Is a Brief Explicit Grammar Explanation Needed in Business English Courses?

Is a Brief Explicit Grammar Explanation Needed in Business English Courses?

  With a view to seeing whether explicit grammar explanation is necessary for increasing writing accuracy in business English courses, the present study investigated whether incorporating a combination of attention-drawing devices into a business English class may be effective in helping low intermediate-proficiency Korean university learners improve accuracy in their use of sentences with a relative clause structure. The study found that the combination of input enhancement, translation, output practice, and corrective feedback and that of the traditional explanation, input enhancement, translation, output practice, and corrective feedback did not have a significant effect on improved accuracy. However, the combination of the pattern explanation, input enhancement, translation, output practice, and corrective feedback led to significantly improved accuracy. Consequently, it can be said that the pattern explanation, which treats relative clause structures as grammatical patterns based on word order, made a decisive contribution to the significant increase in accuracy. The effectiveness of the pattern explanation may be related to attention. Since the "Business English I" course the subjects took involved the integration of content and language instruction, their attention was divided over content and form. Therefore, to help them to achieve accuracy in the use of the target structure, the English restrictive relative clause structure, it was necessary to explicitly direct their attention to the target structure. In conclusion, a brief explicit explanation which explicitly draws students" attention to the knowledge serving for an important factor of the processing of a particular form or structure is needed in business English courses if the form or structure gives many students production problems.