ABSTRACT
The kind of grammatical instruction dispensed in the L2 classroom obviously depends on the teacher’s view of what grammar is, and how students process it. Virtually every practical decision the instructor makes from the conception of the syllabus (Grundy 2004) to the design of the activities themselves (Achard 2004) implements a set of hypotheses about the nature of grammatical organization and the manner in which its units are learned, whether these hypotheses are explicitly stated or not. This chapter explores some of the practical implications of the adoption of the tenets and principles of Cognitive Grammar [henceforth CG, (Langacker 1987, 1991)] for the teaching of grammar, and more generally for the general orientation of the L2 classroom. It argues that the CG view of linguistic organization presents two major advantages. First, by emphasizing the symbolic nature of all linguistic expressions, it allows the instructor to focus on the meaning of grammatical constructions. This focus on meaning in turn provides useful insights into the form of those constructions, since meaning can be shown to motivate form (Doughty & Williams 1998, VanPatten, Williams, Rott & Overstreet 2004). It also allows the instructor to make explicit the semantic relations that obtain with other related constructions. From a methodological standpoint, the recognition of the meaning of grammatical constructions provides opportunities to teach grammar in a way similar to that of lexical items, which makes grammatical instruction congruent with the principles of most contemporary communicative models of language pedagogy, such as processing instruction, content-based teaching, task-based teaching for example. Secondly, the adoption of the CG principles places the speaker squarely in the center of the communicative act. The specific distribution of linguistic
expressions in discourse should therefore be imputed to speaker choice rather than to properties of the system itself. This “teaching of usage” (to be explained in the following sections) reflects the complexity and flexibility of the target system. It also allows the students to understand the choices natives make in specific situations, and exercise their own creativity in similar ways.1 From a pedagogical point of view, the progression toward native-like flexibility of expression represents the goal of the advanced levels of instruction. This chapter is structured in the following fashion. Section 2 presents some of the issues about the teaching of grammar in L2 most hotly debated in the literature. Section 3 introduces the CG tenets most directly relevant for foreign language instruction. Section 4 illustrates the practical implementation of these positions with an example from French. Section 5 recapitulates the results and concludes the chapter.
