An input enhancement study with ESL children : effects of the acquisition of possessive determiners

• Main Author: White, Joanna.
• Other Authors: Spada, Nina (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 1996
• Subjects: English language > Study and teaching > Foreign speakers > Aids and devices.
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35428

In this classroom-based study, the effects of input enhancement on the acquisition of a linguistic feature known to be problematic to francophone children learning English. were investigated. The research questions were: (1) Can L2 learners benefit from typographically enhanced input in their acquisition of third person singular possessive determiners? (2) Is typographically enhanced input more effective than unenhanced input? (3) Is typographically enhanced input more effective when combined with a book flood? === To investigate these questions, three treatment conditions were implemented with Grade 6 ESL learners. Groups E and E+ received a typographically enhanced input flood. This did not include explicit reference to the learners' L1 nor was a pedagogical rule presented at any time. In addition to the typographically enhanced input, Group E+ was exposed to extensive reading and listening activities. To ensure that all groups in the study were exposed to written input containing the target features, Group U read unenhanced versions of the texts read by the other two groups. A pretest, immediate and delayed posttest design was used in this quasi-experimental study. === Results indicated that all three instructional treatments improved the learners' acquisition of the target forms and that those in Group E+ received the greatest apparent benefits. At the immediate posttest, learners in Group E+ outperformed those in the other two groups on written tasks designed to measure their ability to recognize correct instances of the target forms. Learners in Group E+ also outperformed the others on an oral production task. On the delayed posttest five weeks later, however, Groups E and U had caught up with Group E+, and most of the between-group differences had disappeared. === The finding that all learners had significantly increased in their accuracy and development of possessive determiners immediately following instruction suggests that the target forms were equally salient to the learners in the three groups. That all learners continued to improve but did not reach advanced developmental stages, however, suggests that the salience of these features in the input may not have been sufficiently explicit. The results are discussed in terms of the potential need for more explicit instruction in the acquisition of third person singular possessive determiners. This may be particularly important because of substantial differences in the way in which gender is marked in English and French.