quick thinking point...

...just based on a bit of reflection. Like most British people, I endured the hell that is French at school: 30 students in a class, lined in rows, sharing textbooks and listening to a tinny little tape recorder* saying 'ecoutez et repetez. Ou est ma singe? Ma singe est dans l'arbre'. It's no wonder so many Brits don't learn another language.
Amazingly, however, some of my French actually stuck, and I can still read a French text and get at least the gist meaning. What I can't do is produce it, apart from a few lexical chunks.
A bit like my E3s, in fact. I was doing a reading exercise with them the other day, and it was very clear from how they interacted with it that they understood it. What they couldn't do was express the answers to the comp questions absolutely accurately. In other words, it was as if they were looking at the language 'fuzzily'. Or, possibly, they couldn't activate the language.
Here's the thinking point: We all know about active and passive vocabulary - the words we recognise and use, and the words we recognise but don't use. What about an active and passive grammar? Going back to me and French, I can't just read the text, I can generally also identify features such as tenses fairly accurately. But, again, I'd be lousy at producing it. So, is this an example of passive grammar knowledge? And how could this concept be tested in a group? Chew, digest, consider...

*for the kids out there - tape recorder: an analogue linear recording device, recording to a bilateral magnetic medium. Like your iPod, but you can stick a pencil through one end and spin it round.