1. Rod Ellis: Grammar Teaching – Practice or Consciousness-Raising?
Grammar teaching has a delayed effect, not instant.
Practice vs. consciousness-raising (CR)

2. Practice: Isolation of a particular feature Production by students
Repetition of this production
Expectancy that production will be successful
Feedback

3. Consciousness-raising
Isolation of a grammatical feature
Data and perhaps rule
Intellectual effort to understand it
Misunderstanding leads to further clarification
May be articulation of rule by learners

4. Explicit vs Metalinguistic knowledge
Not the same!
Examples?

5. Differences Repetitive production yes/no
Aim is performance / aim is awareness
Aim is to bring about knowing-how/ to facilitate knowing-how
Behavioristic vs concept-forming

6. Combination?
You can combine practice-based teaching with awareness raising.
But you can have awareness raising without practice.

7. Does practice work? Research
Some studies show that practice is followed by better performance but:
Some don’t
No proof that the relationship is causal
A lot of evidence that even after practice learners don’t acquire the structure perfectly
Difficulty of transferring from controlled practice to free

8. 2. Theory
Developmental sequences (‘Natural Order’)
You can’t, in the classroom, provide practice at exactly the level needed for each student.

9. The case for consciousness-raising
The aim of practice is not achievable.
Let’s ‘lower our sights’ – aim for something that is achievable.
i.e. explicit knowledge

10. How does explicit knowledge facilitate implicit?
Three stages:
Noticing
Comparing
Integrating

11. CR induces noticing and facilitates comparing
CR induces noticing and facilitates comparing. Integrating will take place when the learner is ready. Or
Explicit knowledge can be stored, accessed when the learner is ready to start noticing.
And
Explicit knowledge helps learners to notice subsequent samples of the feature

12. Conclusion Removes necessity for practice
Compatible with current thinking
Compatible with ideas about ‘learning through discovering’
But:
May not be appropriate for young learners.
Can only be used with beginners if L1 is used

13. But still
Even if you don’t use CR with young or beginner classes, you still shouldn’t use practice!
Should use lots of communication.
CR is a supplement to communicative activities, not an alternative.