Instruction and L2 acquisition

What is one of the goals of L2?To improve languages teaching

• Researchers studied what impact teaching has on L2 learning

• In this chapter we will consider three branches of this research

Impact teaching

Three branches:• Teaching leaners grammer Wheather teaching

learner grammar has any effect on their interlanguage development.Do learners learn the structures they are taught?

• Individual learner differences • Do learner learn better if the kind of instruction they

receive matches their preferred ways of learning an L2?• Strategy training • Does it help to teach learners how to use the learning

strategies employed by ‘good language learners?’

Form-focused instruction( 语言形式教学）

Traditionally • Language pedagogy ( 语言教育学） has

emphasized form-focused instruction

More recently

• Language pedagogy has emphasized the need to provide learners with real commuicative experiences

The Grammar Translation Method The Audiolingual Method

Both involve attemptsto teach learners grammar

Communicative Language Teaching: No place at all for the direct teaching of grammar

• Two key questions:

• Does form-focused instruction work?

• What kind of form-focused instruction work best?

Because learners do not need to be taught grammar before they communicate but will acquire it naturally as part

of the process of learning to communicate.

Does form-focused instruction work?

• One way -----to investigate whether formal instruction has any effect on interlanguage( 中介语 ) is to compare the development of untutored and tutored learners.

1 、 If we find no differences in the order and sequence of L2 acquisition this would suggest that form-focused instruction has no effect.

2 、 On the other hand, the existence of differences would suggest that form-focused instruction does have an impact.

• In one such study, Teresa Pica compared there groups of L2 learners:

• an untutored group

• a tutored group

• a mixed group

• The tutored group was more accurate on plural-s than the untutored group but less accurate on progressive verb-ing.

• The mixed group was intermediate( 中间的 )in both cases.

In contrast, there were no accuracy differences among the three groups on articles .

• formally simple and manifests a straightforward form-function relationship (as in the case of pural-s)

instruction may lead to improved accuracy.• formally simple and salient bu is functionally fairly

complex (as is the case with progressive-ing) instruction may help learners to learn the form

but not its use so learners end up making a lot of errors.

• lacks saliency and is functionally very complex (as is the case with English articles)

struction has no effect at all.

The question is ---how significant the effects of instruction actually are. Only if the instruction can be shown to enable learners to construct “rules” can it be said to have an effect on the their underlying competence.

Instruction may be effective in teaching items but not in teaching systems, particularly when these are complex.

Strong theoretical grounds for believing that instructions will not have any long-lasting effect on the way in which learners construct their construct their interlanguage systems.

Learners appear to possess some kind of “built-in syllabus”that regulates （控制） how and when they acquire particular grammatical structures.

It’s possible that this “syllabus” is not amenable( 服从于 ) to modification from the outside.

The claim can be tested by two ways.

1.By whether instruction has any effect on the sequence of acquisition of particular

grammatical structures.One way of doing this is by

comparing tutored and untutored learners.

Result: The sequence was the same suggesting that the instruction had had no effect on the processing strategies involved in the acquisition of these word-order rules.

The instructed learners seemed to follow their own syllabus.

However, they proceeded through this syllabus more rapidly than the untutored learners and were more likely to reach the final stage.

2.By designing instructional experiments to see if teaching a particular structure results in its acquisition.

Manfred Pienemann: Investigated whether form-focused instruction led to a group of ten-year-old children acquiring one of the German word –order rules(the inversion rule).Results: Highly suggestive.

Name How Result

Giovanni

He had already reached a stage of development immediately prior to the stage at which the target structure is naturally acquired.

The instruction is effective . Giovanni has acquired the inversion rule.

Teresa She was far less advanced .

The instruction did not wok. She failed to acquired the inversion.

This hypothesis predicts that instruction can only promote language acquisition if the interlanguage is close to the point when the structure to be taught is acquired in the natural settings.

Suggests that

Instruction does not subvert( 推翻 ) the natural sequence（顺序） of acquisition but rather helps to speed up learners’ passage through it.

Pienemann’s research shows that form-focused instruction

on acquisition.

1 、 Progressive –ing reveal that instruction caused learners to increase their use of it in their communicative speech

Often incorrectly but short-lived

2 、 Place an adverb between the verb and the direct object of a sentence

Initial gains in accuracy disappeared over time.

Other studies have shown that -----instruction can have effects that are both beneficial and long-lasting.

Example:

a carefully designed set of materials for teaching the distinction between two French verb tenses resulted in clear gains in accuracy immediately. The learners’ ability to use these verb forms correctly went on improving.

So, the acquisition of at least some linguistic

structures can be permanently( 永久地 )influenced by instruction.

Why some structures seem to be permanently ( 永久地 ) affected and others are not?

Three possibilities :

1, It depends on the nature of the instruction.

2, It depends on the nature of the target structure.

3,long-lasting effects occur only when learners have subsequent 随后的opportunities to hear and use the target structures in communication.

So far, we have considered whether learners learn what they have been taught.

However, it is clearly not possible to teach learners all the rules of the grammar of a language. There are simply too many. What, though, if teaching learners one grammatical structure triggers (vt. 引发，引起） acquisition of one or more other structures? This is distinct possibility given that some grammatical structures seem to be implicated （ vt.牵连，涉及） with each other.

For example, according to the accessibility hierarchy （易接近的层次） , the existence of a marked relative pronoun( 代词） function in a language implicates the existence of other less marked functions. As we have already seen ( page 64), this seem to hold true for interlanguages.

An intriguing （引起好奇心的；令人感兴趣的；

有迷惑力的） possibility, therefore, is that if learners can discover that the target language permits a marked function they will be able to generalize this knowledge to the unmarked （没有标志的，未被注意到的） functions.

A number of studies have explored this possibility with interesting results. Teaching learners a relatively marked function ， such as indirect object ， does appear to trigger acquisition of the unmarked direct object and subject functions.

However, it is not yet clear if such effects are durable nor is it clear whether this triggering (n 、起动，触发，控制） effect applies to other grammatical structures.

Finally, we need to consider exactly what we mean by ‘ acquisition’ when we talk about the effects of instruction. This is a crucial issue. It is one thing for instruction to have an effect on learners’ ability to manipulate （ vt. 熟练控制，操纵） structures consciously and quite another for it to affect their ability to use structures with ease and accuracy in fluent communication.

There is now ample evidence that the effects of form-focused instruction are not restricted to careful language use but are also evident in free communication.

Thank you for your appreciation!