the
auxiliary and past participle are redundant past
markers. Furthermore, since the adverb hier
(yesterday) has now marked the discourse as
"past," the past markers on subsequent verbs
are also redundant. In short, the question is
how to make these sorts of redundant and non-
salient grammatical meaning-form relation-
ships salient in the learners' input. Un-
doubtedly, no single answer to this question
59
exists, but my purpose here is to suggest that
EGI may be helpful in these cases and to
describe one instructional technique with which
I have had some success.
Essentially the idea is to provide meaningful
input that contains many instances of the same
grammatical meaning-form relationship.
Rutherford and Sharwood-Smith (28) describe
this idea as follows: ". . . [to provide] deliberate
exposure of the learner to an artificially large
number of instances of some target structure
in the language on the assumption that the very
high frequency of the structure in question will
attract the learner's attention to the relevant
formal regularities." Grammatical information,
in this case, is used by the instructor as a sort
of "input organizer." In the following para-
graphs we will examine one example from
Spanish.7
Here is a possible sequence of activities for
the Spanish present tense.
* I am going to describe to you a typical
Sunday in my life. Notice that all the verbs
I will use end in -o. Spanish uses this ending
on verbs to refer to the speaker: "I." Sample
input: Los domingosme levantomds tarde,a veces
a las diez, y a veces a las once. Luego, desayuno
cereal.Casi siemprehablopor telefonoa mi hermano,
Pablo. En la tardesalgo con algtin amigo a pasear.
(Sundays I get up later, sometimes at ten and
at times even at eleven. Then I have cereal
for breakfast. I almost always call my
brother, Paul, on the phone. In the after-
noon, I go out for a walk with a friend.) This
narrative can be continued with fifteen to
twenty utterances, all of which contain a verb
form ending in -o.
* Describe your brother/sister's daily activities:
Mi hermanoJorge trabajaen un restaurantecerca
de nuestracasa. Entra al trabajoa las cuatrode la
tardey sale a la una de la maniana.(My brother
Jorge works at a restaurant near our house.
He starts work at four in the afternoon and
leaves at one in the morning.) As you talk,
write the predicate phrases on the board to
draw students' attention to the third person
singular forms. Instruct the students to ask
you questions to see how closely your own
schedule matches your brother's/sister's. If
they use usted (formal you), the verb forms
will be identical to those on the board. Ask
them to notice that the verbs used in your
replies all end in -o.
Does this concentration of many examples
of a single meaning-form relationship in one
activity result in the students being able to focus
60
on meaning and form at the same time? My
informal impressions from teaching and observ-
ing Spanish classes are positive; however, it is
not always easy to know what students are or
are not attending to. And, some evidence to the
contrary exists. VanPatten (37), for example,
has shown that students do not find it easy to
attend to both meaning and form in the input.
In his experiment, students of Spanish were
asked to attend to all verbs with plural endings.
The quantitative results as well as students'
informal comments both lead to the conclusion
that it is difficult to process meaning and attend
to grammatical markers at the same time.
However, his conclusion is suggestive of a
remedy. He speculates that learners can only
attend to grammatical markers when the major
lexical items in the input are familiar and
require little process time. The relevant ques-
tion then appears to be: when (and under what
conditions) can learners process grammatical
markers in the input? My suggestion is that in a
grammatically focused input activity the lexical
load be relatively light, i.e., following
VanPatten's suggestion that the student not
have to expend much process time in general
meaning-form access. This light lexical load
coupled with the high frequency of a single
meaning-form relationship could result in time
to process the meaning of the grammatical form
or structure in focus.
One of the referees for this paper percep-
tively asked the following questions: "But why
should they [attend]? As the relationship is still
redundant, why should they pay attention?"
Unfortunately, some students will not attend
to grammatical relationships even in these cir-
cumstances. But, in my experience, most
college-level students would like to improve the
grammatical accuracy of their speech and will
attend to the grammatical markers in the input
whenever it is possible and relatively easy to
do so.
The other relevant question is: do they need
to attend? That is, one could hypothesize that,
given enough comprehensible input, the verb
system will be acquired naturally and that these
grammar-focused activities are a waste of time.
Evidence exists that much of the verb morphol-
ogy of Spanish can be acquired by a speaker
of English without any special instruction. In
the taped informal conversations in Spanish
with the two native speakers of English who
learned Spanish informally in the Dominican
Republic referred to earlier, E and C, neither
The Modern LanguageJournal 75 (1991)
informant made subject-verb agreement or
tense errors in recorded oral interviews lasting
about one hour. On the other hand, another
informant, TI, who has had extensive contact
with Spanish here in the United States for over
five years, has not yet acquired even subject-
verb agreement for present tense. And another
informant, RV, who has had about 300 hours
of input-interaction in Spanish with native
speakers here in the United States, has not yet
begun to acquire subject-verb agreement, using
a single form (sometimes an infinitive or
gerund, but other times a finite form) in his
Spanish output.
We do not know whether students who are
restricted to a classroom environment could
acquire a verb system as complex as the
Romance language systems without EGI given
their necessarily limited amount of exposure to
input. My impression is that grammar-focused
activities are necessary and that classroom stu-
dents will not come close to the number of
hours of input necessary for natural acquisition.
Future research will undoubtedly provide an
answer to this question.
Monitoring/Acquisitionof Output.The only role
Krashen (12) posits for EGI is to provide infor-
mation about grammatical relationships that
can then be used by the "monitor." He suggests
that students might be encouraged to use the
monitor to improve the accuracy of speech as
long as its use does not interfere with communi-
cation. Monitoring, as Krashen points out, is
quite difficult to do in normal conversation,
even under the most favorable circumstances.
On the other hand, in my experience, virtually
all beginning students report that they attempt
to monitor their speech in a classroom context.
(I do not know whether their attempts to moni-
tor are more often successful or unsuccessful.)
To date we have very little information on
the possible effects of monitoring. Stokes
showed that beginning students of Spanish
(second semester) were able to improve their
use of tense/aspect through monitoring, but
there was very little improvement in person/
number agreement and even a small decrease
in accuracy of mood use (due evidently to
hypercorrection, according to the author).
These results suggest that we will have to look
at each grammatical relationship separately to
determine the plausibility of the structure being
monitored by learners. In addition, it is prob-
able that the level of the learner will have an
effect on his/her ability to monitor certain
TracyDavid Terrell
grammatical relationships. For example, the
learners in Stokes's second semester group were
unable to monitor for correct mood use;
advanced learners might well be able to do this
task successfully.
One way in which learners frequently take
advantage of the monitoring function is to use
grammar knowledge to produce paradigmatic
forms that have never appeared themselves in
the input or forms that may have appeared in
the input but were never processed and stored
by the learner. Suppose a learner is narrating
a past event in Spanish and wishes to say that
he/she "sliced a piece of meat." If the learner
has heard the verb cortar(to cut) in its infini-
tive form several times, it is likely that this is
the form that has been processed and stored.
If the learner has learned that the first person
singular past tense forms of -ar verbs end in -,
he/she can guess the correct form corte. In this
case, the monitor fills in "holes" in paradigms
for words that have not yet been stored in all
of their forms, allowing the learner consciously
to produce forms that have not yet been
acquired.
According to this view, monitoring can help
the learner to produce more accurate and more
complete utterances (assuming that the moni-
toring results in correct forms). But can moni-
toring affect acquisition? One reasonable
hypothesis is that the learner's own output can
also serve as input to the acquisition process.
Dickerson (p. 147), for example, in his study
of the monitoring of pronunciation rules, sug-
gests that the students' "own output is one
important source of their requisite input."
Sharwood-Smith explicitly suggested such a
possibility: ". . situations where learned
knowledge and acquired knowledge interact to
produce utterances . . . the ultimate unified
results are presumably availabe to the speaker
as potential feedback into acquired (as well as
learned) knowledge." Krashen (12: pp. 166-67
and 13: p. 42) also recognizes this possibility.
As learners talk, it is reasonable to suppose
that they hear and process their own output.
In the example above, the learner had acquired
the infinitive cortar,but not the past tense corte.
He/she used the monitor to produce corti and
used it in a meaningful context. Thus the
learner's own output becomes itself input to the
acquisition process.
Acquisition of output will lead to more gram-
matical speech f the output is grammatical. On
the other hand, if the learner has mislearned
61
a rule or misapplied a rule, the output will be
incorrect. For example, one informal learner,
DC, has acquired the sequence "me no + verb"
and uses it fairly consistently in his English out-
put. Since this mistake is relatively common
among Spanish speakers, it is possible that he
acquired it from other Spanish speakers. How-
ever, he has very little contact with other Mexi-
cans who speak English, and it is entirely
possible that he simply equated me with Spanish
mi and used Spanish word order to construct
his output. When confronted with the error he
was astonished to learn that his output was
incorrect, claiming to have heard "me
no + verb" many times.
The informal learner of Spanish, TI, con-
sistently producesyo es no en casa (or any other
location) for "I'm not at home." I have per-
sonally pointed out the correct phraseyo no estoy
en casa to TI on several occasions, but the incor-
rectyo es no en casa seems to be solidly acquired
and he has even recorded it as a part of the mes-
sage on his answering machine. Since he has
no contact with other English-speaking learners
of Spanish (he is not in a Spanish class) and
since native speakers do not produce such a
combination, the only likely explanation is that
TI used English as a model to produce this
pattern and subsequently acquired his own
output.8
Monitoring can apparently interact with
acquisition, resulting in learners acquiring their
own output. Since incorrect output is as easily
acquired as correct output, non-classroom
learners who get little input, or input that is
difficult to process, will most likely quickly
acquire their own incorrect output. Approaches
relying heavily on monitored output activities
instead of input for acquisition will probably
have to resort to strict error correction to avoid
wholesale acquisition of incorrect forms and
structures.
CONCLUSIONS
We began with Krashen's notion that EGI
is of restricted value since the knowledge gained
is only useful as a monitor. In addition, the re-
search to date suggests that learners seem to
work on an "internal" schedule for grammatical
development - a timetable which may depend
more on factors such as frequency of appear-
ance in the input, communicative need, and
linguistic complexity than on the instructional
sequence. However, the belief held by many
62
instructors and by students themselves is that
grammatical instruction is indeed helpful in the
acquisition process. In this paper I have sug-
gested three ways in which grammar instruc-
tion might affect acquisition: 1) as an advance
organizer to help the learner make sense of
input; and 2) as a meaning-form focus in com-
munication activities in which there are many
examples of a single meaning-form relation-
ship. In addition, I suggested: 3) that
monitoring itself might directly affect acquisi-
tion if it is possible for learners to acquire their
own output.
By assigning an expanded role to EGI in the
acquisition process, I am not proposing that we
NOTES
'I do not include in this brief overview of approaches
the "proficiency movement" since, according to Magnan
(p. 267) "there is no consensus . . to the role of grammar
in proficiency-oriented instruction, be it with regard to
syllabus design, classroom activities, or attitude toward error
correction."
2For a general overview of this topic, see 5, 21, 38.
3For additional foreign language acquisition research, see
6, 7, 38.
4Although the ideas on lexical organization presented in
this section have been obviously influenced by Bybee's work
and by the Parallel Distributed Processing model (27), it
should not be thought that those researchers agree with my
particular presentation.
5The concept of advance organizer originated in the work
of the cognitive psychologist David Ausubel.
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