Green Hecht 1992 Explicit Instruction

Implicit and Explicit Grammar:An Empirical Study

PETERS. GREEN and KARLHEINZ HECHTUniversity of York University of Munich

Foreign language learners are commonly taught explicit rules of grammar, butoften fail to apply them when confronted with communicative tasks. How wellha ve they learnt the rules ? Do they recognize where they are to be applied ? A rethey better at some rules than others? Above all, how is getting the languageright related to explicit rule knowledge ?

Twelve errors commonly committed by German pupils performing com-municative tasks in English were put before 300 German learners of English atdifferent levels. They were asked to state the rules they believed had been trans-gressed and to correct the errors. A peer group of 50 native speakers of Englishwas given the same test. The learners' ability to state relevant rules and supplyappropriate corrections for the errors is examined with reference to some of theassumptions and expectations that lie behind explicit grammar teaching.

INTRODUCTIONWhilst the aims of language teaching in schools have become more com-municative and its content more practical,1 teachers appear to have lost none oftheir faith in the value of grammar teaching.2 The 'language teachingcontroversy' (Piller 1978), the 'code-communication dilemma' (Stern 1983),and 'acquisition vs. learning' (Krashen 1981) are considered by teachers, if atall, as debates between theoreticians remote from the practicalities of the class-room. Teachers are more likely to talk about the balance between 'accuracy' and'fluency', and if there has been some shift in the direction of fluency, it is perhapsless to be attributed to theoretical reasons than to practical ones such as theextension of language teaching to a wider range of ability, where too cognitive anapproach proves inappropriate.

This is not to criticize language teachers for not keeping abreast of develop-ments. Scepticism of new theories is probably a sound stance, since the appliedlinguists are unable to agree on how languages are acquired. There are those,like Dulay, Burt, and Krashen (1982), who claim that direct teaching has littleimpact on the learner's built-in syllabus. Felix (1987:419) goes so far as tomaintain: 'Sprachen kann man zwar lernen, aber sie konnen im strikten Sinnenicht gelehrt werden' (Languages can certainly be learnt, but they cannot,strictly speaking, be taught). Others would agree with Ellis (1985:229) that 'todeny that instruction'3 can help learners to acquire a L2 is not only counter-intuitive, but contrary to the personal experience of countless teachers andstudents'. There is certainly no general support for the position adopted byKrashen, that 'conscious learning is only available as a Monitor' (1981:4) to

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PETER S. GREEN AND KARLHEINZ HECHT 169

modify an utterance after it has been initiated by the unconscious 'acquired'system (cf. Hulstijn and Hulstijn 1984; Sorace 1985; Faerch 1986; Rutherford1987; McLaughlin 1988). The distinction in cognitive psychology between'declarative knowledge' (knowing that) and 'procedural knowledge' (knowinghow) (Anderson 1980) lies at the basis of a great deal of discussion of the mentalgrammar, cf., for example, Bialystok (1979) and Faerch (1986) on implicit andexplicit grammatical knowledge; Bialystok (1982) on the relationship betweenknowing and using linguistic forms; Faerch and Kasper (1984) on rules andprocedures; and Bialystok and Sharwood Smith (1985) on the learner'slinguistic knowledge and control of that knowledge in real-time languageprocessing.

Formal grammar teaching and learning perhaps satisfy a human drive toimpose order on the apparent chaos of natural language. Given that teachersseem to want to give, and learners to be given, formal instruction in L2, thequestion of whether it helps is perhaps not the only one that should be asked. Itis important also to know how well learners learn the rules that teachers teach, ifthey learn some better than others, whether they recognize when to use themand how successful they are in applying them. The purpose of this article is toseek some answers to these questions.

BACKGROUNDSince 1979, the language-teacher-training departments of the universities ofMunich and York4 have built up a joint corpus of 'learner language'. Thelearners are school pupils in French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Swedishsecondary schools at beginners', intermediate, and advanced levels. The corpusconsists currently of over 5,000 samples of performance in English as a foreignlanguage, on oral and written communicative tasks and grammar andvocabulary tests. These foreign language samples are complemented by nativelanguage samples, produced by peer groups in English schools performing thesame tasks.

The data have been analysed from different points of view.5 An earlier paper(Hecht and Green 198 9b) looked at the grammatical competence and perform-ance of learners and native speakers. Competence was interpreted as the degreeof accuracy achieved by learners when their attention was focused on form, andperformance as the degree of accuracy achieved when the focus was on thetransmission of meaning. It was found that whilst the learners had achieved agood level of competence, there was a sharp fall-off from competence toperformance. A comparable, group of native speakers, on the other hand,showed only a negligible fall-off. To paraphrase Ellis (1985:197), the nativespeakers were much better at 'performing their competence' than the learners.

One might argue, with Krashen, that the learners had recourse to twodifferent grammatical systems in the two tasks. In the performance task, wherethe focus was on content, they might be supposed to have drawn largely onacquired (implicit) grammar, whereas in the competence task, where theirattention was drawn to form, they may have monitored their production and

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170 IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT GRAMMAR

corrected it where necessary with the help of learned (explicit) rules (Krashen1981). That argument would have to remain purely speculative, since the com-petence task did not ask for any rules to be expressed. However, the syllabus thelearners were following and the textbooks they were using make it clear thatthey had been taught explicit rules for all the areas of grammar that the two typesof task called upon.6 In the task which focused on form, therefore, the learnersmight well have referred to explicit rules, either to produce or to check theanswers they gave.

If that was the case and the learners were indeed bringing conscious rules intoplay, then it would be interesting to take a look at the rules themselves, and notjust the product of them, by asking learners to make explicit the rules they wereusing—or at least thought they were using. That is the aim of the presentinvestigation.

THE INVESTIGATIONA test was devised (see Appendix) in which the testees were shown twelveerrors and asked to offer explanations or rules that would enable someonemaking those errors to understand and correct them. They were also askedthemselves to provide correct versions. The errors were chosen according totwo criteria. Firstly, they were errors that had occurred frequently in two earliercommunicative tasks—a letter to a pen-friend and an oral report of an incident.Secondly, they were infringements of rules that had been taught as part of thesyllabus of all the learners who committed them. The errors were provided withsufficient context to ensure that competent speakers of English would be in nodoubt about the correct versions and underlined so that the testees should nottamper with error-free portions of the text.

The test was given to 300 German learners of English and 50 native Englishpupils. The German learners had had from three to twelve years of exposure toformal teaching of English as a foreign language. They were mainly schoolpupils but a group of university students of English was included. At theintermediate levels, all three school types of the tripartite German secondaryschool system were represented—Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule.7

The English pupils were comparable in age to the intermediate-level Germanpupils and were drawn from a comprehensive school and an independentschool. Table 1 gives a breakdown of the testees.

Table 2 gives an outline of the content of the test, showing only the incorrectportion of each test item together with its correction and a brief statement of thegrammatical generalization.

Whilst the corrections could be marked objectively—the only permissiblevariation lying in the choice of full or contracted forms—judging whethera rule was correctly formulated involved a certain amount of subjectiv-ity. (In the examples which follow, the rules have been translated fromGerman.)

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PETER S. GREEN AND KARLHEINZ HECHT

Table 1: Breakdown oftestees by experience and school type

171

GymnasiumRealschuleHauptschule

Totals

German schoolbeginners

3-4*

50

50

* years of English

Item

123456789

101112

intermediate

5-6*

505050

150

German: advanced university

8-9* 11-12*

50 50

50 50

Table 2: Outline content of the test

Incorrect text

lives my auntI've playedI showtakes notlike to rideI knowsomethingcarefulwas comingsmokedman whichan policeman

Correction

my aunt livesI playedI (wi)ll showdoesn't takelike ridingI (ha)ve knownanythingcarefullycamewas smokingman whoa policeman

Generalization

S-P in declarative sentences

Englishpupils

3rd/4th yearsecondary

50

50

preterite for focus on time of action in pastverb marked to show futuritydo-periphrasis with notgerund for general likingperfect to link past with presentany with negationadverb form usually markedsimple form for unmarked aspectprogressive form to mark aspectrelative who for personsa-form of indefinite article before consonants

Firstly, an accurate rule might be expressed in more or less technicallanguage, for example, (item 11):

Relative pronouns referring to a person and in the nominative have the form who orthat.

People are expressed by who.

Secondly, the metalanguage might be partly inaccurate without impairing thevalidity of the rule, for example, (item 12):

a if the subject does not begin with a vowel, an if the subject begins with a vowel.

Thirdly, the rule might be more or less general, for example, (item 7):

For questions and negation the some of a declarative sentence becomes any.

we won't: negation! anything.

Fourthly, the rule might be correct but not applicable to the item, for example,(item 7):

In questions any is required.

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Fifthly, the rule might be expressed as a rule of thumb, well known to Germanpupils and teachers but not obvious to an outsider without expansion, forexample, (item 1):

SPO. (= subject, predicate, object)

Sixthly, the rule might express the essential concept, and be associated with acorrect correction, but contain a technical flaw (or slip), for example, (item 2):

An action completed in the past is expressed by present tense.

Lastly, the essential concept might appear to have been grasped even though thecorrection was incorrect, for example, (item 6):

Because he knows him now and knew him before, (correction = I'm knowing)

Other variations are, of course, possible. The decision to accept an individuallearner's rule as correct or incorrect was arrived at independently by two judgesafter discussion of the general principles. If they disagreed, a third judgearbitrated. The end result was a liberal view of what constituted a correct rule.Thus, all the above examples except the fourth one were treated as correct rulesin the specific contexts for which they were formulated.

ASSUMPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONSWhen teachers teach learners formally the grammar of a foreign language, andwhen learners ask to be taught it, they are making certain assumptions, even ifthey do not necessarily make them explicit.

The fundamental assumption is that it will help the learners to 'get thelanguage right'. Fluency may well, and probably does, come from elsewhere—from some form of practice, no doubt. But if learners are to get beyond thecategory that Randall Jones called 'fluent but lousy',8 it is felt that they will needto formalize the regularities of the language.

It is further assumed that the complex mechanisms of language can bereduced to learnable formulae with identifiable spheres of application.However, the ability to 'understand' such rules is probably felt to be linked to thedegree of cognitive sophistication of learners.

If these assumptions are justified, they lead to certain expectations about howlearners should perform on our test.

1. Since the rules applicable to our errors are commonly taught, they might beexpected also to have been learnt, at least by a majority of learners.

2. They should have been learnt better by the more able learners and, possibly,also by the more experienced.

3. If learners have a viable rule available, they should be able to produce acorrect correction.

4. Conversely, if they do not have a viable rule, they should largely be unable toproduce a correct correction.

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Some other reasonable expectations might be the following.

5. As some rules are more straightforward than others, the success rate ofindividual rules should vary.

6. Native speakers, if they are taught rules at all about their language, are taughtrules of a fundamentally different kind from those taught to foreign languagelearners.9 They should therefore have a lower success rate than the Germanlearners in formulating correct rules.

7. On the other hand, native speakers should be able to correct all the errorsindependently of whether they can supply rules for the corrections.

RESULTSTable 3 shows the success rate achieved for rules and corrections, item by itemand group by group. Perhaps the first thing to notice about the results is theperformance of the English pupils in correcting the errors. In 96 per cent of thepossible cases they produced the correction anticipated. Those cases wherethey did not were largely omissions, either through oversight or because they feltthere was no error to correct (for example, items 5 and 10). Only rarely did theyproduce a non-anticipated correction (for example, 'I'd played' instead of theanticipated 'I played' in item 2). Thus, even though the context of some of theerrors is of necessity not exhaustively defined, a standard correction for eachitem nevertheless seems to suggest itself to native speakers. To that extent atleast, the test appears to have validity.

The German learners, as might be expected, become better at error correc-tion as their experience increases. For the Gymnasium pupils, the overallsuccess rate is 79 per cent for beginners, 92 per cent for intermediate, and 95per cent for advanced. The largely ex-Gymnasium university students achieve97 per cent. At the intermediate level, pupils in the more academic school typesare more successful than their peers in less academic schools {Gymnasium 92per cent, Realschule 72 per cent, Hauptschule 33 per cent). As a whole group,the German learners achieve 78 per cent of the possible corrections—animpressively high figure. How, then, does their performance on rules match upto our expectations?

Expectation I: Most learners have learnt the rules they were taughtThis expectation is not justified. Taking the German learners as a whole, theyare able to produce a correct rule in less than half the cases (46 per cent). Thelearners who should be most familiar with the rules are those who have beentaught them most recently and extensively. They are the learners at the inter-mediate level. In fact, learners in the most academic school at this level(Gymnasium) achieve no better than 55 per cent, whilst those in the Haupt-schule manage only 7 per cent.

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Table 3: Success rates

NItem

123456789101112

Total%

beg.

GYM

5(R

38202712292868123647

24541

)C

454146423212454545284649

47679

R

1471004901015

427

HS

50C

232019101611825981041

20033

School pupils

R

24720148132014143742

20434

inter.

RS

50C

421249334111464630294347

42972

German

GYM

5(R

352221253123361810164548

33055

)C

474549455027505048415050

55292

adv.

GYM

5(R

46252628191936207164343

32855

)C

504850494633485050455049

56895

Universitystudents

5(R

494143463939444033404648

50885

)C

494948495040495050494849

58097

All

300R

193119144126991031681075989207243

165746

C

256215261228235124256266232200247285

280578

English

School pupils

5CR

4317321510171598113142

25042

)C

504850494649484948444748

57696

•ar~o

Otnx•v( -

nHO

Abbreviations: GYM = Gymnasium; RS = Realschule; HS = Hauptschule; N = no of testees; R = rule; C = correction.

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PETER S. GREEN AND K.ARLHEINZ HECHT 175

Expectation 2: More able/experienced learners learn rules betterThis expectation is partly fulfilled. Success at learning rules does indeed, as mostteachers would probably assume, seem to be firmly linked to the cognitivesophistication of the learners or at least to their academic achievement. This canbe seen most clearly at the intermediate level, where the Gymnasium pupils witha 5 5 per cent success rate perform more than half as well again as the Realschulepupils with 34 per cent, who in turn perform nearly five times as well as theHauptschule pupils with 7 per cent. The link between rule success and schooltype seems confirmed also by the performance of the beginners (41 per cent),who are also pupils of the Gymnasium. Despite the shorter time they have beenlearning English, they outperform the intermediate pupils in the Realschule andHauptschule. This pattern may, of course, be due in part to a self-fulfillingprophecy: the pupils in the less academic schools, especially those in theHauptschule, are perhaps assumed to be less capable of coping with rules andmore easily demotivated by talking about the language. They may, therefore, betaught rules at a simpler level and less intensively.

How far the length of time spent learning English is linked to success informulating rules is unclear from the data. The beginners, intermediate{Gymnasium), and advanced pupils and the university students are all pupils orex-pupils of the Gymnasium. They are distinguished by the number of yearsthey have been learning English. Whilst there is an increment from beginners tointermediate (41 per cent to 55 per cent), there is no improvement by theadvanced learners (also 55 per cent). This may be because, at the advancedlevel in the Gymnasium, formal grammar-teaching plays a lesser role andpupils concentrate on work with texts. The university students are the learnerswith the longest experience of learning English and they are also by far themost successful group in formulating correct rules (85 per cent). On the otherhand, they have perhaps also paid more formal attention to rules in theiruniversity study of English than the advanced pupils. Thus, it would seemimpossible to unravel the effects of length of exposure to English from those ofattention given to rules.

Expectation 3: Correct rule leads to correct correctionTable 4 (row 1) shows that the German learners as a whole group nearly alwaysproduce a correct correction when they have produced a correct rule (97 percent of cases). The same is largely true for the individual groups of Germanlearners: for all except the Hauptschule at the intermediate level the percentageis 96 or better. Even this exceptional group has a high success rate withcorrections (88 per cent) when the pupils have a correct rule available. Itshould not be forgotten, however, that that was in only 7 per cent of thepossible cases.

While it is true to say then that, if pupils have a correct rule available, they canin nearly every case also produce a correct correction, we should not be misledinto thinking that they need the rule to produce the correct correction, as theresults for our next expectation make clearer.

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Table 4: Relationship of rules and corrections

Row

1234

GermaiiSchool pupilsbeg.GYM

98506766

inter.HS

88823129

inter.RS

97546551

inter.GYM

97428884

adv.GYM

96459492

Univer-sitystudents

98149581

All

97437055

EnglishSchoolpupils

100579592

Row 1 = percentage of correct rules associated with correct correctionsRow 2 = percentage of correct corrections not associated with correct rulesRow 3 = percentage of incorrect rules associated with correct correctionsRow 4 = percentage of no rules associated with correct corrections

Expectation 4: Few correct corrections without rulesLearners were much more successful with corrections than with rules. Overall,they achieved 78 per cent of the corrections but only 46 per cent of the rules(Table 3). The same pattern holds true for every individual group: only for theuniversity students do the two success rates come close, but there, too,corrections are ahead of rules by 97 per cent to 85 per cent. This means that alarge proportion of errors are corrected without recourse to a viable explicitrule. In fact, as row 2 of Table 4 shows, 43 per cent of the correct correctionsoverall were not associated with a correct rule. For most of the individualgroups, the proportion of corrections without correct rules is even larger.

Looked at another way round, learners' ability to produce a correct correc-tion when the rule they have given is incorrect (row 3 of Table 4), or when theyhave given no rule at all (row 4 of Table 4) is even more striking. Overall, in 70per cent of cases where they gave an incorrect rule and 55 per cent of caseswhere they gave no rule at all, the learners still produced a correct correction.Again, for most of the individual groups, the percentages are even higher.

The expectation that learners should largely be unable to produce a correctcorrection if they do not have a correct rule is not only unfounded, the exactreverse is true: learners are still largely able to produce a correct correctionwhen they have an incorrect explicit rule or no explicit rule at all. This suggeststhat there is no simple relationship between explicit rules and corrections.

Expectation 5: Some rules are easier than othersTable 3 shows the success rates for the twelve individual rules. Some rules havea fairly consistently high success rate, for example, rule 12 (a/an), where in everygroup but one (Hauptschule), 42 or more of the 50 learners produce an accept-able rule. Other rules have a fairly consistently low rate, for example, rule 9(verb aspect), where, except for the university students, only 10 or fewerlearners can produce the rule. For the university students, too, rule 9 has thelowest score. So some rules are indeed easier than others.

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To simplify the identification of easy and difficult rules, Table 5 shows thefour highest-scoring (+) rules and four lowest-scoring (—) rules in each group.Rules with a preponderance of pluses are easy, those with a preponderance ofminuses difficult. Looked at in this way, the rules for item 1 (word order), item 7(some/any), item 11 (who/which) and item 12 (a/an) are relatively easy toformulate, whereas those for item 5 (gerund), item 6 (perfect), and items 9 and10 (both aspect) are relatively difficult. The qualification 'relatively' is import-ant: for the Hauptschule, where no rule has a success rate higher than 15/50, allthe rules are difficult, whereas for the university students, where no rule has asuccess rate lower than 33/50, they are all easy.

Table 5: High (+) and low (—) scoring rules

Item

GermanSchool pupilsbeg. inter.GYM HS

inter.RS

inter.GYM

adv.GYM

Univer-sitystudents

AllEnglishSchoolpupils

1 (S-P-order)2 (preterite)3 (future)4 (rfo-neg.)5 (gerund)6 (perfect)7 (some/any)8(adverb)9 (aspect +)

10 (aspect - )11 (who/which)12 (a/an)

NB: More than four pluses or four minuses in any column means that the group had equal scoreson two or more rules.

Expectation 6: Native speakers are worse at rules than German learnersIf we compare the mean success rate of the English pupils (42 per cent) with thatof the German learners overall (46 per cent), the expectation that English pupilswill be less successful at formulating rules is fulfilled, though not strikingly so,and despite the fact that they have had no formal training in these rules, they aremore successful in formulating them than the Gymnasium beginners and theRealschule and Hauptschule groups. The metalinguistic awareness of theEnglish pupils may, of course, have profited from their experience of foreignlanguage learning.

Interestingly, they follow the pattern of the German pupils very closely asregards which rules they find easy and which hard. Rules 1, 11, and 12 areamongst their easiest rules whilst 5,9, and 10 are among their hardest. There isonly one rule on which their performance differs noticeably from that of the

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German pupils: that is rule 7 (the use of some/any), a relatively easy rule for mostof the German pupils and a hard one for the English.

Expectation 7: Native speakers can correct the errors without rulesWe have already seen that the vast majority of the English pupils can supply allthe expected corrections of the errors. Table 4 shows, in row 2, that 57 per centof their successful corrections were not associated with a correct rule. Evenwhen the rule they gave was incorrect, 95 per cent of the associated correctionswere correct (row 3), and when they could supply no rule at all they could stillproduce the desired correction in 92 per cent of cases (row 4). It is clear, then,that they were not dependent on explicit rules for their corrections.

DISCUSSIONA number of questions were asked about explicit rules in the introduction to thisarticle, of which the fundamental one must be: do they help learners to get thelanguage right?

At first glance, it would certainly seem that they do. Unlike Seliger, who found(in a study of the use of a/an) that'... being able to state a rule is no assurance ofgood performance ...' (1979:364), our learners were almost always able to getthe correction right if they had stated the rule correctly. However, twoimportant riders have to be added to that statement. The first is the reminderthat, in just over half of the cases, the German learners overall were unable tostate a correct rule, although they were supposed to have learned one. Thesecond is that we would have to go along with the second half of Seliger'ssentence:'... just as not being able to state any rule is not an induction [sic] ofpoor performance'. When our learners either did not give a rule or gave a wrongone, they were still largely able to produce the desired correction. This must castdoubt over whether the rule actually led to the correction or whether the correc-tion was effected by 'feel', which then prompted the rule. The latter was almostcertainly the sequence for the native speakers, whose performance on rules wasnot drastically inferior to that of the non-natives and very similar in the patternof rules found easy and rules found difficult.

Teachers who teach rules doubtless do not usually see them as having only amonitoring function, as Krashen does: they expect them to facilitate the inter-nalization of the grammatical system of the target language. Krashen's 'non-interface' position is not disproved by the evidence here,10 but neither is the'facilitation' view. What does seem to be the case here is that classroom learnerswith learned rules under their belt and confronted by a grammar test—a classicKrashen Monitor situation—operated to a large extent by 'feel'. That is to say,they corrected largely by implicit rules, which very possibly had been facilitatedby explicit rules. The explicit rules resurfaced when they were specifically calledfor and were then wrongly remembered in some cases. This is a possibleexplanation of the consistently greater success rate that the German pupils hadwith corrections when they gave a wrong rule than when they could offer no ruleat all (see Table 4, rows 3 and 4).

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That the interaction between implicit and explicit rules is a complex one canbe seen from Table 3: whilst some low-scoring rules are associated with low-scoring corrections, for example items 6 (use of perfect) and 10 (use of pro-gressive), others are associated with high-scoring corrections, for example items5 (use of gerund) and 8 (use of adverb). (The product-moment correlationbetween the success rates for rules and corrections is 0.53 for the Germanlearners overall—significant (p < 0.01) but modest.)

When no simple relationship can be established between implicit and explicitrules, what conclusions should we draw for the teaching and learning ofexplicit rules?

On the one hand, when learners are able to state a correct rule, they performconsiderably better (corrections 97 per cent correct), for whatever reason, thanwhen they can give only an incorrect rule (corrections 70 per cent correct) or norule at all (corrections 55 per cent correct). On the other hand, success at rulelearning, as measured by the ability to formulate rules, can hardly be deemedsatisfactory when the success rate overall is no better than 46 per cent and, ofthe individual learner groups, only the university students could manage morethan 5 5 per cent. These results are similar to those of Hulstijn and Hulstijn, whofound that learners with explicit knowledge generally applied rules of wordorder in Dutch as L2 better than learners without such knowledge, but that theywere in a minority (1984:37-40). Sorace also found that there was a 'highlysignificant correlation between knowledge and use' in a group of non-beginnersin Italian but that 'verbalizations of rules were hard to produce, despite thesubjects' exposure to detailed and repeated metalinguistic information'(1985:249-50).

Clearly, a balance needs to be found between time devoted to the learning ofexplicit rules (without which many learners may feel frustrated) and timedevoted to the communicative use of language, both of which may contribute tothe development of the implicit rule system. The solution may lie in distinguish-ing between rules that are easy and rules that are hard to learn. The pay-off forthe time investment may be much greater for the former.

The rules that were easy to learn in this investigation were those that (1)referred to easily recognized categories; (2) could be applied mechanically; (3)were not dependent on large contexts: for example, morphological dichotomieslike a/an, who/which, straightforward cases of some/any, and simple wordorder. Bialystok also found that 'the rules which refer to specific lexical items areeasier than the rules which are more abstract' (1979:90). The fact that theEnglish pupils were able on the whole to formulate such rules (except some/any)demonstrates their accessibility.

There are dangers, however, in the kind of rule simplifications that are oftencalled 'rules of thumb'. One pupil corrected 'As you know, lives my aunt on afarm' to 'live my aunt', citing a rule of thumb often taught to German pupils at anelementary level—'he, she, it': das s muB mit' (a rhyme meaning 'With he, she,it, you have to have an s'). The pupil was applying the rule as stated: there was nohe, she, or it in the sentence.

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Hard rules are those that involve aspect, such as the use of the continuousform or the perfect tense or, at a more subtle level than in our item, some/any.These are semantic distinctions that express the speaker's perspective on asituation, as the term 'aspect' suggests. They do not allow of simple exhaustivedescriptions and they are not always governed by features of the immediatelinguistic context. This makes them not only difficult to grasp but difficult also topractise in simple contexts."

Straightforward, mechanically governed linguistic categories can be usefullytaught to learners as rules and readily practised in the context of short linguisticexercises. Semantic categories like aspect are probably best presented asexplanations rather than as rules, with learners' attention drawn to how theyoperate in longer contexts ('grammatical consciousness-raising', cf. Rutherford1987: Chapter 2). Formal practice of these categories, however, may well be aninefficient use of time, which could better be devoted to communicativeactivities with the focus on meaning.

{Revised version received September 1991)

NOTES1 Modern Languages in the School Curriculum, a 'Statement of Policy' published by

the English Department of Education and Science and the Welsh Office (HMSO 1988),claims, for instance, that:

Perceptions about the objectives of foreign language teaching have developed over thepast 2 decades. There has been a move away from approaches, aimed at the more ablepupils, which concentrate on explanation in English of the structure of the foreignlanguage and on written and artificially constructed exercises; the trend is towardsmore broadly-based provision which emphasises the development of practical skills ofcommunication and especially the ability to understand and use the spoken language,(section 41)

2 See, for example, Peck (1988). Not only are seven of the lessons discussed there(in England, France, Germany, and Norway) specifically devoted to 'teaching grammar'but also there is frequent, highly structured practice of specific grammatical patterns inlessons nominally devoted to 'conducting oral practice' and even 'teaching freeexpression'. Zimmermann (1984), investigating grammar teaching in practice, foundthat almost 80 per cent of the teachers studied were in favour of a systematic presenta-tion of grammar and that grammar teaching occupied up to 60 per cent of total teachingtime.

3 Ellis is making the statement in a chapter that is 'solely concerned with the role ofinstruction in the acquisition of L2 grammar' (Ellis 1985:215).

4 Lehrstuhl fur die Didaktik der englischen Sprache und Literatur of the University ofMunich, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Language Teaching Centre of theUniversity of York, in the United Kingdom.

5 For example:—error analysis (Hecht and Green 1983; Hecht 1984; Green and Hecht 1985)—assessment (Green and Hecht 1984; Hecht 1986; Hecht and Green 1987)-marking (Green 1984,1985)—pronunciation (Pascoe 1987)—grammar (Hecht 1987a; Kieweg 1988; Hecht and Green 1989b)

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—communicative effectiveness (Green and Hecht 1987, 1988; Hecht and Green1988a,b, 1989a)

—communication strategies (Hecht 1987b; Hecht and Green 1991)Future papers will deal with communication strategies in greater detail and withvocabulary and monitoring.

6 It should perhaps be pointed out that German learners are encouraged to arrive attheir rules by a largely inductive process, in which the point of departure is the languagenot the rule. At a certain stage of familiarity with the language, rules are elicited andformalized by their teachers.

7 The Gymnasium is the most academic school type, where pupils are expected toremain until the age of 18 or 19, when they take the Abitur qualification for universityentrance. The Realschule is for the more practically oriented pupils, whose furtherstudies after compulsory schooling will generally be pursued in technical or commercialcolleges. The Hauptschule is for the non-academic pupils, who will generally becomeskilled or unskilled manual workers. There is a certain amount of movement between thethree school types. Comprehensive schools are less common.

8 In talking about levels of proficiency in a paper, entitled 'Achieving objectivity insubjective language tests', delivered to the Fourth International Congress of AppliedLinguistics (AILA) in Stuttgart in 1975. The expression does not appear in the publishedversion of the paper (Jones 1976).

9 They tend to be prescriptive rules about style ('Don't begin a sentence with and orbut.' 'Don't end a sentence with a preposition.') or spelling rules (i before e except afterc).

1(1 It is difficult to see how Krashen's hypothesis ever could be tested empirically, asseveral writers have noted (for example, Hulstijn and Hulstijn 1984:41; Sorace 1985:footnote 2; McLaughlin 1988:24).

" Krashen and Terrell (1983) also speak of 'simple' and 'difficult' rules, but it is noteasy to equate them with the rules found here to be easy or hard.'... simple rules do notrequire elaborate or complex movements of permutation' (op. cit.: 31). An example givenis the English third person singular -s morpheme: 'Difficult rules . . . include the Englishwh -question, which involves moving the questioned word to the front of the sentence, asubject-auxiliary inversion, and, with sentences having only main verbs, the insertion ofdo. Rules can also be difficult due to their semantic properties.' The latter is certainly trueof our hard rules.

REFERENCESAnderson, J. R. 1980. Cognitive Psychology and its Implications. San Francisco:

Freeman.Bialystok, E. 1979. 'Explicit and implicit judgements of L2 grammaticality.' Language

Learning 29/1:81-103.Bialystok, E. 1982. 'On the relationship between knowing and using linguistic forms.'

Applied Linguistics 3/3:181-206.Bialystok, E. and M. Sharwood Smith. 1985. 'Interlanguage is not a state of mind: An

evaluation of the construct for second language acquisition/ Applied Linguistics6/2:101-17.

Department of Education and Science. 1988. Modem Languages in the School Cur-riculum. London: HMSO.

Diller, K. C. 1978. The Language Teaching Controversy. Rowley, Mass.: NewburyHouse.

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18 2 IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT GRAMMAR

Dulay, H., M. Burt, and S. D. Krashen. 1982. Language Two. Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press.

Ellis, R. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Faerch, C. 1986. 'Rules of thumb and other teacher-formulated rules in the foreignlanguage classroom' in G. Kasper (ed.): Learning, Teaching and Communication in theForeign Language Classroom. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Faerch, C. and G. Kasper. 1984. 'Pragmatic knowledge. Rules and procedures.' AppliedLinguistics 5/3:214-25.

Felix, S. W. 1987. 'Kognitive Grundlagen des Sprachlemens' in H. Melenk et al. (eds.):11. Fremdsprachendidaktiker-Kongrefi. Tubingen: Narr.

Green, P. S. 1984. 'Marking written work.' Inside English 4. (Cassette magazine forEnglish teachers, published by Petersen-Macmillan, Hamburg.)

Green, P. S. 1985. 'Teachers and pupils as markers' in P. S. Green (ed.): York Papers inLanguage Teaching. York: Language Teaching Centre, University of York.

Green, P. S. and Kh. Hecht. 1984. 'Reliability in the assessment of written communicativeskills.' Finlance 3:1-23. (The Finnish journal of language learning and language teach-ing. University of Jyvaskyla, Finland: Language Centre for Finnish Universities.)

Green, P. S. and Kh. Hecht. 1985. 'Native and non-native evaluation of learners' errorsin written discourse.' System 13/2:77-97.

Green, P. S. and Kh. Hecht. 1987. 'The influence of accuracy on communicative effect-iveness.' British Journal of Language Teaching 25/2:79-84.

Green, P. S. and Kh. Hecht. 1988. 'The sympathetic native speaker—a GCSE role-playfor the teacher.' Modern Languages 69/1:3-10.

Hecht, Kh. 1984. 'Die Fehler von deutschen Schiilern bei der schriftlichen Sprach-produktion und ihre Bedeutung fur den Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufe I.' InsideEnglish 4. (Cassette magazine for English teachers, published by Petersen-Macmillan,Hamburg.)

Hecht, Kh. 1986. 'Das Interview. Karlheinz Hecht im Gesprach mit der Praxis desneusprachlichen Unterrichts zum Thema "Fremdsprachliche Fehler und ihreBenotung".' Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 1:79-86.

Hecht, Kh. 1987a. "Talking about the past": bypassing strategies.' Englisch 3:105-7.Hecht, Kh. 1987b. 'Lexikalische Kommunikationsstrategien.' Englisch 3:107-9.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1983. Fehleranalyse und Leistungsbewertung im Englisch-

unterricht der Sekundarstufe I. Donauworth: Ludwig Auer.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1987. 'Analyse und Bewertung von miindlichen Schiiler-

produktionen.' Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 1:3-11.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1988a. 'Kommunikative Wirksamkeit von Schulerbriefen—

ein Produkt von Sprachrichtigkeit?' Englisch 1:1-8.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1988b. 'Verstandlich oder sprachlich korrekt?' P'dda-

gogische Welt 2:84-7.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1989a. 'Zur kommunikativen Wirksamkeit von fehlerhaften

SchiilerauBerungen.' Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 1:3-9.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1989b. 'Grammatische Kompetenz und Performanz.' Die

neueren Sprachen 88/6:573-90.Hecht, Kh. and P. S. Green. 1991. 'Kommunikationsstrategien: ein Lern- und Lehr-

problem?' Praxis des neusprachlichen Unterrichts 2:133-44.Hulstijn, J. H. and W. Hulstijn. 1984. 'Grammatical errors as a function of processing

constraints and explicit knowledge.' Language Learning 34/1:23-43.

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Jones, R. L. 1976. 'Achieving objectivity in subjective language tests' in G. Nickel (ed.):Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Applied Linguistics. Stuttgart:HochschulVerlag.

Kieweg, W. 1988. 'Die Signalwortgrammatik—funktioniert sie wirklich?' PddagogischeWelt 2:81-3.

Krashen, S. D. 1981. Second Language Learning and Second Language Acquisition.Oxford: Pergamon.

Krashen, S. D. and T. D. Terrell. 1983. The Natural Approach. Oxford: Pergamon.McLaughlin, B. 1988. Theories of Second-Language Learning. London: Edward

Arnold.Pascoe, G. 1987. Die Aussprache des Englischen an Bayrischen Schulen. Munich:

Profil.Peck, A. J. 1988. Language Teachers at Work. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice

Hall.Rutherford, W. E. 1987. Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching. London:

Longman.Seliger, H. W. 1979. 'On the nature and function of language rules in language teaching.'

TESOL Quarterly 13/3:359-69.Sorace, A. 1985. 'Metalinguistic knowledge and language use in acquisition-poor

environments.' Applied Linguistics 6/3:239-54.Stern, H. H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Zimmermann, G. 1984. Erkundungen zur Praxis des Grammatikunterrichts. Frankfurt:

Diesterweg.

APPENDIX

Text of Rules Test

The version of the test that follows is that given to the English pupils. For the Germanpupils the instructions were in German.

InstructionsOn page 1 you will find 12 sentences written by German pupils who are learning English.There is one mistake (underlined) in each sentence. Can you think of a grammar rule or ofan explanation that would help the German pupil to avoid this mistake? Write thisexplanation on page 2 and 3. If you can't think of anything, write N. Then write the correctform of the underlined phrase next to your explanation.

The following sentences are taken from a letter of a German pupil to an English pen-friend:

1. As you know lives my aunt on a farm.2. 1 spent last Easter with my aunt. Most of the time I've played tennis.3. If you come to Munich next year, I show you the new sports centre.4. It takes not very long to get there.5. There is a farm near us. Do you like to ride horses?6. If you do, there'll be no problem, because 1 know the farmer for a long time.7. Of course, we won't have to pay something for the ride.8. Have I told you that my brother has got a new car? He drives more careful now than

before.

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The following sentences are taken from a statement given by a German pupil who saw aman steal a radio in a shop in London:

9. About half an hour ago a man was coming into the shop.10. He had a very big nose and smoked a cigarette.11. While the shop-keeper was fetching a radio from the backroom, the man, which was

a thief, snatched a little cassette-recorder from the counter and ran out of the shop.12. Outside he was arrested by an policeman.

SENTENCE

1

2

3 etc.

RULE

Explain the rule here asclearly as you can.

If you can't, write N.

CORRECTION

Write the correct formof the underlinedphrase here.

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Documents

Green Hecht 1992 Explicit Instruction