The phenomena about interlanguage development that we have examined in this chapter have been documented across diverse contexts and thus are relevant for instructed as well as naturalistic learners. However, we should ask ourselves: What is the value of grammar instruction, if any, in the face of what we know about L2 development? This question has met with diverse answers in the field of SLA.
Some experts question the value of instruction, based on the widely felt gap between the classroom and the outside world. If you have ever learned or taught a foreign language in the classroom, you too will no doubt remember many times when what was learned through grammar explanations and conscious effort did not transfer well to spontaneous, idiomatic usage in real-world situations. This was Krashen’s (1985) position when he distinguished between learning, or conscious
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knowledge obtained through grammar study, and acquisition, or the incidentally developed ability to use an L2 fluently and naturally. He claimed that learning cannot become acquisition. Yet, the SLA scholarly community soon deemed it impossible to investigate these constructs and the related prediction, for a number of reasons that Barry McLaughlin (1987) authoritatively summarized a few years later (see particularly pp. 55–8).
Nevertheless, rather than disappearing, the issue has metamorphosed into the question of whether implicit and explicit knowledge can interface in long-term memory (see Chapter 5, section 5.4). Because many formal linguistic SLA researchers subscribe to the modularity hypothesis that we briefly introduced in section 6.1, they argue that implicit (subconscious) and explicit (conscious) learning are supported by separate knowledge systems which are neurophysiologically distinct and thus cannot communicate. Schwartz (1993) explains this no interface position with the allegory of an electric shaver (instruction) and a plug (the language module):
Take a bearded man who moves to a foreign place. Unbeknownst to him, all men must be clean shaven in this culture. He soon discovers this custom, and he is the type that tries to fit in as best he can in other cultures. Luckily for him, he has the solution: He (coincidentally) brought an electric shaver along, so logically the shaver is what is necessary to solve his problem. He goes to his hotel and plugs it in, but nothing happens. The current is different. It turns out that a transformer is needed to make the shaver work. Even though the shaver is necessary, it cannot be used.
(p. 153) Although the possibility of a transformer remains open in this allegory, many Universal Grammar researchers are sceptical of any interface. Cognitively oriented SLA researchers, by way of contrast, endorse the position of two systems with an interface, at least for adults. Skill acquisition researchers have been particularly firm on this point, as they view deliberate and systematic practice as an optimal ‘transformer’, to build on Schwartz’s allegory above (see Chapter 5, sections 5.2 and 5.3; DeKeyser, 2007b). Usage-based and emergentist theories of L2 learning reject most dichotomies in traditional thinking about language and psychology and therefore find the metaphor of two separate systems with an interface ‘an unfortunate appellation’ (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2006, p. 569). They also accord explicit knowledge a smaller role in the overall task of acquisition (see sections 6.3 and 6.4) than skill acquisition theorists do. Nevertheless, they agree that L2 instruction has value. If instruction targets implicit processes, they argue, it can boost bottom-up induction of constructions by making exemplars in teaching materials more frequent, salient and consistent (Robinson and Ellis, 2008b). If instruction targets explicit processes, on the other hand, it can help summon conscious attention in ways needed to optimize the learning of particularly challenging generalizations, such as those that involve low salience or high complexity, and those that depart from what learners expect based on their L1 (N.
Ellis, 2005). In a meta-analysis of 49 L2 studies reflective of the research of the 1990s, Norris and Ortega (2000) were able to show that, indeed, instruction targeting various kinds of implicit and explicit learning processes had sizeable effects. As Rod Ellis (2005) has pointed out, if both implicit and explicit knowledge are likely to be implicated in the learning of an L2, it will be important to investigate their respective contributions to L2 acquisition in much more detail in the future.
6.15 INSTRUCTION, DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNER READINESS
Most SLA researchers who believe in the value of grammar instruction also qualify their position with the proviso that instruction is constrained by development (just as the influence of the L1 is; cf. Chapter 3, sections 3.3 through 3.5). In other words, teachers can only hope to teach successfully what learners are developmentally ready to learn. This idea was formalized in the Teachability Hypothesis, also known as the issue of learner readiness, which Pienemann (1984, 1989) proposed in response to results he obtained in two quasi-experimental studies of German word order (see section 6.12 and Table 6.8). In them, he taught stage 4 (inversion) to ten seven- to nine-year-old Italian children in Germany and three adult classroom learners of German in Australia, respectively. On both occasions, those who bene- fited from the instruction were ‘ready’ learners who exhibited evidence of stage 3 (verb separation) at the time of the teaching, but nothing was gained for the ‘unready’ learners who had begun the study at stage 2 (adverb preposing). In fact, Teresa, one of the unready young learners, began avoiding the use of adverb prepos- ing (stage 2), presumably to avoid making errors. She may have been the type of accuracy-oriented learner who is concerned with perfectionism, as we will discuss in Chapter 9 (sections 9.3 and 9.4). In any case, error avoidance was an unwanted consequence that may have slowed her development of word order, since no stages, not even the ungrammatical stage 2, can be skipped. (As I have insistently reiterated in this book, an important lesson to be learned is that making fewer ‘errors’ is not always a good thing for language learning.) Later findings by Mackey (1999) and Spada and Lightbown (1999) suggest that some unready learners may benefit from instruction on word order (of English question formation, in their studies; see Table 6.9), but that the effects are only modest enough to help them advance to the next stage prior to the one taught, not to skip stages. Thus, language teachers should care- fully consider what their students are developmentally ready to learn.
Although there is much merit in the principle of learner readiness, it should not be followed slavishly, because not all interlanguage systematicity presents equal challenges for instruction. True, for some developmental areas, such as sequences for word order (Tables 6.8 and 6.9) and tense and aspect morphology (Table 6.6), learners appear psycholinguistically unable to skip stages. But for other areas of the grammar, instruction above the cutting edge of a given interlanguage may accelerate development. Thus far, this has been shown to be possible only with language subsystems that exhibit crosslinguistic markedness relations, such as the development along the relative clause hierarchy in Table 6.7. Specifically, a good
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number of small-scale studies (e.g. Eckmann et al., 1988; Doughty, 1991) have reported that teaching object of preposition relative clauses to students who are already able to handle relativization, but only of the simplest subject type, can result in gains not only in the taught type but also in all the less marked intervening types in the hierarchy. For yet other grammar areas, instruction may be essentially unconstrained by readiness. This appears particularly plausible in matters of accuracy rather than emergence, for example, with the morpheme accuracy orders depicted in Table 6.4. In sum, developmental constraints on what can be taught are likely to play out differently across different areas of L2 development, and more research is needed to shed light that is of use in making instructional decisions.
6.16 ADVANTAGES OF GRAMMAR INSTRUCTION: ACCURACY AND RATE
OF LEARNING
While the value of language instruction regularly becomes the object of heated debates in scholarly and public policy circles, supporters and sceptics often fail to pay sufficient attention to the fact that the accumulated evidence clearly shows accuracy and rate advantages for instruction. Simply put, instructed learners progress at a faster rate, they are likely to develop more elaborate language repertoires and they typically become more accurate than uninstructed learners.
Several compelling examples are available in the area of syntax. Thus, while many naturalistic L2 German learners may not reach the particle separation stage (stage 3) even after several years of living in the L2 environment (Meisel et al., 1981), in the foreign language classroom most students will have reached that stage (and some may even have traversed the entire developmental sequence!) by the end of the second semester, judging from the findings reported by Rod Ellis (1989) with 39 students of German in the United Kingdom and by Jansen (2008) with 21 students of German in Australia. For relativization, too, Pavesi (1986) found that only about 25 per cent of 38 naturalistic learners with six years on average of living in the L2 environment were capable of producing object of preposition relative clauses in English, whereas the same stage had been reached by about 40 per cent of 48 high- school students in Italy with an average of only four years of foreign language instruction. Likewise, Byrnes and Sinicrope (2008) found evidence of the object of preposition stage at just the end of the second year of study for about one-quarter of 23 college students of German in the United States that they investigated longitudinally. In addition, as mentioned in the previous section, the acquisition of relative clauses can be greatly accelerated when (more marked) object of preposition relative clause exemplars are presented or otherwise focused on in instructional materials, because the (less marked) direct object relative clause construction is learned for free, as it were (e.g. Doughty, 1991).
Evidence of clear rate and accuracy advantages of instruction is also available for L2 morphology. After daily use of English but without specific instruction, many naturalistic learners do not produce –ed or produce it with extremely low levels of accuracy. This has been documented for late starters (e.g. Alberto, as discussed in
section 6.13; but also Wes, as briefly noted in Chapter 4, section 4.1). It is also true of learners who had the advantage of a relatively early start when they were first surrounded by the L2, as was the case for the two 10- and 12-year- old Vietnamese boys studied by Sato (1990) for ten months or the ten young Chinese children and adolescents studied by Jia and Fuse (2007) for five years. By comparison, Bardovi- Harlig (1995) found that 135 instructed English learners enrolled in a college English programme exhibited levels of accuracy in the use of –ed that averaged about 70 per cent for the lowest curricular level and 90 per cent for the highest. In addition, numerous quasi-experimental instructional studies have shown that providing any form of corrective feedback on the use of –ed to learners who already are using the simple past tense but at low levels of accuracy can foster more target- like performance (e.g. Doughty and Varela, 1998; Ellis et al., 2006).