STRUCTURED INPUT: GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION FOR THE ACQUISITION-ORIENTED
CLASSROOM. Andrew P. Farley. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Pp. vii +
123. $51.56 paper.
This volume for second language teachers builds on two principles of
structured input (SI; VanPatten, 2004): the primacy of meaning principle
and the first noun principle. After an overview of SI, Farley provides
chapter-length explanations of teaching activities based on the two SI
principles and concludes with a chapter on recent SI research. The three
core SI activity-preparation chapters are organized around (a) an
introduction to the SI principle focused on in the chapter, (b) a research
review, (c) examples from various languages, (d) “principles in
practice” to guide teachers in writing SI activities, (e) sample
studies, and (f) suggested readings. The technique recommended for
activities involves the creation of controlled tasks that limit
information available to students so that only one grammatical point is
salient. For example, an activity on English subject-verb agreement
requires the learner to select the correct present tense verb for a given
subject; one singular subject (“Sarah McLachlan”) and one
plural subject (“Bono and the Edge”) are followed by only two
choices: one with a verb in the singular (“travels all over the
world”) and one with a verb in the plural (“play the
guitar”). The logic of this activity is that language learners look
to meaning first and, therefore, often overlook form, so activities can
force focus on form by limiting content and restricting grammatical
choice. (My own experience of this type of grammar drill is that students
have a 50% chance of getting the correct answer without having to think
about either meaning or form.)