«The effects and effectiveness of contrastive form-focused instruction on mastering tense-aspect»

Newsha Ahmadi
«The effects and effectiveness of contrastive form-focused instruction on mastering tense-aspect»
Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics VIAL, n.º 13 (2016)

Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics VIAL | Universidad de Vigo | Facultad de Filología y Traducción | Vigo | ESPAÑA


Extracto de apartados en páginas 9 y 24-27 de la publicación en PDF. Véanse las referencias en la publicación original del texto.

«Abstract

»This study focuses on the impact of the type of form-focused instruction (FFI) on its efficiency in mastering L2 forms. The hypothesis that FFI, which induces structural and metalinguistic salience on the basis of contrastive analysis of the learner’s L1 and L2, would be particularly effective at facilitating the acquisition of difficult L2 forms was tested in a quasi-experimental study comparing the effectiveness of two types of FFI, one with and one without a contrastive component.

»The contrastive FFI explicitly drew learners’ attention to the cross-linguistic differences in the tense-aspect systems of their L2 and L1 while the non-contrastive treatment only focused on the tense-aspect system of the L2. The effects of these two types of FFI were assessed by analysing the learners’ pre-test and post-test performance on two tasks differing in the extent to which they involve the activation of explicit and implicit linguistic knowledge: a grammatical judgment task and a controlled translation task. Results from the analyses indicate differential effects for different tasks.

»Key words: Foreign language teaching, Form-Focused Instruction, Contrastive Form-Focused Instruction, Tense and aspect, Translation, Grammatical Judgment

»Discussion

»The impact of CFFI on the Grammatical Judgment

»The effects of the mixed implicit and explicit teaching with and without a contrastive explicit instruction component as manifested in the PLE’s ability to make correct grammatical judgments about problematic progressive and present perfect constructions in English appear to be very small. Statistical quantitative analysis of the GJT scores did not reveal any significant effect of either the traditional explicit FFI or of the contrastive explicit FFI.

»A more qualitative analysis of the response patterns on the GJT from learners revealed differential effects of the mixed implicit and explicit teaching with and without contrastive explicit instruction according to the nature of the target feature and the nature of the cognitive procedure that is triggered by the instruction. As for the progressive, it seems that the traditional instructional procedure of the control group, which consisted among other things of memorizing a list of verbs incompatible with the progressive, works better for our PLE.

»The experimental treatment, providing contrastive metalinguistic instruction and relying on metalinguistic reasoning (deduction and induction), was counterproductive for many learners as 47% of the experimental group performed worse on this aspect of the GJT after the treatment.

»The abstract metalinguistic reasoning about the semantics of the progressive, the semantic features of different inherent aspect classes (especially states) and the proposed translatory technique appears to have confused many of the learners. In contrast, for the present perfect, and particularly the present perfect with locative state verbs, the contrastive FFI treatment seems to have been beneficial, or at least more beneficial than the traditional explicit instructional treatment (43% of the experimental group learners were more accurate in their posttest for these target forms .This ratio was only 19% for the control group learners).

»There may be several reasons why the same treatment has a differential impact on the PLE’s grammaticality judgments depending on the target structure. However, it should be borne in mind that all our subjects, as university students of English, had already received several hours of grammar instruction before entering university, including instruction on progressive aspect. This means that none had been completely ignorant about the issue of progressive states before the treatment.

»The contrastive instruction, with its explicit focus on L1-L2 differences and its use of technical metalinguistic terminology (e.g. stativity, dynamicity), was totally new for all our learners, and as already indicated above, may have confused several of them. Secondly, the differential effect of the treatments may also be due to the nature of the two different target structures itself, including their formal complexity and saliency in the L2.

»Furthermore, as Doughty and Williams (1998) and Harley (1993) suggest, grammatical errors in communicative interaction that lead to communicative breakdown will lead more often to negotiation of meaning and hence implicit acquisition than those errors that do not obscure the communication of meaning, and may therefore not require focused instruction and corrective feedback. Since an overextended progressive state is less likely to cause communication breakdown than a present perfect with a locative state, the learners might have underestimated its importance and not paid significant attention to the form.

»The last factor to be mentioned here concerns potential individual learner differences between the control and experimental group learners. For instance, it is now reasonably well documented that some learners are more analytically and logically oriented and are therefore more receptive to explicit, analytically and metalinguistically oriented teaching approaches that draw on rules and logical deduction and inference than other less analytically oriented who might prefer for example simple memorization and rote-learning (Dörnyei and Skehan 2003).

»Since the contrastive instruction of the progressive aspect used in this study relies to a great extent on the logical mind of the learner, it might be interesting to investigate its effect on different learning orientations as well. In contrast, the instructional treatment in the control condition relied less on logical reasoning, i.e. while the experimental learners had to engage in complex rule learning, the control learners had to engage in rote learning (by memorizing a list of verbs that bar the progressive in English).

»Such individual differences were of course not directly examined in our study, and they need to be further investigated on a larger sample of learners. For these and other reasons, we must be cautious in extrapolating the findings from the GJT to other aspects of the learners’ competence and proficiency in English. It may be that the (absence of) effects of the instructional treatments are not observed in other language tasks. To investigate this possibility, there would be now a turn to the analysis of the PLE’s performance on the translation task.

»The impact of CFFI on the correct use of verbs in translation

»The analyses of the PLE’s performance on the translation task yielded a number of interesting results. First, it was concluded that the CFFI is effective in reducing the erroneous verb form use of PLE in translating from L2 to L1 (contrary to what it was observed in the GJT). This observation may be due to a variety of factors. The two tasks may each activate different types of knowledge and skills, which in turn may have been differentially affected by the instruction.

»The GJT may have required the learners to activate a more implicit type of knowledge in contrast to a more explicit type of knowledge activated by the type of translation used in the study. And perhaps the instructional treatments in our study mainly fostered the development of explicit knowledge.

»A related explanation is that there may also be an effect of the task itself in the sense that translation pushes learners in their output, thereby fostering the acquisition process, while the GJT does not constitute such a source of comprehensible or pushed output.

»Besides, a translation is in essence a contrastive activity and as such is more likely to activate learners’ knowledge about L1-L2 contrasts than a non-contrastive task such as the GJT. In other words, the translation task would naturally advantage our experimental learners because they have been previously engaged in contrastive activities as part of their instructional treatment and as a result have acquired the kind of explicit knowledge of L1-L2 contrasts that is required for doing a translation.

»In short, the experimental learners’ attention to L1-L2 contrasts was heightened and they were therefore probably more aware of the specific cross-linguistic differences implemented in the translation task than the control group learners.

»Moreover, it may be suggested that the experimental CFFI was more effective in raising learners’ awareness about potential sources of transfer errors. In other words, the structural and metalinguistic salience of the three problematic target structures induced by the contrastive component in the experimental treatment facilitated the acquisition and mastery of these forms more than in the case of non-contrastive instruction.

»Conclusions

»The quantitative analysis of the GJT data revealed no significant effect of CFFI. The following elements have been put forward to explain this result: the novelty of the translatory technique, or the potential individual differences in the learning orientation of the learners. In contrast, the qualitative analysis indicated differential effects of this type of FFI according to the nature of target form, i.e. CFFI was beneficial in raising the grammatical judgment of PLE regarding present perfect form but not effective in their judgment of ungrammatical progressive forms.

»As for the translation task, the CFFI appeared to be effective in the correct use of the target structures by PLE. This may be mainly due to the fact that TT needed explicit knowledge which was presented in CFFI and that translation is a contrastive activity in nature. The present study’s findings may offer implications for pedagogy especially in translation classes.

»Further investigation is needed for the impact of CFFI on PLE with different learning orientations since it is assumed that due to the analytic nature of the CFFI, the analytic learners will benefit more as compared to the holistic learners. Moreover, it would be interesting to see the effect of this type of instruction in the translation from L2 to L1 (English to Persian) as well.

»Last but not least, the three target structures chosen for the contrastive instructional treatment in this study, namely OPS, PPWLS and PPWPA were different in nature. In other words, the mechanisms that the learners used to internalize each of these issues differed, but the time devoted to the contrastive instruction of each was the same. The relationship between the time spent on the contrastive instructional treatment, the type of cross-linguistic differences being instructed and the effectiveness of the instruction should be considered in future studies.»