The Effects of Structured Input Practice and Output Practice on Grammar Knowledge among Young Learners in an EFL Context

• Main Authors: Chen, Ying-ju, 陳盈如
• Other Authors: Chan, Daniel Yu-Ching
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/24055410925356131884

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 兒童英語教育學系碩士班 === 100 === Abstract The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of different practice modes on the learning of English subject-verb agreement in present simple affirmative tense by young EFL learners. 180 elementary students in New Taipei City were divided into two groups and provided with two types of practice activities, output practice and structured input practice, after explicit information of the target feature. Traditional output practice activities were focused on production of the target form and followed mechanical, meaningful and communicative sequences. Structured input practice activities were designed in accordance with the guidelines posited by VanPatten (1996). In order to complete the activities, the students had to interpret correctly through paying attention to the target forms. All the time the students were not required to produce any output. After the pretest, both treatment groups received the same duration of instruction about 120 minutes. After the treatment, an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest, consisting of a grammaticality judgment test and a production task of the target from were administered to investigate whether two types of instruction had an impact on the students’ grammatical knowledge. Then an ANOVA was carried out to compare the relative effects. The results indicated that both types of practice facilitated students’ learning of the target form significantly and none of them outperformed one the other.