Grammar Instruction for Second Language Development: Bridging the Socio-Cognitive Divide in Theory and in Practice

Grammar Instruction for Second Language Development offers a theoretical and practical framework for understanding how classroom instruction shapes second language development, with a particular focus on the cognitive and social factors that influence grammar teaching.

Across eleven comprehensive chapters, Toth equips readers with a holistic understanding of effective classroom practices, first tracing the twentieth-century theories that informed now-outmoded grammar-centered instruction, then reviewing current cognitive and social thinking on language and linguistic development. He moves beyond a purely theoretical approach by illustrating the main featured theories–generative, construction-based, and systemic-functional theories of language, as well as skill acquisition, usage-based, processability, conversation-analytic, sociocultural, socialization, and identity theories of language learning– through examples of real-life conversations between teachers and learners. In this way, the book aligns with complex dynamic systems theory, demonstrating that what teachers say and do with language, both explicitly and implicitly, is of vital importance to their learners’ linguistic development.

With a clear and accessible narrative style, this book serves as a reliable resource for second language scholars and especially for teachers and professionals, actively addressing the research-to-practice gap in second language instruction.