Page 201 - Beyond Methods

Activating intuitive heuristics 189 Reflective task 8.6
What type of classroom activities do you think will help you raise your learn- ers’ consciousness and prompt them to notice language features?
Input Enhancement in Action
Current literature on L2 grammar learning and teaching presents several types of activities to achieve the goals of input enhance- ment. I shall highlight two of them: grammar tasks advocated by Rod Ellis and his colleagues, and pedagogic tasks advocated by Michael Long and his colleagues.
GRAMMAR TASKS
Based on a series of studies, Ellis and his colleagues (see Ellis, 1997, 1999 for comprehensive reviews) suggest the use of what they call grammar tasks or grammar discovery tasks to help learners gain cognitive understanding of grammar. They argue that it does not re- ally matter whether grammar discovery tasks are inductive or de- ductive so long as these tasks are designed to offer a range of data options and a range of learner operations that can be performed on them.
The data options include:
• Authentic vs. contrived (whether or not the data consist of text prepared by competent speakers for other competent speakers for purposes other than language teaching).
• Oral vs. written (whether the data represent spoken language or written language). Spoken language data can be made available to the learner in the form of a recording or, more likely, by means of a transcription.
• Discrete sentences vs. continuous text (whether the data consist of a series of disconnected sentences or continuous discourse).
• Well-formed vs. deviant (whether the data conform to the norms of the target variety or whether they include deviations from these norms, as, for example, in grammaticality judgment tasks).
• Gapvs.non-gap(whetherthedataaredistributedamongthelearn-