Page 196 - Beyond Methods

184 Activating intuitive heuristics
spend their lives trying to describe, explain, and understand it have not been able to do so satisfactorily. Therefore, it is too much to ex- pect either the language teacher or the language learner to do so.
Of course, it could be argued that, unlike theoretical linguists who are concerned with the principles and parameters of an overall grammatical system in order to derive a comprehensive theory of syntax, language teachers are interested only in what is called ped- agogical grammar that has been selected and simplified to meet the needs of L2 learners. But even that simplification is not as simple as it seems. As Rutherford (1987, p. 17), echoing Chomsky, asks: “The most brilliant linguists can as yet come nowhere near knowing fully what constitute the proper generalizations and the correct for- mulations of the rule of English syntax, then, how can anything of this sort, in whatever ‘simplified’ form, be profitably ‘taught’ by any teacher or ‘learned’ by any learner?” The pedagogical grammar of even a language like English—one of the most analyzed and stud- ied languages in the world—remains unsatisfactory, prompting a prominent pedagogical grammarian to conclude: “Pedagogical grammar is not static: Many problems remain to be understood, and until they are, second language teaching will depend on guess- work” (Terence Odlin, 1994, p. 11).
In spite of persistent questions about the feasibility of explicit grammar description and instruction, the deductive method of gram- mar teaching has long been a desired method for many teachers and learners. They see certain advantages to it. For example, many adult L2 learners, particularly those who bring an analytical ap- proach to language learning, would like explicit description and in- struction of grammatical rules so that they can consciously analyze them to understand how the linguistic system works. They can also use the explicit grammar rules for language practice and for error correction. Some learners may even use explicit rules to work out the similarities and differences between their L1 and L2.
The deductive approach with its explicit description and expla- nation of grammar rules may have its advantages for teaching gram- mar to adults. However, with regard to the specific purpose of acti- vating learners’ intuitive heuristics, it has only limited use. The reason is simple: it encourages very little teacher-learner interaction and almost no learner-learner interaction that is necessary to create an environment conducive to self-discovery. Once a grammatical rule is explicitly stated, the natural tendency of the learners will be not