Download chapter 8 Instruction and L2 acquisition

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
The Grammar Translation Method
The Audiolingual Method
Both involve attempts
to teach learners grammar
 More recently
• Language pedagogy has emphasized the need to
provide learners with real commuicative experiences
Communicative Language Teaching: No place at
all for the direct teaching of grammar
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.
• Two key questions:
• Does form-focused instruction work?
• What kind of form-focused instruction work
best?
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 tenyear-old children acquiring one of the German
word –order rules(the inversion rule).
Results: Highly suggestive.
Name
How
He had already
reached a stage of
development
immediately prior
Giovann to the stage at
i
which the target
structure is
naturally acquired.
Teresa
She was far less
advanced .
Result
The instruction is
effective .
Giovanni has
acquired the
inversion rule.
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 longlasting.
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!