Abstract

Grammar is being rehabilitated (e.g., Doughty & Williams 1998a) and recognized for what it has always been (Thornbury, 1997, 1998, cited in Burgess & Etherington, 2002): an essential, inescapable component of language use and language learning. Few would dispute nowadays that teaching and learning with a focus on form is valuable, if not indispensable. What perhaps is still the subject of debate is the degree of explicitness such teaching and learning should display. The ultimate goal of any instruction is to make L2 learning implicit, like L1 (due to ease of access and automaticity of it). The current study examines the effect of explicit instruction on the participants’ acquisition of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge in the case of indirect reported speech. The descriptive-survey method was used in this research. The results revealed that this type of instruction fosters both short- and long-term acquisition of explicit grammatical knowledge. However, the study could not foster the acquisition of implicit knowledge.

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