The necessity of grammatical language awareness (GLA)

Axel Kolbeinsson

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2, Uni...

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2, University of Linz (Department for Languages and Intercultural Communication, Johannes Kepler Universität), course: Seminar in English Studies (FD): Language Awareness, language: English, abstract: Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has been analysing the effectiveness of different language acquisition processes. Whereas some findings suggest benefits through implicit acquisition processes, others believe explicit acquisition to be superior. The paper aims to identify current positions in the literature regarding the efficacy of implicit versus explicit language instruction, learning and knowledge, as well as learning difficulties for specific grammatical features when presented implicitly or explicitly and what the findings imply for the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. In order to do so, a general literature review was used to analyse the most relevant findings in the field to answer the first question as well as a specific literature review of The Marsden Project by Elder, Ellis (Ed.), Erlam, Loewen, Philp & Reinders (2009) to answer the second research question. Findings include support for both implicit and explicit acquisition processes, although significantly more evidence of learning difficulties were found for the former, indicating that explicit knowledge seems to be acquired more easily. However, SLA-research and successful classroom practices do not always align perfectly, as the curriculum indicates that a shift towards a more communicative approach is favoured and teachers should only include explicit instruction where necessary. It was particularly interesting that some grammatical items seem to be similar in learning difficulty for both processes, suggesting that a wider variety of teaching methods can be implemented into the ESL-classroom. Also, the subjective and objective difficulty of the grammatical items do not always overlap completely, which entails that successful acquisition, regardless of its nature, also depends on the teacher-learner relationship.