Reconceptualizing grammar and vocabulary as meaning-making resources

Grammar and vocabulary are, for many FL teachers, the most important parts of language learning and the foundation for the acquisition of all other elements of FL learning, including listening and reading comprehension, oral expression, pronunciation, and writing, as well as overall fluency. In fact, the importance of grammatical and lexical knowledge has been confirmed by SLA research (e.g., Broady, 2008; Spada, 2011; Zhang, 2012). It is also the case that implementing effective grammar and vocabulary instruction is a great challenge for FL teachers, who often grapple with moving beyond a discrete approach to lexico-grammatical teaching that focuses on the memorization of word lists and rules and accurate production of forms separate from skills such as reading and writing texts and meaningful oral communication. Indeed, such an approach to grammar and vocabulary instruction is not in line with the multiliteracies perspective, given the primacy of meaning design through integration of the various linguistic modalities. The way in which the multiliteracies perspective conceptualizes grammar and vocabulary and how instruction can build on this perspective will be the focus of this module.

What does know knowledge of FL grammar and vocabulary entail?

Although grammar and vocabulary have often been defined prescriptively in the past as involving what “one should and should not say in order to speak and write a language ‘correctly,’” (Katz & Blyth, 2007, p. 264), SLA research has brought to light less prescriptive notions that conceptualize of what it means to understand lexico-grammatical resources in more nuanced terms. Explicit knowledge involves “an understanding of language forms that students can consciously learn and then explain to others” whereas, in contrast, implicit knowledge is “unconscious, used in spontaneous conversation, and not easily explained” (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016, p. 77). This contrast can be illustrated by reflecting on how you know your native language—you may have implicit knowledge that allows you to use a certain grammatical structure with ease but you may not have explicit knowledge of that structure that allows you to explain what it is and how it is used in abstract terms in relation to other grammatical structures. Two other important notions are those of productive and receptive knowledge, involving the capacity to actively use a given linguistic form orally or in writing versus the capacity to understand the structure and meaning of the linguistic form without being able to produce it. FL classroom instruction tends to focus more on explicit knowledge, as it is easier to teach and assess. However, as Paesan