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DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TEACHING GRAMMAR: A CASE STUDY

1.0 INTRODUCTION
For a few decades, there have been so many disputes on different approaches to
teaching grammar. To date, teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL) are still
confronted with the crucial issue of choosing the best approach to improve their students'
grammatical accuracy. Through experience as an ESL teacher in a government school, the
researcher found out that many of her students always struggle with their grammar
especially in their writing compositions. They are form three students and they can be
categorized into groups of high intermediate to low proficiency in English. The level of
proficiency in English is determined from their semester exam's results whereby they only
managed to obtain scores below eighty percent. Based on their narrative compositions, it
was apparent that these students are very weak in using Simple Past Tense and Past
Continuous Tense. It is believed that, with the years of learning English language in ESL
classrooms, they should have some basic knowledge on grammar. In the English
syllabuses of Kurikulum Baru Sekolah Rendah (KBSR) and Kurikulum Bersepadu Sekolah
Menengah (KBSM) grammar is not taught in isolation. Instead, in Communicative Language
Teaching (CLT) approach, which is adopted by KBSR and KBSM, grammar is taught
implicitly through meaningful contexts.

Presently, CLT is considered to be the main stream in English as Second Language

classrooms. According to Williams (1995), CLT has met with great success; second
language learners who study in CLT classroom are generally successful communicators.
Unfortunately, now many researchers and teachers have begun to wonder if it is enough to
provide students with rich, varied, and interesting input alone. Williams also highlighted that
there have been concerns regarding the grammatical competence of second language
learners; that in focusing solely on meaning, we have forsaken all concern for form. This
phenomenon took place because many CLT classrooms share the same features. Some of
the features are:-
i) the emphasis on tasks that encourages the negotiation of meaning between
students and teachers,
ii) the emphasis on successful communication and
iii) minimal focus on form which includes lack of emphasis on error correction
and little explicit instruction on language rules.
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1.1 Background to the Study

The notion that grammar can be learnt implicitly through exposure is in accordance
with what Krashen (1985) believes. He firmly believes in comprehensible input. He
proposed that given extensive opportunities for meaningful communication in the classroom,
grammar would be learnt naturally and automatically. However, in Malaysian real situation,
it is difficult to replicate the natural first language acquisition environment in the actual ESL
classrooms. ESL students are seldom capable of acquiring grammar naturally and
automatically. This is because they do not have enough comprehensible input outside the
English classroom. These students are not adequately exposed to the English environment.
They seldom have or find the opportunity to listen to English language or to speak the
language at home. Thus it is very difficult for them to acquire the language in terms of
grammatical accuracy and communicative competence simultaneously.

Furthermore, is comprehensible input alone enough to ensure second language (L2)

learners' grammatical competence in writing compositions? Or do teachers of ESL need to
revert to the traditional way of teaching grammar, that is, explicit teaching of the rules and
concepts of grammatical items. Besides that, the researcher also faced another crucial
issue; is explicit teaching of grammar effective in developing learner's grammatical
accuracy?

Krashen (1999) refutes any claims that grammar or formal instruction works and
studies that attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of direct instruction in grammar
showed only that grammar teaching has a marginal effect.

Seedhouse (1997) declares that the relative merits of focusing on accuracy and form
(grammar instruction) as opposed to focusing on fluency and meaning (CLT) has been a
prolonged debate in language teaching. Van Lier (1988) reports that an extreme focus in
each direction will produce either 'fossilphobia' or 'pidgin-breeding'. In conjunction with that,
Seedhouse proposes a 'dual' focus approach, a means of focusing on accuracy and fluency,
on form and meaning simultaneously.

To accomplish this dual approach, Ellis (1994), on the one hand, posits two possible
approaches: first, activities can be devised that require learners to communicate while also
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focusing their attention on specific formal properties; second, teachers can elect to provide
feedback on learners' errors during the course of communication activities. While
Widdowson (1990), on the other hand, discusses communicative grammar activities which
aim to reconcile and combine 'linguistic repetition', with its necessary focus on form, and
non-linguistic purpose, with its necessary focus on meaning.

However Spada (1997) uses another term to refer to the dual approach, that is form-
focussed instruction (FFI). FFI refers to any pedagogical effort, which is used to draw the
learners' attention to language form either implicitly or explicitly that occur within meaning-
based approaches.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

To date, teachers of ESL classrooms are still confronted with crucial issue of
choosing the best approach to improve their students' grammatical competence. Thus, in
light of these three different approaches to teaching grammar (implicit teaching of grammar
in CLT, traditional explicit teaching of grammar, and FFI), it would be very useful to examine
the effect of these disparate approaches on the students' performance in writing narrative
compositions. It would also be interesting to discover which approaches will produce a
higher margin of improvement in terms of the students' grammatical accuracy.

1.3 Objectives of the Study

This study attempts to achieve the following objectives:-
i) to examine the effects of the traditional explicit teaching of grammar and
form-focussed instruction on students' performance in writing narrative
compositions compared to CLT approach.
ii) to determine which of these approaches would produce the highest marginal
score or the highest margin of improvement.

For this study, the Simple Past Tense and the Past Continuous Tense are chosen as
the target grammatical rules. Both tenses are selected because they play a very dominant
part in narrative writing particularly in describing past events.

1.4 Research Questions

The questions that form the basis for this study are:
i) Does practicing different approach to teaching grammar show different effects
on students' performance in writing narrative compositions?
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ii) If there is an effect, which approach is responsible for the most improved
performance of the students' writing compositions?
1.5 Significance of the Study
Despite Krashen's belief in comprehensible input, it seems that although the
communicative language teaching (CLT) resulted in high level of fluency, it left the L2
learners linguistically incompetent.

Thus the present study will apply other approaches to teaching grammar so as to
improve the students' grammatical competence. The findings of the study will give the
researchers and other ESL teachers an insight as to which approach is more suitable to
further improve their students' grammatical competence especially in terms of using Simple
Past Tense and Past Continuous Tense in writing narrative compositions.

1.6 Limitations of the Study

In conducting the study, the following limitations should be taken into consideration:
i) The number of subjects used in this research is very small; only sixty
students. Therefore, any conclusions regarding the effect of any of the three
approaches cannot be generalized from the findings of the study.
ii) In this study, the focus is on two grammatical items which are the Simple Past
and the Past Continuous Tense because these two items normally occur
concurrently. Hence, any conclusions derived from the findings of the study cannot
be the basis to presume the same results for other grammatical items.
iii) Another limitation of the study is the time factor. The whole experiment took
about two months to complete, that is, from the pretest to the delayed posttest. The
duration of the treatment itself was conducted in only two weeks time. Thus, the
findings of the study may not reflect the actual effects of the approaches on the
students' writing performance over a longer period of time.
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2.0 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

As the study was conducted in a school setting, students were already grouped into
different classrooms. Thus, this study was quasi-experimental in nature because the
researcher formed the groups to be studied by randomly assigning classrooms rather than
individual persons. The researcher had randomly assigned three classes to be taught with
three different approaches to teaching grammar.

2.1 Research Design

The design of the study was a quasi-experiment with pre- and posttests and a control
group. Therefore, the data for the study were collected from the scores of the pretest and
the two posttests and then the data were analysed and evaluated using the ANOVA
(Analysis of Variance) in order to answer the research questions.

In this research, three out of seven form three classes of Sekolah Menengah
Kebangsaan Seri Perling Johor Bahru were randomly selected by way of a lucky-draw to be
assigned with one of the different approaches to teaching grammar. The number of
students in each class is between 35 to 37 and they have different levels of English
Language proficiency. However, only twenty students were selected from each class for the
purpose of this study after excluding those who did not meet the requirements of the study.
Both pretesting and recurrent absenteeism in the two posttesting phases eliminated subjects
in each group. The final number of subjects was 57, distributed in the following manner: ET
Group (N = 20); FFI Group (N = 20); and CLT Group (N = 17).

2.1.1 Requirements of The Study

To avoid any bias in the study, for each class, the researcher selected the first top
twenty students from the class register list after eliminating those who did not meet the
requirements of the study as below:-
i) Students who scored above 80% in the pretest.
ii) Students who wrote less than 100 words for the narrative composition in the
pretest.
iii) Students who came from English-speaking homes were also excluded from
the study. They were identified through a short interview session about the
language used at home. This is to ensure that subjects have only minimum
contact with English outside the classroom.
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iv) Those who were absent during the treatments or during the posttests.

2.2 The Instrument

The main sources of data for this study were the narrative compositions written by
the subjects in the pretest, posttest, and the delayed posttest. The writing of short narrative
compositions was used as the instrument in this study because during the narrative writing
activity, the focus on grammatical accuracy is contextualised and more advanced than the
sentence level.

2.3 Scoring Procedures

After the pretest and the two posttests, all the essays were collected. In order to
measure the performance of the subjects; the researcher used an obligatory count
procedure to analyze the data. In this procedure, the number of correct use of the simple
past tense and past continuous tense verbs is divided upon the number of obligatory
occurrence. To obtain the margin of improvement, the difference between the mean of the
pretest and the mean of the first posttest was calculated. The margin of improvement of the
delayed posttest was calculated by finding the mean score differences between the pretest
and the delayed posttest. Then the scores were tabulated.

The formula used for the obligatory count procedure:

No. of correct use

X 100 = score (%)
No. of obligatory occurrence

It is necessary to clarify here that when the researcher checked the subjects'
compositions, her only focus was on the use of past tense and the past continuous tense
verbs. She did not correct any other mistakes (especially on subject-verb agreements and
articles) made by the subjects.
After obtaining the mean and the standard deviation for each group, the researcher
calculated the margin of improvement for each group. Raw scores were then submitted to
one-way analyses of variance (ANOVA) to find if there are any differences between the
groups before and after the treatments. In order to find a significant main effect for the tests,
the Scheffé test was used. To find the margin of improvement, the researcher looked at the
difference of the mean score between the first posttest and the pretest.
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3.0 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

From the findings of the data, the answer to the first research question is yes, different
approaches to teaching grammar show different effects on the students' performance in
writing narrative compositions. All approaches show positive effects with varying degrees of
improvement. The answer to the second question can be determined from the margin of
improvement shown by each group.

3.1 Comparison of the mean scores

For each group, the mean scores are displayed graphically in Figure 3.1

70

60

50
Mean scores

Pretest
40

30 Posttest

20 Delayed
Posttest
10

0
Explicit Form- Implicit
focussed
Group

Figure 3.1: Mean scores for the three tests obtained by each group

From the data above, it is possible to find the margin of improvement for each group
as shown in the following table.
Table 3.1: Margin of improvement for each group in the post-test

Group Explicit Form-focussed Implicit

Score (%) Teaching Teaching
Pretest 26.34 23.94 39.20
Posttest 53.08 67.43 59.78
Margin of Improvement 26.74 43.49 20.58

Looking at the margin of improvement for each group, it is very clear that the form-
focussed instruction group has achieved the highest margin of improvement, 43.49%
followed by the explicit teaching group, 26.74%. The implicit teaching of grammar in CLT
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group only managed to increase by 20.58%. These figures answer the second research
question, that is the form-focussed instruction group showed the most improved
performance of the students' writing compositions when compared to explicit teaching group
and the implicit teaching group.

All groups showed a slight decrease in their delayed posttest which was carried out a
month after the treatment. The explicit teaching group registered the highest decrease,
9.69%, followed by form-focussed instruction group, 8.13%. The implicit teaching group
showed the least decrease in performance that is only 2.1%. However the mean score
(57.68%) is still less than the mean score for the form-focussed instruction group (59.30%).

3.2 Discussion of the results

The results presented in the previous section showed that the significant
improvement achieved by the form-focussed instruction group is due to the methods used in
the treatment given. In form-focussed approach, subjects were taught using methods
derived from both opposing approaches. Subjects were presented with the rules of the
target grammatical items, in this instance, the past tense and the past continuous which is
similar to what the explicit teaching group had received. Then they were given
comprehensible input in a form of passages and newspaper reports to be read similar to
what the students in the implicit teaching group received during their normal lessons. The
passages and newspaper reports were about past events which enabled the subjects to
learn the rules of the target tenses in context through meaning-based activities.

3.2.1 The Importance of Comprehensible Input

One of the possible explanations as to why the traditional explicit teaching of
grammar had shown only moderate effects on students' writing performance when
compared to form-focussed instruction group is because the subjects in this group have
learnt the rules of the tenses but they did not acquire the language. This is in accordance
with what Krashen (1982) has posited that learners may develop two systems; an acquired
competence and a learned competence. He claimed that traditional instruction or explicit
teaching of grammar results in learned competence and he argues that the learners' internal
system can only develop by getting comprehensible input.

Although the subjects in the explicit group had learnt the rules and they could do well
in the discrete point tests given, they were unable to apply the rules learnt in the writing tests
given. This is because they had learnt the rules of the past tense and past continuous
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tense in isolation whereas writing involves cognitive skills that needs acquired knowledge to
express intended meaning. The truth is the students did not have enough input and they
faced a lot of problems in writing essays. Through the discussion with the subjects, they
admitted that they seldom speak English and they do not read any English materials except
when they are asked by the teacher. They do however sing popular English songs and
watch English movies. Nevertheless, from the result of the study, it was obvious that the
little input they have through singing and watching movies is not enough to help them apply
the rules learnt in writing compositions.

3.2.2 Over-Generalization of Rules

Based on the performance of the subjects in the implicit teaching group, they also
showed a slight improvement in the posttest. Their improvement can be due to the input
from activities carried out in the classroom such as reading comprehension, listening and
speaking activities and process writing. However there is an instance which need to be
highlighted. It is the over-generalization of the past tense rules. From the two posttests
analysed, there are 21 errors made in this category. Some of the words the subjects used to
show past tense verbs are as follows:
i) blowed (blew)
ii) catched (caught)
iii) drinked (drank)
iv) falled (fell)
v) heared (heard)
vi) hitted (hit)
vii) sended (sent)
viii) shooted (shot)
ix) sleeped (slept)
x) taked (took)

From the examples above, it is clear that these students did not realize that those
words are irregular verbs and they do not follow the same rules applied for the regular verbs.
This is one of the weaknesses in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) whereby
grammar is taught implicitly. In this case subjects were not aware of the different types of
verbs and verb forms. Thus, they follow the same rules to form past tense for regular verbs.
Without form-focussed instructions, learners in CLT continue to have difficulty with the basic
structures of the language as pointed out by Lightbown and Spada (1993, pp. 103). This
over-generalization of the rules, however, is not a common occurrence in the other groups.
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For the explicit teaching group and form-focussed, after the presentation of rules, there are
only 7 and 4 mistakes found respectively. The wrong words are shooted, waked and felled.
3.2.3 The Advantage of Form-focussed Instruction
From the analysis of the subjects' narrative compositions, there are two cases that
deserved to be brought to light. In the delayed posttest, one of the subjects in implicit
teaching of grammar in CLT group had started her composition using the word 'Today …'
and continued to write using the simple present tense. She also showed confusion in using
present continuous tense and present perfect tense. When asked about it, she confessed
that she was not sure when to use simple past and why she should use past tense in her
essay. She assumed that when she wanted to describe what happened 'today' she has to
use simple present tense.

The other similar case happened to one of the subjects in the form-focussed
instruction group. She has the ability to write a narrative composition since she has a wide
range of vocabulary and a flair for writing, but due to her unawareness of the rules of tenses,
she used present tense to describe past events. After she was told about the rules of past
tense and past continuous tense, she improved significantly, that is from 6.5% in the pretest
to 90.3% in her posttest.

These two cases revealed that although both subjects have received input that
enable them to write a narrative composition, they lack the basic structure of the language
i.e. the grammar of the language, in this case the use of past tense and past continuous
tense. This suggests that "the 'language' has to be 'learnt' before it can be used" (Gray,
1999). However, she is convinced that the application of grammar cannot be learnt by only
memorizing the lists of rules. Instead, it can be learnt through identifying a rule from many
meaningful examples of the language followed by extensive opportunities to apply the rule in
actual communication.

In terms of the decline in performance of each group in the delayed posttest, one
obvious explanation is that conscious learning on rules of the past tense and past
continuous tense has only a short-term effect on the second-language learners. During the
treatment, the explicit teaching group was not exposed to any meaning- focussed activities
which can provide the means for them to identify and use the rules in real-life situations. For
the form-focussed group, although they received comprehensible input in the form of reading
passages, they were still not varied enough input to enable them to identify and use all the
rules learnt. As for the implicit teaching group, a few of the subjects were confused about
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tenses as they did not know exactly on what occasion they are supposed to use the
correct tenses.
3.3 The Implication of the Findings
The findings of the study brought to light that second language learners would benefit
more from the combination of approaches which is adopted by form-focussed approach.
Since it is difficult to replicate the natural first language environment in the second language
learning classroom, explicit teaching of grammar rules may be viewed as a necessary 'short
cut' to learning the rules and structures of the target language (Wright, 1999). Furthermore,
limited comprehensible input in language classrooms is not adequate to help learners to
acquire the target language.

Thus, the implication of the findings is that it may convince language teachers and
practitioners to adopt the form-focussed approach to teaching grammar particularly in
teaching the target grammatical items; the past tense and the past continuous tense.
However, to fully implement the form-focussed approach in our secondary schools with
limited and ever decreasing time available is difficult. Gray (1999) elucidates a few factors
that can impede the success of form-focussed approach in meaning-based context:
i) reduction in the time allowance;
ii) the need to cater for an extremely wide range of ability;
iii) larger and more mixed ability classes;
iv) the huge variety in both motivation and general linguistic competence;
v) the mounting pressure to focus on examination results rather than on the
teaching and learning processes which should be the first priority in teaching
profession.

Although it is stated that the aim of the English Language Curriculum is to equip the
students with positive communication skills and knowledge of English , the focal point is still
on the examination. The last factor stated by Gray is actually the foremost in teachers'
minds because they have to prepare the students for the examinations to fulfill the students,
parents, school's administration and the government's expectations. Thus it is a real task to
provide students with rich-input and repeated opportunities to enable the students to put the
rules of grammar learnt into action in authentic communication.

Nevertheless, Gray (1999) proposes that millennial formula for language

development may well be a mixture of opportunities both for acquisition through
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communicative interaction and for form-focussed instruction, in a balance which takes into
account the individuality of the learners and the classroom environment variables.

4.0 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Although Krashen (1982) and Prabhu (1987) have suggested that efforts to teach
grammar should be abandoned because learners will develop their interlanguages naturally
by engaging in communication in the L2, a few research findings had proven that the single-
minded focus on meaning approach has disadvantages.

Findings of the present study revealed that there is a clear disadvantage to an

extreme focus in either direction. Ellis (1995, pp.136) deduces that "… implicit and explicit
modes of operation interact in interesting ways … [and] …demonstrate that a blend of
explicit instruction and implicit learning can be superior to either just explicit instruction or
implicit learning alone".

The form-focussed instruction group showed the most improved performance in the
narrative writing compared to the other two groups. Gray (1999) proposes that we must
never go back to learning grammar for its own sake but the emphasis is upon working within
an interesting and relevant context to provide maximum practice in different formats of
activities. According to White et al. (1991) the target language input 'enhanced' by specific
focussed on form does lead to improved learning.

Nevertheless, a few limitations should be kept in mind when discussing about the
results. The limited number of subjects chosen in the study made it unreliable to generalize
the findings. Other limitations are due to the short duration of the treatment and the delayed
posttest carried out only one month after the treatment, thus the present study cannot make
any claims on the long-term effect of form-focussed instructions. Lastly the limitation on the
target grammatical item used. The improved performance of the form-focussed instruction
group cannot be guaranteed with other grammatical items.

4.1 Recommendations

There are many aspects of the form-focussed approach that are in need of research.
Below are a few suggestions for future research:
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i) As the findings of the present study revealed the advantages of form-
focussed approach, it should be given more credence and opportunity to be
practiced in the classrooms. Since this study was a small-scale study, the
conclusion on the improved performance of the students in writing narrative
composition cannot be generalized. Hence a bigger sample should be used
for a more extensive study.

ii) The short duration in which the study was carried out does not provide any
long-term effects of the form-focussed approach. Ideally, future studies
should allow for longer periods of time for exposure especially since short-
term studies are likely to underestimate the impact of treatments particularly
that of focus on meaning and focus on form.

iii) More studies are needed to determine which grammatical items and linguistic
features benefit more from form-focussed instruction than others do, that is to
identify which forms to focus on.

iv) Another aspect that is useful for teachers to know is, at what instances is a
form-focussed beneficial, and at what point it is ineffective or even harmful.

v) Since different learners may have different abilities to grasp the grammatical
aspects of the language, more studies need to be done in order to determine
appropriate form-focussed activities in which learners' attention can be drawn
to identify difficult forms.
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