The author has described it as an approach derived from the linguistic theory of Chomsky. It is

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For teachers of a second language, the role of grammar instruction in the classroom has been a perennial subject of debate and has undergone many changes over the years. For example, the once well-respected traditional methods that relied on extensive drilling and memorization of grammar evoked a backlash in the 1970s, which resulted in new methods that excluded grammar instruction in favour of ‘natural’ communication in the classroom. Nevertheless, the topic of grammar remained a live issue, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, research in the classroom reported positive results for grammar instruction. Even so, the communicative methods had an enduring effect, and the traditional methods of teaching grammar did not return; instead, techniques were developed whereby students would be able to ‘notice’ grammar, often spontaneously in the course of a communicative lesson, and especially if the grammatical problem impeded comprehension. In this way, learners would notice and learn the pattern of grammatical rules for themselves. This new way of looking at grammar instruction has come to be known as language awareness, among other designations. This article will discuss the background and rationale of language awareness, and will introduce a few of the techniques that teachers can use to help students discover grammatical relationships and improve their learning of English. 
Traditional grammar instruction, as it was commonly called, was criticised for its long-winded teacher explanations, its drills and drudgery, and its boring and banal exercises. In the 1970s, new teaching methods appeared that replaced grammar exercises with meaningful communicative environments. In general, the goal was to mirror the way a person learned his or her first language, an approach that was derived from the linguistic theory of Chomsky (1965), who pointed out that humans are endowed with a language acquisition device that enables them to acquire whatever language they are exposed to. Accordingly, our ‘organ of language’ extracts the rules of the target language from the data of performance, and this innate schema comprises ‘linguistic universities’ which are part of our generic inheritance.
Chomsky’s theories revolutionized the field of linguistics, and had a dramatic impact on language teaching as well. The basic assumption underpinning the communicative approach is that language is made in the mind and is internal, a process that generates what Chomsky (1986) refers to as I-language. This suggests that language cannot be acquired by putting learners through a series of linguistic hoops, which is the approach found in the traditional grammar book, and what Chomsky calls E-language, language external to the learner. Based on these theories, ‘nativists’ argued against explicit grammatical instruction in favour of the naturalistic discovery of the target language’s rule system. In the early 1980s, Krashen (1981) proclaimed that exposure to comprehensible input in a stress-free environment was the primary condition for successful second language acquisition. However, at the same time this was being propagated, a number of researchers were investigating on the effect of formal instruction on second language acquisition. Long (1983), for instance, in an extensive review of the empirical research, found that certain types of instruction did make a significant difference and hence one could no longer accept the nativist argument that the effects of grammar teaching appear to be peripheral and fragile.