However it is important to understand that this claim does not represent a back to grammar movement. It is different from previous grammar teaching approaches in a number of ways. In the first place the attention paid to the language can be either conscious or subconscious. For example, the earners might be paying conscious attention to working out the attitude of one of the characters in a story but might be paying subconscious attention to the second conditionals which the character uses Or they might be paying conscious attention to the second conditionals having their been asked locate them, and to make a generalisation about tion in the The is that the learners become aware of between particular feature of their they currently understand or use the feature) and the equivalent feature in the target language. Such noticing of the gap between output and input can act as an "acquisition facilitator (Seliger by immediately changing the grammar but by alerting the learner to subsequent instances of the same feature in future input. So there is no instant change in the learners conventional at by such grammar teaching approaches as the Presentation, Practice, Production approach). There is, however, an increased likelihood of acquisition provided that the learners receive future relevant input.
White (199o) argues that there are some features of the L2 which ers need to be focused on because the deceptively apparent similarities with LI features make it impossible for the learner to otherwise notice certain points of mismatch between their interlanguage and target language And Schmidt (1992) puts forward a powerfu argument for approaches which help learners to note the gap between their use of specific features of English and the way these features are by speakers. Inviting learners to compare their use of, say, indirect speech with the way it is used in a transcript of a native conversation would be one such approach and could quite easily be built into coursebook materials.
Gwyneth Fox in Chapter I of this book and Jane Willis in Chapter 2 exemplify ways of helping learners to pay attention to linguistic features of their input.