Grammar in Second/Foreign Language Instruction: The Grammatical Knowledge of L2 Learners of French and the Way They Relate to the Didactic Choices of the Teacher

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the debate on explicit vs implicit instruction, there are those studies supporting that explicit instruction is more effective than implicit instruction (Norris & Ortega, 2000; Spada & Tomita, 2010), those supporting that implicit instruction yields long-lasting results by focusing not only on accuracy but also on fluency and complexity (Piggott, 2019; Rousse-Malpat, 2019), and those supporting a type of teaching that does not entirely exclude, in a way, either one of the two (Lantolf & Tsai, 2018; Long & Rothman, 2013). The present study focuses on the move from the lab to the classroom and asks what the effectiveness is of explicit grammar teaching as it is done in actual classrooms, and how students actually integrate grammar structures and rules into their own knowledge and understanding of language use. 18 Greek high school students learning the contrast between the passé composé and the imparfait in French participated in this study. The innovative aspect of the study lies in the collaborative nature of the task students were asked to perform, allowing for the students' discussions to be analyzed to get an insight into their past tense choices. Results show great support for the effectiveness of explicit language learning, while the students' production choices do not always depend on the instruction provided in the classroom. The study calls for a replication in a classroom of implicit instruction, with larger student samples or similar populations with a different L2 or of a different language proficiency level.