Discourse perspectives on formal instruction

Abstract

Formal instruction in the second‐language classroom is generally characterised by two approaches: inductive and deductive presentations. In this paper, it will be argued that formal instruction is not easily reduced to explicit statements about the language or implicit strategies whereby the learner is expected to hypothesise and formulate structures of the language on their own. Rather, formal instruction can involve discursive negotiation resulting in the co‐construction of understanding between teacher and student. This study will report on the discourse of formal instruction of two foreign language teachers. It will be shown that explanation can be a negotiated process in which the teacher plays a role in collaborative sense‐making with the class. This finding reveals that the dichotomy of induction and deduction fails to capture the complexity of formal instruction, since it does not take into account its often interactive nature. Through protocol analysis, formal instruction will be examined and the discursive mechanism referred to as ‘prolepsis’ will be discussed as a means of distinguishing negotiated and co‐constructed formal instruction from its mono‐logic counterpart.