Introduction

As the two citations above suggest, adult learners of second languages tend to express contrasting, and frequently ambivalent, views towards 'learning grammar'. This is hardly surprising since the term 'grammar' itself has a range of meanings, referring on the one hand to the syntactic and morphological systems of a target language, based on implicit knowledge not necessarily available to the learner as a conscious representation, or, on the other, to an explicit knowledge of grammatical rules which exist independently of their application (Ellis, 1994a). For some learners, like Stevick's Derek, explicit knowledge provides a metacognitive tool, a framework for organising sometimes dauntingly complex information, a tool which is accessible to conscious control and can therefore be reviewed and refined with a resulting sense of satisfaction. Various researchers have claimed that explicit knowledge and understanding of grammar can facilitate implicit language acquisition (see Ellis, 2005; Ellis, 2006 for overviews, and the section (below) on Current theoretical frameworks. Further, it may also play a facilitative role in language use, and a learner's developing literacy is likely to depend on some explicit sense of grammatical accuracy.