Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching
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Teaching English tense and aspect with the help of cognitive grammar: An empirical study
Full text linkForm-focused instruction is usually based on traditional practical/pedagogical grammar descriptions of grammatical features. The comparison of such traditional accounts with cognitive grammar (CG) descriptions seems to favor CG as a basis of pedagogical rules. This is due to the insistence of CG on the meaningfulness of grammar and its detailed analyses of the meanings of particular grammatical features. The differences between traditional and CG rules/descriptions are exemplified by juxtaposing the two kinds of principles concerning the use of the present simple and present progressive to refer to situations happening or existing at speech time. The descriptions provided the bases for the instructional treatment in a quasi-experimental study exploring the effectiveness of using CG descriptions of the two tenses, and of their interplay with stative (imperfective) and dynamic (perfective) verbs, and comparing this effectiveness with the value of grammar teaching relying on traditional accounts found in standard pedagogical grammars. The study involved 50 participants divided into three groups, with one of them constituting the control group and the other two being experimental ones. One of the latter received treatment based on CG descriptions and the other on traditional accounts. CG-based instruction was found to be at least moderately effective in terms of fostering mostly explicit grammatical knowledge and its effectiveness turned out be comparable to that of teaching based on traditional descriptions
Age effects on the acquisition of nominal and verbal inflections in an instructed setting
Full text linkThis study examines evidence for the hypothesis (e.g., Muñoz, 2006) that an early starting age is not necessarily more beneficial to the successful learning of L2 inflectional morphology in strictly formal instructional settings. The present author investigated the quantitative and qualitative differences in the production and reception of 5 selected inflectional morphemes in English written performance and competence tasks by 100 early classroom learners and 100 late classroom learners of the same age. While an earlier age of first exposure and a longer instructional period was not associated with higher accuracy scores, the findings suggest distinct patterns in the productive and receptive knowledge abilities of inflectional morphology; the late classroom learners’ superiority seems to be rooted in their greater reliance upon memory-based item-by-item associative learning, as they are significantly stronger on tasks that might cause semantic difficulties, whereas the early classroom learners are marginally better on pattern-based processes for certain morphemes. This finding possibly supports Ullman’s (2005) proposal that, as procedural memory declines with age, older starters have difficulty in discovering regularities in the input and thus over-rely on the declarative memory system in L2 learning
The effect of focused communication tasks on instructed acquisition of English past counterfactual conditionals
Full text linkOne important controversy connected with the effectiveness of grammar teaching seems to have been resolved as there is ample empirical evidence testifying to the positive effect of form-focused instruction on second language acquisition (Nassaji & Fotos, 2004; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Spada, 1997, 2010). Nevertheless, there are still a number of problems open to debate and awaiting concrete solutions, such as how to establish connections between form and meaning and find the best way to teach grammar for implicit knowledge, which, in the opinion of most SLA researchers (Ellis, 2006a, p. 95) and according to numerous theoretical positions, is a key driver of linguistic competence. One of the options available to language educators is to employ focused communication tasks, which “are designed to elicit production of a specific target feature in the context of performing a communicative task” (Ellis, 2001, p. 21). The aim of the study reported in this article was to explore the effect of focused communication tasks on the instructed acquisition of English past counterfactual conditionals when compared with contextualized practice activities. The results of two types of intervention were measured employing a number of data collection instruments with a view to tapping both the explicit and implicit knowledge of the participants of the study. Both types of instructional treatment were equally effective in helping learners develop the explicit knowledge of past unreal conditionals, but when it comes to the implicit knowledge of the aforementioned structure, the group instructed by means of focused communication tasks outperformed the other experimental group and the control group, as evidenced by the results obtained from the individually elicited imitation test and the focused communication task performed in pairs
