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. ![DOI logo](https://benjamins.com/logos/doi-logo.svg)
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.