Classroom comparisons
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The principle of saying what you mean and meaning what you say
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Teach what is teacheable
Getting right in the end
Grammar aquisition: Focusing on past tenses and conditionals
The implications of classroom research for teaching
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Grammar aquisition: Focusing on past tenses and conditionals
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10.2 Grammar aquisition: Focusing on past tenses and conditionals
Focusing on past tenses
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there is a growing belief that learners in native language immersion programs need more opportunities to focus on form and receive corrective feedback. There has been a call for more classroom research of the type exemplified by Studies 16 and 17 to determine how this can best be accomplished.
Birgit Harley[24] (1989) examined the effects of a functional approach to grammar teaching on a particularly problematic area of grammar for English-speaking learners of native language—the contrastive use of two past tense forms for 'My mother often spoke about her childhood', and roughly the specific or narrative past, for example, 'After class I had talked with the other students'.
Approximately high grade 6 immersion students were given instruction on the use of these past tense forms through teaching materials which encouraged their use in a variety of functionally-based practice activities. No explicit grammatical rules were provided, nor was there an emphasis on corrective feedback. The intention was to create opportunities, activities, and tasks which would expose them to more input containing both verb forms, and encourage more productive use of them by the learners. The teaching materials were administered over an eight-week period. Learners were tested on their spoken and written knowledge before the instructional treatment began, eight weeks later, and again three months later.
Harley's findings showed that learners in the experimental classes outperformed the control classes on the immediate post-tests on some of the written and oral measures. Three months later, however, there were no significant differences between the two groups.
Focusing on the conditionals
Elaine Day and Stan Shapson[25] (1991) examined the effects of instruction with average grade 7 students (age about twelve or thirteen). The feature of grammar which was taught was the conditional mood of the verb, for example in sentences such as 'Agar men lotereyada yuib olsam, sayohatga borar edim'. -' If I won the lottery, I would go away on a trip'.
Students in the experimental classes received several hours of focused instruction on the conditional over a period of five to seven weeks. The students in the control group continued with their usual classroom routines, that is, they continued to encounternative language mainly in the context of learning their general school subjects (science, mathematics, history, etc. through the medium of native language).
Special teaching materials were prepared by the team of researchers. They consisted of:
1) group work which created situations for the use of the conditional in natural communicative situations;
2) written and oral exercises to reinforce the use of the conditional in more formal, structured situations;
3) self-evaluation activities to encourage students to develop conscious awareness of their language use.
Oral and written tests were administered before the instructional treatment, immediately after the instruction (five to seven weeks later), and at the end of the school year.
Learners in the experimental classes outperformed those in the control classes on the immediate post-tests for the written tasks (but not for the oral). In contrast to the students in Study 16, they were still doing better than the control group on the follow-up post-tests administered several months later.
Interpreting the research
The overall results of the experimental studies in the intensive ESL and native language immersion programs provide partial support for the hypothesis that enhanced input or form-focused instruction and corrective feedback within communicative second language programs can improve the learners' use of particular grammatical features. The results also show, however, that the effects of instruction are not always long lasting. For example, in the intensive program studies, the positive effects of form-focused instruction on adverb placement had disappeared a year later. Yet, the positive effects of this type of instruction and corrective feedback for questions were maintained in the long-term follow-up testing. Similarly, in the experimental native language immersion studies, while there were only short-term instructional benefits for the use of the imparfaitand passe compose, the benefits of instruction for the use of the conditional continued to be evident several months later.
It would be useful to notice here that the different results of the intensive ESL program findings might be explained in terms of the frequency of use of the two linguistic structures inregular classroom input after the experimental treatment had ended. For example, as mentioned in Study 15, question forms occur much more frequently in classroom input than adverbs. This continued reinforcement may have contributed to the continued improvement in the learners' use of questions over time. Evidence from classroom observations suggests that students did not receive any continued reinforcement through exposure to adverbs in classroom materials and activities once the experimental period was over, and thus it should not be surprising that these learners failed to maintain the improved performance levels.
The contrasting results of the native language immersion program teaching experiments (focuses on grammar) may also be explained by potential differences in input. But in this case, it seems more likely that differences in the experimental teaching materials and methodology may have contributed to the different results. Although both sets of materials had as their goal to provide learners with the opportunity to use the linguistic forms in a variety of functionally-based communicative practice activities, the instructional materials for the 'past tense' study (past tenses) may not have been sufficiently form-focused or did not draw the learners' attention to their language use as frequently and as explicitly as the instructional materials for the 'conditional' study (conditionals). While this is a possible explanation, other factors may have contributed to the different outcomes. For example, it could be that the two linguistic structures under investigation respond to instruction in different ways or that even the relatively small differences in the age of the learners played a role.
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