8.2 Communicative Grammar Practice & Error Treatment with Adults
Key Takeaways
Communicative grammar practice transitions deliberately along an instructional spectrum from mechanical drill to meaningful practice to communicative task-based deployment.
Input flood exposes learners to saturated natural exemplars, while input enhancement (Sharwood Smith) visually or phonologically highlights target forms to promote conscious noticing.
Consciousness-raising (CR) tasks (Fotos & Ellis) engage learners in problem-solving about grammar, developing explicit language awareness without requiring immediate productive mastery.
Corrective feedback taxonomies (Lyster & Ranta) distinguish between teacher-led reformulations (recasts, explicit correction) and prompts (elicitation, clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, repetition) that drive learner-generated repair.
Error treatment with adult learners requires balancing affective sensitivity and cognitive dignity with linguistic accuracy through structured self-monitoring and peer-editing protocols.
8.2 Communicative Grammar Practice & Error Treatment with Adults
Note
Second language acquisition research shows that errors are not signs of failure; rather, they reflect an adult learner's developing interlanguage. Effective grammar pedagogy moves systematically from structured awareness to communicative deployment while implementing error correction that preserves adult dignity.
The Grammar Practice Spectrum: Mechanical, Meaningful, and Communicative
To transition from declarative knowledge (knowing a rule) to procedural fluency (using it spontaneously), educators employ Christina Bratt Paulston's practice taxonomy, central to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT):
- Mechanical Practice: Controlled exercises manipulating form without requiring comprehension. Activities include repetition drills, slot substitutions, and transformation drills (e.g., active to passive). While mechanical drills build articulatory automaticity, they offer minimal communicative transfer. Over-relying on them infantilizes adults and causes cognitive disengagement.
- Meaningful Practice: Semi-controlled tasks where language remains constrained, but completion requires comprehending semantic content. Examples include matching conditions to consequences, completing personal schedules, or selecting verb tenses based on timelines. Learners attend to meaning, but linguistic choices are structured.
- Communicative Practice: Open-ended tasks where language is deployed in unpredictable contexts to fulfill authentic communicative goals. Driven by an information gap, opinion gap, or problem-solving outcome, communicative tasks require learners to integrate form, meaning, and use under real-time processing conditions.
Communicative Grammar Activity Spectrum
| Practice Level | Degree of Control | Attentional Focus | Typical Activity | Exemplar Task (Past Continuous vs. Past Simple) | Communicative Authenticity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanical | High; single predetermined answer. | Form / Syntax only. | Substitution tables; transformation drills. | Transforming base sentences into past continuous (She worked → She was working). | Low; divorced from authentic context. |
| Meaningful | Moderate; multiple plausible responses. | Form + Semantic comprehension. | Information matching; true/false surveys. | Choosing correct aspect to complete true statements about what learners were doing during major events. | Moderate; requires processing temporal overlap. |
| Communicative | Low; open-ended negotiation. | Meaning, Pragmatics, and Task Completion. | Information-gap role-plays; problem-solving simulations. | In pairs, reconstructing an alibi timeline to determine who was working when an equipment fault occurred. | High; replicates authentic workplace communication. |
Noticing and Consciousness-Raising in Adult Grammar Instruction
Richard Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis posits that conscious awareness of form in input is necessary for second language acquisition. Adults do not acquire grammatical features purely through ambient exposure; they must notice the gap between input and their developing interlanguage. Teachers utilize three primary techniques to stimulate noticing:
- Input Flood: Saturating oral or written texts with high frequencies of a target structure without explicit highlighting. While input flood provides abundant positive evidence, adult learners often process texts purely for semantic gist, bypassing unattended grammatical markers.
- Input Enhancement: Developed by Michael Sharwood Smith, input enhancement alters the visual or acoustic prominence of target forms using typographical cues (bolding, italicizing, color-coding) or acoustic stress. Visual enhancement draws focal attention to forms without disrupting communicative immersion.
- Consciousness-Raising (CR) Tasks: Formulated by Rod Ellis and Sandra Fotos, CR tasks treat grammar as an analytical puzzle. Learners collaborate to analyze linguistic data sets, discover patterns, and articulate rules. Rather than demanding immediate oral production, CR tasks develop explicit awareness, priming learners to notice target structures in subsequent input.
Tip
Use typographical enhancement in vocational texts (e.g., bolding causative verbs in safety protocols) prior to communicative tasks to stimulate noticing without interrupting comprehension.
Corrective Feedback Taxonomy: Lyster & Ranta (1997)
When adult learners produce non-target utterances, instructors select appropriate corrective feedback. Roy Lyster and Leila Ranta classified oral corrective feedback into reformulations (teacher provides the correct form) and prompts (teacher pushes learner to self-repair):
| Feedback Type | Category | Instructional Mechanism | Classroom Exemplar | Uptake & Repair Potential |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recast | Reformulation | Teacher implicitly reformulates utterance without changing meaning. | Student: "He go to meeting yesterday." / Teacher: "Oh, he went to the meeting?" | Low: Learners often interpret recasts as conversational assent rather than correction. |
| Explicit Correction | Reformulation | Teacher explicitly identifies error and provides correct form. | Student: "I have 35 years." / Teacher: "No, we say 'I am 35 years old.'" | Moderate: Provides immediate correction but requires no cognitive retrieval. |
| Clarification Request | Prompt | Teacher indicates non-comprehension or ill-formedness. | Student: "She don't like schedule." / Teacher: "Pardon me? What did you say?" | High: Prompts learner to re-evaluate the utterance and self-correct. |
| Metalinguistic Feedback | Prompt | Teacher provides comments or grammatical cues without giving form. | Student: "They was late for work." / Teacher: "Remember subject-verb agreement for plurals." | High: Activates explicit metalinguistic knowledge, stimulating self-repair. |
| Elicitation | Prompt | Teacher elicits target form by pausing strategically or asking questions. | Student: "The manager... sign contract." / Teacher: "The manager... [pauses with rising pitch]" | Very High: Obliges learner to generate the correct morphological form independently. |
| Repetition | Prompt | Teacher repeats erroneous utterance with acoustic emphasis. | Student: "He must to leave early." / Teacher: "He must TO leave?" | High: Isolates the error locus, prompting immediate re-evaluation. |
Important
Lyster and Ranta showed that prompts (elicitation, metalinguistic feedback, clarification requests, repetition) generate substantially higher rates of uptake and repair than recasts, because prompts require cognitive retrieval and interlanguage restructuring.
Affective Sensitivity, Dignity, and Error Treatment Protocols for Adults
Adult learners possess professional identities and acute vulnerability. Public, blunt correction triggers high affective filters, inducing shame and conversational withdrawal:
1. Timing: Immediate vs. Delayed Feedback
- Accuracy Practice: Provide immediate, scaffolded prompts (elicitation, metalinguistic clues) during controlled stages where the explicit focus is structural precision.
- Fluency Tasks: Avoid interrupting spontaneous communication. Act as an unobtrusive observer, noting recurring interlanguage patterns for Delayed Error Treatment.
2. Whiteboard Delayed Error Analysis
Following a communicative simulation, write 4–6 anonymized error sentences on the whiteboard. Engage the class in collaborative analysis: have learners work in pairs to identify errors, guide the class to negotiate corrections collaboratively, and explain subtle pragmatic distinctions.
3. Self-Monitoring and Peer-Editing Protocols
Provide adult writers with standardized proofreading codes (e.g., VT = Verb Tense, WO = Word Order, SV = Subject-Verb Agreement). Rather than rewriting student papers, mark marginal codes and have learners consult personal Error Tracking Logs. Over time, adults identify individual fossilization tendencies, fostering self-efficacy and autonomous editing.
During a communicative simulation, an adult learner says: 'The supervisor didn't approved my overtime request.' The instructor responds: 'Check the verb after didn't—what form of the verb follows did?' According to Roy Lyster and Leila Ranta's corrective feedback taxonomy, which type of feedback has the teacher provided?
An input flood, because the instructor exposed the student to numerous authentic exemplars of past tense negation.
A conversational recast, because the instructor implicitly rephrased the sentence into a standard interrogative structure.
Explicit correction, because the instructor provided the target bare infinitive form for immediate imitation.
Metalinguistic feedback: a grammatical question about the verb, without supplying the correct form.
An adult ESOL instructor wants to help advanced learners acquire complex causative structures ('have someone do something' vs. 'get someone to do something') without subjecting them to decontextualized mechanical drilling. The instructor provides learners with a transcription of an authentic workplace dispute, instructs them to work in small groups to underline causative verbs, compare the syntactic patterns between 'have' and 'get,' and formulate a rule explaining the structural differences. According to second language acquisition theory, what instructional task has the teacher implemented?
A traditional grammar-translation exercise, because learners are translating idiomatic vernacular expressions into their native language.
An unenhanced input flood, because the instructor relies entirely on incidental, non-analytical exposure to natural discourse.
A mechanical pattern substitution drill, because learners are repeating invariant structural formulas to build articulatory automaticity.
A consciousness-raising (CR) task, because learners analyze authentic language data as a problem and work out an explicit rule.
During an open-ended communicative negotiation task, several adult professional learners make recurring errors with past modal verbs of regret ('should have done'). To maintain a supportive and dignity-preserving classroom environment that honors adult self-concept while fostering grammatical accuracy, how should the instructor manage error correction?
Interrupt the negotiation immediately after each mistake to force public choral repetition of the correct modal formula.
Ignore the errors entirely and permanently, because communicative language teaching forbids any explicit attention to grammatical accuracy.
Assign punitive decontextualized grammar worksheets to be completed individually in silence whenever an error occurs.
Note the recurring errors quietly during the task, then lead an anonymous, collaborative board analysis in the debrief.
Sections you finish are checked off in the contents.