The relative effects of metalinguistic explanation and direct written corrective feedback on children’s grammatical accuracy in new writing
Mary Gorman | University of Auckland
Rod Ellis | 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.00005.gor
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.00005.gor
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