Exploratory task 4.2 Try to give rules to the following language samples (all language samples are grammatically correct and have a certain sensible communicative message)

Grammar samples	Rules
He locked the door
He locked himself out of the car
The dog barked the burglar out of the room
He said he will travel abroad
He said he would travel abroad
If the party starts at eight let’s have a bite
If the party will start at eight lets have a bite	“Will” in “if-clauses” is used to show definiteness of what will happen
I am having a problem
I am having a new coat	“Having” can mean “buying soon”
I had clicked the door before he saw me
I clicked the door before he had seen me

Procedural grammar develops from accuracy to fluency (Ur, P.1996. P. 75-89) in communicating a message. At the "accuracy" stage the learner's attention is drawn to the correct language. At the "fluency" stage the attention is shifted to the communicative messages. Teaching “procedural grammar” starts with the formal drill, i.e. practicing grammar structures with the focus on language accuracy.

The next step is functional drill i.e. teaching how to express grammar meaning in separate sentences (saying what a driver should not do when coming across road-signs).

The ability to express grammar meaning is necessary for the learners to pass over to the meaningful drill i.e. communicating a message in a situational setting with a certain grammar focus (e.g. commenting on what people are doing in the photos from the family album and focusing on Present Progressive).

Acquisition of procedural grammar first involves computation during language production. Structures have to be consciously constructed and planning has to take place some distance in advance. Before the utterance is actually pronounced the sentence is built in the learners’ minds first (Skehan, P. 1998. P. 30). Gradually the language gets memorized as chunks, i.e. collocations (e.g. “have got”, “has done” etc). Internal language processing (computation) gives way to lexicalized chunks. They function as "islands of reliability" for the language users.

The average native speaker can know perhaps many thousands of such sentence chunks (ready-for-use collocations). The greater this repertoire of chunks, the more native-like fluency is achieved. They also have to be authentic and idiomatic collocations (Skehan, P. 1998. P. 35-39). The process is shown by the flow-chart:

Noticing

Awareness

Computation

Lexicalization

Automation

The combined development of the “grammar competence” and “grammar ability” in learners is the way to the acquisition of the target grammar, i.e. the grammar of the second language. “Target grammar” is the product of the joint processes, in which the development of knowledge and practical ability converge at a single point of creating mental grammar in the learners’ minds.