Situating Grammar Instruction in the World Language Classroom: Four Content-Enriched Strategies

The role of grammar instruction in promoting communicative competence continues to be a controversial issue for the world language classroom teacher. Second language acquisition research suggests that critical to sustained progress in language use is a focus on form, which we define as attention to linguistic form in the context of performing a communicative task. We therefore offer here four content-enriched strategies for situating grammar in a communicative context: textual enhancement, input flood, structured input, and dictogloss. We present these tasks and activities within the framework of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (SFLL, 2006) to illustrate how a standards-based approach that integrates form-focused instruction with content increases student achievement in the target language