Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Teaching Grammar - From Rules to Reasons > Status Update

"Rather than strictly following the rules, speakers are writers make choices. It is those choices that L2 learners should explore - Certainly, but there is no contrast between following rules and making choices, language users follow the rule to realise the choice they have made.

"The key is too create a culture of enquiry..[when the students] get things wrong or struggle to work something out...the teacher can simply tell them.' - Obviously never taught Hungarian teenagers, who will wait patiently until the teacher does.

"However, it is important to ensure that the language in the text is natural, as graded reading texts or scripted dialogues written specifically for the level can often be unnatural or artificial" - yep, and natural texts are usually too lexically rich to easily understood by students, unless you want to spend the whole lesson discussing vocabulary. Teacher trainers shoud admit how difficult finding natural texts is.

Bloom's taxonomy - good to see him reaching out of the ELT bubble.

"An authentic task, also called a real world task (Thomlinson, 2011) should enable the learners to read or listen to the text for the same purpose as it would be read or listened to outside the classroom" - easily said, than done

"It helps if statements or discussion questions are open-ended and pictures or headlines arouse curiosity, rather than merely depict the content of the lesson"

"A prediction task can be used to sensitize learners to difficult aspects of the text, such as organisation, accents, features of connected speech or typical genre features".

"Because many commercially produced coursebooks have been designed to appeal to as broad a range of learners as possible, it is naturally difficult for writers to include culturally specific texts or topics." - and vice versa

"Find some unusual photographs online and bring them into class. The students have to guess what has happened." - a visual version of "Yes, No, Nope"?

Conditionals and reported speech are not used standardly among native speakers. It's not clear if mixed forms represent the speakers' meaning or they are slips.