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BECOMING
GRAMMATICAL

by Rod Ellis
Rod Ellis is currently a professor at the Institute of English Language Teaching and
Learning, University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is also the director of the
Institute. Previously, he taught at Temple University in Japan and Philadelphia. He
has also worked in Spain, England and Zambia. He has written several books
about second language acquisition and has also published a number of ESL and
EFL textbooks that are used widely throughout the world, including the Impact
series.

All teachers experience epiphanies -- moments during

their teaching when they have sudden flashes of
insight. I recall quite vividly an epiphany experienced
many years ago while teaching in a secondary school
in Zambia. I was trying to eliminate a common
grammatical error - the use of the present progressive
tense with verbs such as "have" (e.g. "I am having a
headache"). I carefully and thoroughly drilled the
students in the correct use of "have." The lesson went
well, so I thought, and the students successfully used
"have" correctly. Then I set the class a written
exercise and noticed one student at the back doing
nothing. When I asked him why he was not writing he
promptly replied, "I am not having my exercise book."
So much for my grammar lesson! At that moment I
became aware of the gap that exists between teaching
and learning grammar.

What then should a teacher do? There are two

possible courses of action. One is to abandon
grammar teaching. This is what Krashen (1982)
recommends. He suggests that teaching grammar
results in "learned" knowledge, which is only available
for monitoring utterances that learners produce using
their "acquired" knowledge, and, as such, is of very
limited value. Krashen recommends instead that
teachers concentrate on providing lots of
comprehensible input so that learners can "acquire" a
second language naturally like children acquiring their
mother tongue.

This is an attractive proposal -- particularly for

teachers who don't like grammar! But it has several
problems. One is that students are often convinced
that "learning" grammar is of value to them and,
therefore, expect the teacher to teach grammar.
Another more serious problem is that learners do not
seem to master the grammar of a second language
even when they get plenty of comprehensible input.
Studies of learners in immersion classrooms (e.g.
Swain 1985) have shown even after ample exposure
to the target language learners continue to make a lot
of grammatical errors. In other words, Krashen's claim
that learners "acquire" grammar naturally is not
entirely correct.

This suggests, therefore, that the second course of

action might be better -- trying to find a way of
teaching grammar that is compatible with how
learners learn grammar. Teachers may not be able to
make learners speak and write grammatically, as I
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