Teaching English Grammar Penny Ur 2015

The teachability hypothesis

• There is a natural developmental sequence of acquisition of morpho-syntactical structures.
• Teaching of a grammatical feature will be effective only if the learner is developmentally ready to acquire it.
• Teaching of a feature when a learner is not ready may have a detrimental effect.
• (Pienemann, 1984; Spada & Lightbown, 1999)

Explicit teaching

• Teaching grammatical rules (R. Ellis, 2001)
• Providing practice exercises (Dekeyser, 2007)
• Explicit corrective feedback on errors (R. Ellis et al., 2006)