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Teachability and Learnability across Languages
Edited by Ragnar Arntzen, Gisela Håkansson, Arnstein Hjelde and Jörg-U. Keßler
[Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition Research & Teaching 6] 2019
► pp. 71–93

Chapter 4
Are speech and writing teachable?

Re-examining developmental constraints on pedagogy

| The University of Sydney

Does the teachability hypothesis (Pienemann 1984, 1989) apply to spoken and written L2 English questions? Given varied findings on this issue, the present chapter reports on a study of 20 postgraduate students, divided into experimental and comparison groups. The experimental group, which comprised ‘unready’ (stage X), ‘ready’ (stage X+1) and stage X+2 students, was taught X+2 question formation. This group’s post-test results demonstrated overall differences from the comparison group and that, in both skills, the ready learners moved up a stage and one unready learner did not. However, two of the experimental group’s unready students advanced two stages in both skills. The spoken and written results imply that instruction cannot make learners skip stages but may help unready learners progress.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1PT
    • 2.2PT’s ESL question stages
    • 2.3The TH
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Tasks and elicitation
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.5Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Pre-test results
    • 4.2Post-test results
    • 4.3Other analyses
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/palart.6.04dys
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[no author supplied]
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