The meaning of grammatical consciousness‐raising

ABSTRACT: The pros and cons of grammatical consciousness‐raising (C‐R) in pedagogy are still very much a part of current discussion on the proper relations between theories of second‐language acquisition and classroom learning and teaching. While it seems clear from these studies that grammatical C‐R should be given a place in the language‐teaching curriculum, it by no means follows that we have a clear idea of what that role ought to be. There would presumably be little dispute with the notion that whatever it is that is raised to consciousness should be maximally consistent both with what we presently know of the nature of language and its organizing principles and with how all of that gets absorbed by the learner—i.e. the nature of language acquisition. Yet it can easily be argued that what has invariably been singled out for pedagogical attention, even over the many centuries of documented language teaching, amounts at best to a misrepresentation of these principles—where it seems to have been widely assumed that the essence of language is the sum total of its putative combinatorial units and that the task of the teacher is to ‘impart’ these units directly to the learner. This is essentially a ‘product approach’ to grammatical C‐R, and one in which the learner is presumed to be a tabula rasa. It will be argued, however, that meaningful research on the issue of whether or not formal instruction makes a difference will need to abandon notions of language learning as the accumulation of language entities and consider C‐R with regard to grammatical processes and the learner's progressive restructuring of prior knowledge.