This study investigates the effectiveness of form-focused instruction: relationships among grammar instruction, grammar complexity and grammatical inference ability. Participants were assessed for their grammatical inference ability through LLAMA F an...
This study investigates the effectiveness of form-focused instruction: relationships among grammar instruction, grammar complexity and grammatical inference ability. Participants were assessed for their grammatical inference ability through LLAMA F and pretested for prior grammar knowledge including the target structures. Then they completed four treatments followed by an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test conducted two weeks after the treatment. A pretest and two post-tests consisted of untimed grammaticality judgment, metalinguistic knowledge, and a written productive grammar test.
To conduct this study, two groups of middle school students were independently exposed to explicit and implicit grammar instructions on the acquisition of two grammatical structures, the article and passive voice, classified by complexity. Performance on the pretest and post-tests was compared to establish if there was a significant effect for the instructions that accompanied the treatments and the LLAMA F scores indicating individual grammatical inference ability.
It was found that in terms of the article acquisition, participants having the explicit instruction have shown the better accomplishment on a post-test and a delayed post-test than those having the implicit instruction, and that both the explicit and implicit instructions did have an immediate effect on the passive acquisition, not showing a long term effect. When it comes to the effect of the grammatical inference ability on two grammatical structures, the acquisition of the article, simple structure, was positively influenced by the grammatical inference ability while there was no significant correlation between the acquisition of passive voice, complex structure, and the grammatical inference ability.
This study’s findings contribute towards our understanding of the efficacy of form-focused instruction on the acquisition of simple and complex grammatical features, and the relationships between grammar instructions and grammatical inference ability. Considering the implications of this study, teachers need to be aware of the interaction between the types of instructions they give and the complexity of the target structures.