What tasks should we use in the grammar class?

Villa María

Jornada; III Jornadas de ELT en la UNVM: ?Rethinking English Language Teaching; 2015

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

The notion that grammatical knowledge structures can be differentiated accordingto whether they are fully automatized (implicit knowledge) or not (explicitknowledge) raises important questions for the teaching and acquisition ofgrammatical ability. In this presentation we will show which tasks have proved to be effective for learning implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge.The corpus was made up of 40 tests in which the students´ implicit and explicitknowledge of grammar was elicited by tasks of different nature. On the one hand,the test included tasks that required the students´ production and dentification of particular grammar structures: They had to detect the cohesive function of certain phrases in a text, fill in blanks with suitable junctives, and finally, determine the syntactic and semantic relations held by some of the clauses in the text. On the other hand, a task was designed to have the students answer a question in writing about a particular grammar point. This aimed to assess the learners? implied knowledge of cohesion, junctives and logico-semantic relations, in a context that they would provide. The main objective of this task was to channel the students? attention to meaning and content and thus assess their ?acquired? knowledge of cohesion, junctives and logico-semantic relations.To analyze the corpus, simple percentages were calculated and compared. Of allthe tasks included in the test, two were analyzed quantitatively. We took intoaccount the percentages the students obtained in the task designed to elicit explicit knowledge and these were compared to the percentages obtained in the activity designed to elicit implicit knowledge. The results show that although the students did quite well in the tasks designed to test explicit knowledge, they had not fully acquired these structures as was shown by the tasks meant to test implicit or automatized knowledge.