Publications
Publication details [#48282]
White, Joanna. 2008. Speeding up acquisition of his and her: Explicit L1/L2 contrasts help. In Oliver, Rhonda, Alison Mackey and Jenefer Philp, eds. Second Language Acquisition and the Younger Learner. Child's play? (Language Learning & Language Teaching 23). John Benjamins. pp. 193–228.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper reviews three pedagogical intervention studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of providing pre-adolescent and adolescent learners in communicatively-oriented classrooms with explicit metalinguistic information and opportunities to use it. The studies, which target the possessive determiners (PDs), his and her, follow a pretest/posttest design and were carried out in intact treatment and comparison classes. Measures consist of grammaticality judgement, metalinguistic comment, and oral picture description tasks. A number of issues are discussed in the context of older children’s second language learning in a classroom setting. These include implementing age-appropriate instruction that takes into account learners’ cognitive and linguistic readiness for form-focused instruction, their learning style and motivation, and the context of instruction.