38 CHAPTER 2 the pages with grammar explanations were torn out. Rather than spending time on explicit grammar explanations in the L1 and doing the related exercises, teachers in the experimental condition spent more time on the listening and reading materials o ered by the textbook. While the explicit group in general performed better on accuracy measures, the implicitly taught group outperformed in terms of complexity and uency measures. However, as West and Verspoor (2016) showed, there were exceptions in methods used and some teachers were using strong versions of CLT with the target language spoken almost exclusively and students communicating in the target language, speci cally in French classes that used AIM, which can be considered a strong version of CLT aligned with speci c dynamic usage-based (DUB) principles in that it o ered a great deal of exposure and has built in a great deal of repetition of FUMMs. Examples of strong versions of CLT which have been investigated (cf. Rousse-Malpat, 2019 and Piggott, 2019) show that structure-based approaches are not needed for e ective second language acquisition. However, these studies have been conducted in the lower classes of secondary schools with 12-14-year-old students and have tested the participants at the end of a 2-year or a 3-year program. e question remains if such a usage-based program, if it is extended to 6 years, remains e ective a er 6 years, particularly with regard to writing skills and reading skills, which are considered extremely important by Dutch policymakers and by the majority of L2 teachers and form an important part in the nal school exams in the later years of secondary school. CONCLUSION Despite the fact that “using to learn” language teaching approaches have been strongly encouraged based on SLA research carried out over the last 4 decades, most methods around the world, and in the Netherlands as well, can still be characterized as “learning to use” and are predominantly structure-based, failing to meet communicative demands (Lightbown & Spada, 2013). We have argued in this chapter that teachers might still be subconsciously in uenced by Chomskyan or other structural thought that language is highly systematic and driven by form and that this belief may be fueled by external factors such as work pressure, but crucially, also the role of commercial coursebooks. We also presented usage-based theories of language that are very much in line with a “using to learn” foreign language teaching approach. Constructions (or FUMMs) are conventionalized symbolic units of language with particular semantic, pragmatic, and discourse functions and they become entrenched as language knowledge in the learner’s mind when they are heard and used by the learner. We have attempted to show how usage-based theories can nd their way to classroom practices. ere is no doubt that a focus on grammar helps in achieving morphological or syntactic accuracy, but the question is whether accuracy can also be achieved without teaching grammar explicitly
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