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Widening Contexts for Processability Theory: Theories and issues
Edited by Anke Lenzing, Howard Nicholas and Jana Roos
[Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition Research & Teaching 7] 2019
► pp. 301–326

Chapter 13
Teaching the German case system

A comparison of two approaches to the study of learner readiness

This chapter compares two different approaches to the construct ‘readiness’: namely, processing constraints as defined by Processability Theory and the Teachability Hypothesis (Pienemann, 1998) and partial mastery as defined in the research on Focus on Form (Williams & Evans, 1998). The former operationalises readiness through the emergence criterion, the latter employs an accuracy criterion. The chapter applies both definitions and operationalisations in the context of a study investigating the effectiveness of instruction on the acquisition of the German case system by Dutch-speaking foreign language learners. The study included 18 freshman university students of German and adopted a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest design. The instructional treatment involved a meaning-focussed activity which eventually led to explicit rule presentation. Oral language production data was collected by means of a picture description task and an elicited imitation task. The results show that the (non-)emergence of the developmental stages of the German case marking system stayed within the predictive boundaries of the Teachability Hypothesis, whereas the development of the accuracy scores did not reveal any observable sequence. However, the results reveal that the two (emergence and accuracy) are related to the extent that increases in accuracy scores are only possible if a stage is reached or reachable. The findings suggest that the systematic, implicational emergence of stages and the subsequent, variable increases in accuracy scores represent two different, but complementing, aspects of L2 development.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Individual learner readiness in SLA
  • 3.The acquisition of the German case system
  • 4.The study
    • 4.1Design and participants
    • 4.2Instruction
    • 4.3Data elicitation
    • 4.4Readiness
    • 4.5Analysis and scoring
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Accuracy analysis
    • 5.2Emergence analysis
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 28 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/palart.7.13bat
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Baten, Kristof
2016. A study on explicit instruction and its relation to knowing/using linguistic forms and individual learner readiness. EUROSLA Yearbook 16 ► pp. 116 ff. DOI logo
Baten, Kristof & Aaricia Ponnet
2023. Chapter 4. Extending PT to split ergative marking and differential object marking. In Processability and Language Acquisition in the Asia-Pacific Region [Processability Approaches to Language Acquisition Research & Teaching, 9], ► pp. 91 ff. DOI logo

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