Grammar ???

Reasoning and Hypothesizing

“- Adults create hypotheses about the rules these patterns might demonstrate, and gradually revise their hypotheses according to new information. They seem to use a set of strategies for analyzing the language and reasoning about it. These have been described by Oxford (1990) as “reasoning deductively”, “analyzing contrastively”, “translating” and “transferring”- Hedge (2008).

This is the main difference between a child learner and an adult learner, the kind of the process that they use to acquire grammar; the child takes a frequently form to use in a real communicative fact, while the adults tend to analyze and create hypothetic rules to start to use the language, for this reason we as teachers have to focus our classes in different way according with the learners, we have to give to our students the clues to learn according with their ages, for adults, children, or teenagers, each group uses different process to learn and manipulate the information.

It is more commonly that the adults resort to grammar pre-knowledge in natural language to understand new information about the foreign language, in this case they can use the grammatical structures in L1 to translate or transfer it into the L2 and here we find other problems: the L1 grammar, our students cannot identify the grammatical structures in L1 because they do not have enough understanding about their own language, so that they have difficulties to understand it in L2. The form to present the grammar it is very important in order to give our students appropriate information according with their needs.