Page 189 - Beyond Methods

Activating intuitive heuristics 177
rigid rules with is grammar. I shall therefore discuss the macrostrat- egy of activating intuitive heuristics with particular reference to the teaching of L2 grammar.
The primacy of grammar in language teaching has been recog- nized from time immemorial. However, an informed consensus on how to teach grammar is yet to be reached. In his analysis of twenty- five centuries of language teaching, Louis Kelly points out that “since the beginning of language teaching the manner of learning the syntax and flexions of language has been disputed. Accepted methods have ranged from the inductive, by which the pupil himself arrives at rules from examples, to the deductive whereby one proceeds from rules to knowledge. At all periods of language teaching both have existed, but never on an equal footing” (Louis Kelly, 1969, p. 34).
In spite of the historical truth that both inductive and deductive methods have coexisted for a long time, scholars have reminded the language teaching profession of the virtues of learner self-discovery, and they have done so with remarkable consistency. Long before Chomsky expressed his views in the above quotation, Henry Sweet (1899–1964) had suggested that “the pre-grammatical stage may be utilized to convey a good deal of grammatical information not di- rectly through rules, but indirectly through examples, so that when the learner comes to the rule, he finds that he knows it already, or, at any rate, has advanced half-way towards knowing it” (p. 128). Even stronger views were expressed by Otto Jesperson (1904), who advocated what he called an “Inventional Grammar” created by learners themselves as they gained insights into the underlying pat- terns of grammar based on their discovery process.
The refrain of learner self-discovery has continued unabated in recent times as well. William Rutherford (1987), for instance, uses the term grammaticization to focus more on the psycholinguistic processes governing the relationship between grammatical products such as the passive, the relative clauses, etc., than on the grammat- ical products themselves. Through the process of grammaticization “the learner is constantly engaged in reanalysing data, reformulat- ing hypotheses, recasting generalizations, etc.” (Rutherford, 1987, p. 159). Diane Larsen-Freeman (2000) uses an even more elegant term, grammaring, to focus more on reasoning than on rules. Both grammaticization and grammaring seek to help learners discover powerful patterns underlying the linguistic system. The persistent emphasis on a process-oriented approach to grammar teaching has