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teachers direct learners’ attention to specific forms which occur in the course of a task or an associated text. They may exemplify, explain and practice these forms. This we will call a focus on form. Teachers should take care that this focus on form does not detract from a focus on meaning. The simplest way to do this is to withhold this focus on form until after a task has been completed. Sometimes this focus on form is incidental. The teacher stops a learner and offers correction. This correction is aimed primarily at ensuring that the learner is aware of the correct form. It is not offered to help with meaning. When teachers do this they are standing outside the interaction and commenting on learners’ performance with regard to accuracy.

      We are, then, looking at a three-way distinction:

      • A focus on meaning, in which participants are concerned with communication.

      • A focus on language, in which learners pause in the course of a meaning-focused activity to think for themselves how best to express what they want to say, or a teacher takes part in the interaction and acts as a facilitator by rephrasing or clarifying learner language.

      • A focus on form in which one or more lexical or grammatical forms are isolated and specified for study, or in which the teacher comments on student language by drawing attention to problems.

      Long (1988) makes a similar distinction, but uses different terminology, contrasting a focus on form (singular) with a focus on forms (plural). Roughly speaking, what he refers to as a focus on form, we have referred to as a focus on language; and what he refers to as a focus on forms (plural), we have referred to as a focus on form (singular).

      A meaning-focused approach normally involves a focus on meaning and a focus on language before a focus on form. Meaning-based approaches have the following characteristics:

      1 The teacher does not attempt to control learner language.

      2 The success of the procedure is judged on whether or not learners communicate successfully.

      3 At some stages during a meaning-focused cycle of activities learners and teachers will focus on language. Learners will pause to think how best to express themselves and may discuss different options with fellow students or look for help in a dictionary or grammar book. Teachers will participate in the interaction by helping learners to shape and clarify what they want to say.

      4 Focus on form comes after focus on meaning. Advocates of a meaning-based approach will spend most of the time in the classroom on activities which promote communicative language use, but will supplement these with activities designed to promote accuracy. Course books which take a form-based approach encourage teachers to devote a lot of time in the classroom to form-focused activities, presenting specific forms of the language to their students and practising those forms. They will, however, almost certainly reinforce these activities with opportunities for communicative language use.

      1.3 Language as meaning

      When children begin to use their first language they communicate without using sentences. Early utterances may simply consist of pairs of nouns like ‘book table’. Depending on the context and intonation and the accompanying gestures this may be interpreted as ‘The book is on the table’, or ‘Please put the book on the table’, or ‘Shall I put the book on the table?’ Relying on a shared context, children manage to convey meanings quite effectively without using grammatical sentences. Much the same is true of learners at the elementary level.

      Taking this observation as a starting point, one might argue that early communication is primarily lexical and that grammar plays a subsidiary function. Let us put this to the test by looking at a text which has minimal grammar:

      Mother little girl. Mother say little girl go see grandmother. Mother give little girl big basket food. Mother say ‘You take food grandmother …’.1

      We feel reasonably confident that many of you will have identified the opening of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. It is not true to say, however, that we have simply a string of words to tell this story. If we had offered you the sequence:

      Mother girl little. Say mother grandmother go see girl little. Basket big food girl little mother give. Say ‘Grandmother food take you …’ mother.

      You would certainly have found this much more difficult, perhaps impossible, to interpret. What, then, is the important difference between the first and the second versions of the story?

      You might answer this by saying that the word order in the first version makes sense. More precisely, you might say the first version follows the conventions of English clause and phrase structure. Each clause has the structure ‘subject + verb + …’. In the phrases ‘little girl’ and ‘big basket’ the adjective comes in front of the noun. So the first version does conform to some of the rules of English grammar. It follows the rules of English word order, the rules of English clause and phrase structure.

      So, it is possible to tell a story quite adequately with a string of words and a very limited grammar of structure. There are no definite articles or indefinite articles in the first version of the story, and no other determiners such as ‘this/that’ or ‘his/her’. There are no verb tenses. This raises an interesting question. If things like articles and tenses are unnecessary why do we bother with them at all? The answer, of course, is that articles and tenses are far from unnecessary. Even in the telling of a simple story we can make things much easier for our listener by using the full resources of the grammar:

      Once upon a time there was a mother who had a little girl. The little girl was going to see her grandmother. Her mother gave her a big basket of food and said ‘Take this food to your grandmother’.

      So grammar is vital if we want to make things reasonably easy for listeners or readers.

      It is also difficult to express complex abstract meanings without grammar. One day our daughter, Jenny, was playing in the garden with her two-year-old son. He was filling a bottle with water from an outside tap, pouring the water in a hole he had dug and watching it disappear. Jenny was thirsty and asked him for the bottle. When he gave it to her she drank some of the water. He was horrified. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that water not for drinking. It for putting in hole.’ He used the form ‘for + – ing’ to express purpose, and it is difficult to see how he could have got his message across efficiently without that complex little bit of grammar.

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      We are indebted to Andrew Wright for this striking example.

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