FORMAL INSTRUCTION AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

RAPONSEL S. PACSIPSYCHOLINGUISTICS

TEACHING CAN BE VIEWED IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS:

1. INTERACTION (Exposure)

2. FORMAL INSTRUCTION (Classroom setting)

THE EFFECT OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION ON THE RATE AND LEVEL OF L2 ACQUISITION

Long (1938) Reviewed a total of eleven (11) studies that examined

the effect of formal instruction on the rate and success of L2 acquisition. Six (6) studies showed that instruction helped, Two (2) studies produced ambiguous results Three (3) studies indicated that instruction did not help.

Researchers asked whether instruction or exposure produced more rapid or higher levels of learning.

THE EFFECT OF FORMAL INSTRUCTION ON THE RATE AND LEVEL OF L2 ACQUISITION

Long (1938) CONT. He claimed that:

Instruction is beneficial Children and adults Intermediate and advanced students Acquisition-rich and acquisition-poor environments.

Instruction is more effective than exposure in promoting L2 acquisition

Here are some of the Studies LONG had reviewed

Krashen,Jones,Zelinski and Uprich (1978)

The subjects are116 ESL students who had experienced different amounts of instruction and exposure

They were given three test: Michigan test of English Proficiency Free composition (total numbers of written words/number of errors) Cloze test

Conclusion: The authors concluded that formal instruction is more efficient way of learning English than trying to learn it in the streets. Michigan test-25% for instruction and 3.2% for exposure

Weslander and Stephany (1983)

Examined the effects of instruction on 577 children with limited English Proficiency in Grades 2 to 10 in public schools in Iowa. The result is students who received more

instruction did better on the Bilingual Syntax Measure, test devised by Burt, Dulay, and Hernandez (1973) to elicit natural speech.

Spada (1986) Examined the effects instruction and

exposure in 48 adult learners enrolled in an intensive six-week ESL course in Canada.

The implication of the study is that learners require both formal instruction and informal exposure and that the two together work better than either on its own.

Long’s review has been widely cited as demonstrating that formal instruction has a positive effect on L2 acquisition.

There are, however, a number of reasons for exercising caution.

1. As Long admits, many of the studies failed to control for overall amount of combined contact and instruction.

Long points the studies (Krashen and Seliger, 1976) which showed that more exposure did not result in higher proficiency in learners.

2. An intervening variable – Learner’s motivation from Krashen,Jones,Zelinski and Usprich (1978).

Students who are highly motivated to learn are likely to enroll in classes and those who are less strongly motivated will keep away.

3. Amount of formal instruction experienced by learners can be equated with the number of years spent in the classroom.

It is possible, therefore, that the positive effects of instruction derived not from the fact that learners are focusing on form but from communicative properties of the interactions which occurred.

Long is aware of this problem and argues that there is evidence to suggest that instruction is beneficial even in settings where the learners have plenty of opportunity for negotiation outside the classroom. Instruction worked because It required learners to focus on form (form-focused

study, Pickett, 1978) Learners were able to let in more input in a

classroom context because they felt more secure and more relaxed in face to face interactions with native speakers in naturalistic settings.

THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTION ON THE PROCESS OF L2 ACQUISITION

There have been number of studies that have investigated and have sought to establish the effects of instruction in two ways: 1. By comparing classroom and naturalistic

acquisition 2. By means of classroom experiments designed to

ascertain whether teaching specific items results in their acquisition

COMPARISON BETWEEN CLASSROOM AND NATURALISTIC L2 ACQUISITION

Error AnalysisComparisons of the errors found in naturalistic and classroom L2 acquisition help to show whether the process involved in the two kinds of acquisition are the same or different. There are three possibilities.

1. The errors are the same If this is true, it can be concluded that the process of

interlanguage development is immune to instruction.

2. Instruction enables learners to avoid errors commonly found in naturalistic acquisition.

It provides evidence that instruction facilitates acquisition.

3. Instruction results in different kind of errors. It suggests that instruction does affect the process of

acquisition, but not necessarily in a positive way.

Felix (1981)Subjects: 34 children studying L2 English in their: 1. Negation ( no + verb)

No you playing there. Mariana no coming today.

2. Spontaneous classroom speech It’s no my comb

3. Sentence types Doesn’t she eat apples. (She doesn’t eat

apples.)

Felix and Simmet (1981)

Concluded that the processes of acquisition of the English pronoun system were also unaffected by instruction.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF THE EFFECT OF INSTRUCTION

ACCURACY STUDIES AND CONCLUSIONS

Shumann (1978) Attempted to improve the accuracy. Subject: Alberto, a Spanish-speaking learner of English in US, Instruction was seven month period. The reason for giving Alberto the

instruction was to discover whether the apparent “pidginization” of Alberto’s English could be overcome.

Pidginization- def. A simplified form of speech that is usually a mixture of two or more languages”

Concluded that instruction influenced production only in test-like situations while normal communication remained unaffected.

Lightbown,Spada, and Wallace ( 1980) Studied the effects of instruction on the accuracy with which three

different structures were produced: -s morpheme, used to perform five functions ( plural,

possessive, third person singular, copula and auxiliary) ‘be’ in sentence like ‘He is sixteen years old’ Locative prepositions (to)

Subjects: French-speaking children Data were collected by means of a grammatically-judgment test.

( learners identify correct and incorrect sentences and then to correct the incorrect ones)

Test was administered on three occasions: immediately before instruction, immediately after and five months later.

Lightbown,Spada, and Wallace (1980)

Conclusion: the improvement is attributed to the period of review instruction. The study suggests that instruction can result in increased accuracy in production but the gains may not long-lasting.

Ellis (1984) Investigated the effects of instruction on the

production of four semantically appropriate WH pronouns. (who, what, where, and when)

Subjects: children aged between 10 and 13 years old learning English full time in London language unit

Ellis (1984) Instruction consisted of three one-hour lessons

involving contextualized practice in both teacher-led and group work. Subjects ask questions about a picture that resulted to

in a relatively spontaneous speech. There was no significant improvement in the accuracy.

However, a number of children showed a marked improvement. Like children with few opportunities practicing the ‘when interrogatives’ showed the largest gains.

Kadia (1988) Studied whether formal instruction was successful in

enabling Chinese student at the University of Toronto to avoid errors in the placement test of pronominal direct objects, as in: Last time I show Beth it He told me that he will call up me this evening

CONCLUSION: He found that instruction had no real effect on the subject’s spontaneous language production but there was some evidence that it aided her controlled behavior (substitution task).

The Different Studies suggest that:

1. There are constraints on the effects that instruction can have on acquisition.

2. Spontaneous speech production can be impervious to instruction (Shumann,Ellis and Kadia)

3. Instruction can improve accuracy in careful, planned speech production. However, this improvement may disappear over time, as more ‘natural’ process take over. (Shumann, Lightbown et.al and Kadia)

SEQUENCE OF ACQUISITION STUDIES

MULTIDIMENSIONAL MODEL( Meisel, Clahsen and Pienemann, 1981)

Two sets of linguistic features: DEVELOPMENTAL AND VARIATIONAL

DEVELOPMENTAL FEATURES- those that are constrained by developing speech-processing mechanisms.

Ex. German and English word-order rules

VARIATIONAL FEATURES-those that are not so constrained or controlled.

Copula ‘be’

Projection Studies Projection device (Zobl, 1983)-

enables the acquisition of one rule to trigger the acquisition of all the other rules that cluster with it. This explains why learners are able to acquire a language quickly despite the immense complexity of the task and the relative poverty of input they experience. Marked linguistic features- difficult to

acquire because they are not universal Unmarked linguistic features-

universal and easy to learn

Grass (1979)Based her study on the Accessibility Hierarchy. Investigated the effects of instruction on adult ESL learner’s acquisition of relativization.

Experimental group- given instruction in recognizing and producing sentences in which the object of preposition was relativized ( a position low down in the Accessibility Hierarchy)

Control group- given similar instruction involving sentences in which the subject and object were relativized (positions high up in hierarchy)

RESULTS: Sentence-combining task experimental group not only succeeded in

improving their scores in on object of preposition but also on all the positions higher in the hierarchy. In contrast,

control group improved their scores on the subject and object positions but failed to demonstrate on any improvement on the lower positions.

Zobl (1985) Investigated the effects of fifteen minutes

of instruction on the acquisition of English possessive adjectives by approximately forty French-speaking university students in Canada who were assigned randomly to two groups.

Both groups received intensive oral practice consisting of question and answer and teacher-correction. First group-received practice on the use of possessive

adjectives with human-possesed entities. (e.g. his/her car). They did not show gains on both features. Errors on overgeneralizing ‘his’ and to substitute the developmentally simpler ‘the’.

Second group-involved examples of human-possessed entities (e.g. his/her sister). They showed gains in both features. Errors on overgeneralizing ‘her’ but were likely to substitute ‘the’.

Henry (1986)

Investigated fifteen adult English learners of L2 Chinese were able to predict the positioning of relative clause with regard to head noun on the basis of general exposure to word-order phenomena but without any specific instruction in the use of relative clauses.

The word-order for Chinese is basically head-final (modification generally precedes the head noun) and English word-order is head-initial(modification in general follows the head noun)

Henry (1986) cont.

They were asked to translate ten sentences into Chinese in some of which contained relative clauses. Some positioned them before the head-noun. When asked why, they thought that Chinese had prenominal relative clauses: If you want to say ‘the door of the house’ you have to say ‘frangzi de menkour’ ( the house of the door)

Henry concludes that these students were able to access parameters of word order and that this enabled them to know features that they had not actually been taught.

Based from the three studies, the relationship between instruction and acquisition is much more complex. Here are some of the tentative conclusions. Instruction can result in learners acquiring not

only those features that have been taught but also other features that are implicationally associated with them.

Instruction in marked features can facilitate the acquisition of unmarked features, but not vice versa.

Instruction in unmarked features may result in learner’s simplifying their interlanguages, whereas instruction in marked features aids the process of complexification.

DOES FORMAL INSTRUCTION WORK? There is evidence that

instruction aids the acquisition of useful formulas

Instruction can result in the acquisition of some new linguistic rules and can improve control over existing knowledge.

RATE OF ACQUISITION Schmidt (1983)- learners

sometimes do not develop high levels of linguistic accuracy even they do become communicatively effective.

There are no well-documented studies of adults who have successfully learned the grammar of a L2 solely through interaction.

Instructed learners appear to outperform naturalistic learners because they are encouraged to focus on form.

Instruction and the Acquisition of formulas

Instruction and Acquisition of Rules Lots of studies in the review shows that

instruction has no effect on the acquisition of linguistic rules.

Lightbown summarizes her findings: The learners heard and practiced certain

language items in class, and for a period of time outside of class, they appeared to know these forms in the sense that they used them correctly in appropriate context.

Later, however, some of these “correct” forms disappeared from the learners’ language and were replaced by simpler or developmentally “earlier” forms.

INSTRUCTION CAN HAVE AN IMMEDIATE EFFECT PROVIDING THAT CERTAIN CONDITIONS ARE MET.

Linguistic Conditions- linguistic structures need to conform to two criteria to be amenable to instruction: They must be formally simple; they must

not involve any psycho-linguistically complex processing operation.

Form-function relationships must be transparent. A truly simple feature will be one that performs a single function. A complex feature will be one that is linked to a number of different functions.

Figure. The teachability of different linguistic structures     FORM-FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS  

   TRANSPARENT

 OPAQUE

Processing Operations

Simple  A 

Plural –sCopula ‘be’

 

 B 

V-ingArticles

Complex  C 

Inversion3rd person -s

 D 

Verb infin. complements

THE DELAYED EFFECT OF INSTRUCTION

Instruction in some way primes the learner so that acquisition become easier when she is finally ready to assimilate the new material. Lightbown (1985) - formal instruction may

provide ‘hooks’, points of access for the learner. According to this view, we should see instruction as an ‘acquisition facilitator’.

Seliger (1979)- it speeds up learning in the long term and helps to prevent the kind of grammatical fossilization found in adult naturalistic learners.

SUMMARY INSTRUCTION CAN WORK DIRECTLY- It

can have an immediate effect on the learner’s ability to perform the target structures in natural communication. However not all structures are teachable and teachable structures have to be taught at the right time.

INSTRUCTION HAS DELAYED EFFECT INSTRUCTION CONTRIBUTES TO

DECLARATIVE RATHER THAN PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE. Declarative knowledge serves as a facilitator of

ultimate procedural knowledge by helping to make forms salient that would otherwise be ignored by the learner.

Conscious knowledge of marked forms may help to accelerate learning and may also prevent fossilization.

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