Formal instruction and language learning

1. FORMAL
INSTRUCTION AND
LANGUAGE
LEARNING
RAPONSEL S. PACSI
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

2. TEACHING CAN BE VIEWED
IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS:
1. INTERACTION (Exposure)
2. FORMAL INSTRUCTION
(Classroom setting)

3. 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.

4. 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

5. Here are some of the
Studies LONG had
reviewed

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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

15. COMPARISON BETWEEN
CLASSROOM AND
NATURALISTIC
L2 ACQUISITION

16. Error Analysis
Comparisons 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.)

19. Felix and Simmet (1981)
Concluded that the
processes of acquisition of
the English pronoun system
were also unaffected by
instruction.

20. EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF
THE EFFECT OF
INSTRUCTION

21. ACCURACY STUDIES
AND CONCLUSIONS

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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

26. 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.

27. 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).

28. 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)

29. 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’

30. 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

31. 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.

32. 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’.

33. 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)

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. Figure. The teachability of different linguistic structures
FORM-FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS
TRANSPAREN
T
OPAQUE
ProcessingOperations
Simple
A
Plural –s
Copula ‘be’
B
V-ing
Articles
Complex
C
Inversion
D
Verb infin.

41. 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.

42. 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

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