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Most of my experience with teaching L2 is in an adult basic education setting. In this setting I find that I typically focus in on meaning more than accuracy. Typically we are teaching practical life skills, things like going to the store, making doctors appointments, healthy living, etc. To this end we typically focus on communicative competence. If there is a reoccurring grammatical error, or some kind of error that impacts meaning I will take the time to integrate it into the lesson or make a note of it for the next lesson, but again the overall focus of most lessons and classes is on meaning more so than accuracy

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I started learning Spanish in junior high and continued through one year of college. I remember the classes being very focused on grammatical form and accuracy. Especially in high school, we mainly studied verbs and verb conjugation. There was very little oral production of language. I really didn't feel confident to speak Spanish at all. Also, our teacher did not spend much time speaking Spanish to the class. The balance definitely focused on grammar and accuracy. It was a rather boring learning environment.

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It's hard to remember my experience as an English language learner because I was so young when I first started learning it. However, I can draw on my experience learning the French language in my middle school, high school, and college years. Most of what we focused on was grammar and accuracy in the younger years. We worked a lot in workbooks and learning sentence structure, how to conjugate verbs, etc. There was less focus on deep communication. We did do things such as small skits or practice phrases in French, but it wasn't anything that encouraged us to delve deep into the spoken language. Regardless of that, I still enjoyed learning the language. The courses I took in college involved a lot of writing in French, but again, not as much verbal communication.

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I started learning English as my second language since I was 6 years old. My English learning experiences in Chinese school mainly focused on grammatical form and accuracy since we had to pass many English leveled tests. However, I was not able to communicate with others fluently or comprehend the texts as I read in English very well. Especially, when I came to the U.S., I always struggled communicating with people because I was too afraid to speak English and did not understand the conversation. When I was at the U, I took ESL classes for one semester. The teacher asked us to focus on meanings in the class. One thing that she did was to ask us to write journeys a few times a week. We did not have to focus on the grammatical form, she wanted us to write down whatever we had in our minds. Throughout the whole semester, she gradually taught us different grammatical forms and encouraged us to use these forms while writing. I found out that my writing and speaking tended to be more fluent and accurate by the end of the semester.

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I took two Korean language classes.  One in the US, and an intensive 20 hour/week one in Seoul.
The one in the US was very much focused on form.  We got tested on very specific things, and accuracy was the basis for our grades.  Units were organized around grammar and vocabulary topics.  However, almost nobody could actually hold a conversation in Korean.  I hated this course, even though I actually agreed with the total focus on form.
I ended up moving to Korea and taking the intensive program. Because I could do the level test well, I got into level 3, but I actually couldn't function in the level. I didn't know how to negotiate meaning, or go off script, or be creative or anything like that. I dropped to level 2, and then I could handle it. The class only focused on form during the grammar sections, which were probably 45 minutes/day, so about 20% of the class. The rest of the program was focused on meaning. Since we all lived in Korea, we had to be able to survive, so the goal (at level 2) was to help us get around and do daily things like read a schedule, talk to people, order food, etc. After level 2 I went to level 3, which was more focused on daily conversation. There was a LOT of speaking, and one of the skills all the students developed was how to go outside their range of knowledge and talk about things they had never studied by being creative. We were from all around the world, so we didn't have a shared language except Korean, and so this ability to be creative to get meaning across was a very valuable skill. Yeah, we all cared about accuracy, but less so than being able to actually communicate.

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In high school, I had an awesome Spanish Teacher, Senora MacDougal. When teaching a grammar feature, such as past tense verbs, she explicitly explained the purpose of using the language. In Spanish, the past tense has regular [ar- e, aste, o, amos, aron and er/ir - i, iste, o, io, imos, ieron] and irregular [ir, decir, etc] verbs and there are two forms: preterite (occurred once in past- When I was a little girl, I went to Disneyland with my family = Cuando yo era nina, yo fui a disneylandia con mi familia) and imperfect [ia and -aba and irregular - era] (ongoing occurrence in past- When I was a little girl, I lived in California = Cuando yo era nina, yo vivia in California). At the beginning of the year, we were taught how to conjugate verbs for the yo, tu, usted, nosotros and ustedes forms. With this background knowledge, she built on this to support us with the preterite and imperfect. Once we learned how to produce this new knowledge in written form, we focused on speaking, reading and listening with a focus on meaning. She incorporated a lot of interactive tasks with pairs and group work that required us to negotiate meaning and respond with details and elaborate about our lives. Allowing us to express our past in different ways helped us learn about each other. We had a big project called "when I was little" that we began at the beginning of the lesson and built on throughout the class . We did peer and teacher edits and conferences to help us improve our skills. My parents still have this project at home. I can still recite the preterite regular ar/er/ir verb "We will rock you" song to help us recall it and utilize it as a strategy for when we got stuck. With a focus on grammar through communication, it helped build our knowledge and allowed us to bridge input to output. Instead of just memorizing the verbs with worksheets, her teaching strategies allowed for problem solving and higher order thinking skills making our language use more meaningful.

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In my L2 learning experience (Russian), I was the only student, so interaction consisted of me and my teacher. Despite this, I feel like she did a great job bringing interaction and communication/context into each lesson. She definitely was a stickler for correct grammatical forms, but with books, articles, and constant conversation(millions of questions), she tried to bring context and meaning for the purpose of communication into each lesson.

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Last year I was fortunate enough to have an aid in my classroom. With this extra set of hands, I designed my stations to include a computer/vocab practice, my aid ran a speaking/pronunciation station, and the last was direct instruction in reading, writing or grammar. The stations were always intertwined and gave students a chance to focus on meaning-focused practice as well as form-focused practice- both implicitly and explicitly. This year I don't have an aid so students receive a lot more implicit training in meaning and communication, but also still receive explicit instruction from a specific station.

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Meaning v. Accuracy in a Mainstream Classroom Context

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Meaning v. Accuracy in a Mainstream Classroom Context

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When I think about my current teaching context, the overall goal of conversation and instruction in the classroom is meaning. Though form is important and modeled for our students to use much of the time, we are overall concerned with whether they understand what something means. This is evidenced in our reading progress monitoring assessments which ask comprehension questions. Students are not scored on their correct sentence structure, but they are scored on their understanding of the text in accordance with the questions asked. I think form definitely plays a role in comprehension and comprehensibility, so we do have a specific time of the day when we teach specific grammar forms students can use in their speaking and writing. Even in this time, the goal is that students understand what grammar terms mean so they are able to identify and use those forms in their own writing and speaking.

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In my French class in high school I remember A LOT of attention being focused on focusing on forms. The teacher taught mostly explicit grammar rules that we had to memorize. These rules were then reinforced with worksheets. We did some speaking but it was a text heavy class. With that being said, I do not remember much French and I took 4 years of it! The clas
s would've benefited from more peer interaction, CF and overall language use.

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In my languages learning experience attention was always drawn to grammatical forms and accuracy; grammar was always taught explicitly. I don`t think that I graduated from the university having a clear understanding of meaning and function of the grammatical forms. The curious thing is that I got the grip of understanding the functions only when I started teaching and when I was receiving CF from other English speakers with a focus on MEANING. So, in my case I had very clear and well organised forms in my memory and by receiving FUNCTIONAL CF I was able to integrate function into the form very quickly and the puzzle was cumplete. As for me teaching others, before explaining a rule to learners I had to re-process the material again adding new knowledge to already existing storage in my memory in order help my students understand functions well and construct their utterences joining these 2 aspects. I always compare this process of integration of form & meaning with architecture that can be illustrated by this short conversation:
- WHY do we need this building?
- It`s going to be a GYM and people will EXERCISE there (FUNCTION).
- So, to build it we need these MATERIALS... (FORM).
Or, in other words, 'I know WHY I need it and I know WHAT I need and HOW to use it."
Thanks to this experience, I significantly improved my understanding of grammar and language as a whole.

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In my teaching experience, I feel like grammar is often taught separate from comprehension and fluency. The two objectives do not tend to appear together in a lesson. But, when the focus is on speaking or writing then I feel like grammar is more successfully integrated into the lesson objectives. In my opinion, grammar needs to be integrated more with other objectives. Without integration with other linguistic areas, grammar seems to become just a "list of rules" kids needs to memorize.

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Integrate Grammar with communication and instruction

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Integrate Grammar with communication and instruction

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The focus of grammar can be integrated and situated in every subject area and infused throughout curricular activities.  Students can explore how the grammar functions in the text and hence understand why the author has made such grammatical choices.  Through the activities of noticing, exploring and practicing the text, students can develop the language to talk about the grammar and also discuss about the in-depth meaning of the text.  I think it is possible to infuse grammar into the instruction and develop students' language fluency through grammatical instruction.