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Article published In:
Language Teaching for Young Learners
Vol. 1:1 (2019) ► pp.57–81

The relative effects of metalinguistic explanation and direct written corrective feedback on children’s grammatical accuracy in new writing

| University of Auckland
| Curtin University

There has been little research investigating the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the second language acquisition of children. This article reports a quasi-experimental study of integrated form-focused instruction for 33 children aged 9–12 years. They completed four dictogloss tasks designed to elicit the use of the Present Perfect Tense and received instruction consisting of either explicit metalinguistic explanation (group 1), direct written correction (group 2) or no form-focused instruction (the comparison group) between performing the tasks. Accuracy in the production of the target structure across the four tasks was variable and showed no improvement from the first to the last. Nor were there any statistically significant differences in accuracy among the three groups. The results support some earlier studies of young children (e.g. Fazio, 2001) that have failed to show that FFI benefits young children. This may be because children fail to make use of their metalinguistic knowledge of grammatical features when undertaking meaning-focused writing tasks.

Keywords: children, form-focused instruction, metalinguistic information, written corrective feedback, acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Metalinguistic explanation
    • 1.2Written corrective feedback (WCF)
    • 1.3FFI and explicit knowledge
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Design
    • 2.3Target structure
    • 2.4Materials
      • 2.4.1Background questionnaire
      • 2.4.2Dictogloss tasks (Appendix A)
      • 2.4.3Procedure
      • 2.4.4Coding and scoring
      • 2.4.5Analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 22 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.00005.gor
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