Grammar Teaching－Practice or Consciousness-Raising?

The definition of practice: the practice stage consists of series exercises…whose aim is to absorb the structure thoroughly. Practice activities include mechanical practice, contextualized practice and communicative practice. Practice has the following characters:
1. There is some attempt to isolate a specific grammar for focused attention.
2. The learners are required to produce sentences containing the target features.
3. The learners will be provided with opportunities for repetition the target features.
4. There is an expectancy that learners will perform the grammatical feature correctly. Therefore, activities are “success oriented.”
5. The learners receive feedback on whether their performance of grammatical structure is correct or not. This feedback may be immediate or delayed.
The definition of consciousness-raising: it involves an attempt to equip the learner with understanding of a specific grammar-to develop a declarative rather than procedural knowledge of it. The main characters are following:
1. There is an attempt to isolate a specific grammar for focused attention.
2. The learners are provided with data which illustrate the target and they may also be supplied with an explicit rule describing or explaining the feature.
3. The learners are expected to utilize intellectual effort to understand the target feature.
4. Misunderstanding and incomplete understanding of the grammatical structure by the learners leads to clarification in the form of further data and description or explanation.
5. Learners may be required to articulate the rule describing the grammatical structure.
The main difference between practice and consciousness-raising is that consciousness-raising doesn’t involve the learner in repeated production. This is because the aim of consciousness-raising is not to enable the learner to perform a structure correctly but simply to help him to know about it. However, the two types of grammar works can involve a combination of practice and consciousness-raising. Many methodologists recommend practice work be preceded by a presentation stage. This presentation stage may involve an inductive or deductive treatment of the structure. Also practice work can be rounded off with a formal explanation of the structure.
Dose practice works?
Practice does not result in the autonomous ability to use the structure. In other words, practicing a grammatical structure under controlled conditions doesn’t seem to enable the leaner to use structure freely. Practice will often not lead to immediate procedural knowledge of grammatical rules.
The case of consciousness-raising
The goal of practice activities is to develop automatical control of grammatical structures that will enable learners to use them productively and spontaneously. Practice is directed at the acquisition of implicit knowledge of a grammatical structure. Consciousness-raising is directed at the formation of explicit knowledge the construction of explicit may help the learner perform perfectly in some tests but it is not much useful when it comes to communicating. Although consciousness-raising doesn’t contribute to implicit knowledge, it facilitates the acquisition of grammatical knowledge needed for communication. Consciousness-raising is unlikely to result in immediate acquisition but have a delayed effect. There are limitations to consciousness-raising. It may not be appropriate for young learners or beginners. It can only be used with beginners if the learners’ first language is used as the medium to solve tasks.

Reference
Ellis, R. Grammar Teaching－Practice or Consciousness-Raising? In Richards, J. C. and Renandya, W. A. (Eds)Methodology in Language Teaching(pp. 167-174) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.