L2 Learners' Awareness of L1 Influence

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Do They Know What They're Doing? L2 Learners' Awareness of L1 Influence Patsy M. Lightbown & Nina Spada Published online: 29 Mar 2010.

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Do They Know What They’re Doing? L2 Learners’ Awareness of L1 Influence Patsy M. Lightbown TESL Centre, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8

Nina Spada


Modern Language Centre, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 In this paper we report on the extent to which learners can make explicit L1 rules which appear to influence their L2 performance. The learners were 11–12-year-old francophone students learning English in intensive communicative ESL classes in Quebec. In previous research we had found that their knowledge and use of English questions and adverbs, while systematic, was not target-like. In question forms, the pattern in their interlanguage reflected the French constraint which allows subject-auxiliary inversion with pronouns and prohibits it with nouns. Regarding adverb placement, students accepted sentences with both SAVO (ungrammatical in French) and SVAO (grammatical in French but ungrammatical in English). In this study, students from the same population were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences and to explain their judgements. The results confirmed the patterns previously observed. That is, students’ performance on adverbs and questions showed clear influence of transfer from French. However, there was no evidence that students were aware of how their intuitions about L1 grammaticalityinfluenced their L2 judgements. It is suggested that research is needed to explore the potential effectivenessof drawing learners’ attention to these L1 influences. Such research is needed particularly with young learners in communicative L2 learning contexts.

Second language (L2) acquisition research has confirmed that certain characteristics of learners’ knowledge and use of the L2 are typical of learners, regardless of their first language (L1). However, there is also ample evidence that interlanguages reflect the influence of previously learned languages. In this paper, we report on a study of the extent to which young school-age learners of L2 English showed awareness of word order rules from their L1 which appeared to influence both their production of L2 sentences and their judgements of L2 grammaticality. The influence of L1 on developing interlanguages is not straightforward, and it can be manifested in a variety of ways (see Odlin (1990) for review). Researchers have identified L1 influence in learners’ errors (Odlin, 1996; Selinker, 1969). It has also been observed that learners are sometimes reluctant to attempt certain L2 features which are very distant from comparable L1 features (Schachter, 1974). On grammaticality judgement tasks, learners have been observed to accept ungrammatical sentences which resemble the interlanguage sentences which they, and other learners with the same L1, produce in spontaneous speech (White, 1991; Schachter et al., 1976). In addition, learners sometimes reject grammatical L2 sentences which do not correspond to related sentences in 0965-8416/00/04 0198-20 $16.00/0 LANGUAGE AWARENESS

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their interlanguage (Spada & Lightbown, 1999). L1 has also been observed to influence the rate and pattern of L2 learners’ progress through developmental stages, causing learners to linger longer in developmental stages where the interlanguage sentences resemble their L1 (Selinker & Lakshmanan, 1992; Wode, 1976; Zobl, 1980a, 1980b). Learners have also been observed to reject correct L2 words and grammatical features which resemble cognate words and features in the L1, suggesting that learners have a sense of what is and what is not transferable from one language to another (Kellerman, 1983; Lightbown & Libben, 1984). Selinker and Lakshmanan (1992) and Han and Selinker (1999) have proposed that L1 influence is almost always involved in the fossilisation of errors. Most of the work on L1 influence has been done with adult learners, and some have even claimed that children acquire L2 without reference to their L1 (Dulay & Burt, 1974a, b). Although there is good evidence that young simultaneous bilinguals are able to speak multiple languages without confusing them (Genesee et al., 1995), young learners with limited L2 proficiency, especially those whose exposure to the L2 is restricted to classroom interaction, have been observed to draw on L1 knowledge in trying to create novel L2 sentences when the demands of the communicative situation go beyond what they have learned in class (Ervin-Tripp, 1974; Harley & Swain, 1984; Lightbown, 1980, 1991; Selinker et al., 1975). Most of the research on the impact of learners’ metalinguistic awareness of their L2 acquisition has also been restricted to adult or older adolescent learners (e.g. Birdsong, 1989; Green & Hecht, 1992; Bialystok & Fröhlich, 1978). This is partly related to the assumption that younger learners do not have sufficiently well-developed metalinguistic awareness to reflect on their L2. However, younger learners do seem to have metalinguistic awareness of some features. This is evident in the numerous studies of L1 metalinguistic awareness, especially as it relates to the development of literacy (see Dickinson et al., 1989). In Europe, there is a long tradition of work in the area of ‘language awareness’, exploring children’s ability to reflect on their L1 knowledge and its role in second language learning in guided oral interactions (Bailly, 1998; Bengtsson, 1980; Hawkins, 1984; Redard, 1977). While L1 learners vary in both the rate of development of metalinguistic awareness and the level of awareness which they ultimately attain (Gleitman & Gleitman, 1970; Gleitman et al., 1972), there is evidence that children as young as five reliably recognise violations of word order rules. Even younger children are known to be sensitive to word order errors (e.g. Hakes, 1980; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1972, 1974). Thus, in assessing the metalinguistic awareness of young L2 learners, it is important to choose features which most young children are known to be able to recognise in their L1. Word order, the focus of the present study, is such a feature.

Background This study arises from previous research with francophone students in communicative, intensive ESL classes. Students in these classes spend five months in intensive ESL and five months during which they cover the regular Grade 6 curriculum in French (see Lightbown & Spada, 1994, 1997). The model on which their ESL classes are based is a strong version of communicative

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language teaching in which the emphasis is on meaning rather than form and in which explicit metalinguistic instruction is virtually excluded. One kind of explicit instruction which teachers in these classes particularly avoid is the comparison of English and French. They are convinced that it is neither necessary nor desirable to use French in the English class. In addition, they have a strong commitment to the belief that students will acquire English incidentally if they are exposed to a substantial amount of comprehensible input and given opportunities to use English in communicative interaction. Activities in these classrooms almost always involve oral interaction. Students sometimes engage in reading and writing activities for small projects or the creation of plays for presentation to the class, but there is little or no emphasis on analytic activities using the written language. In our previous research, we found that young francophone students in intensive ESL classes produced, and accepted as grammatical, English sentences which reflect the word order of French, their L1, rather than or in addition to those which conform to the word order of English. The word order features analysed in this study are the placement of adverbs in simple sentences and subject-auxiliary inversion in questions. Adverb placement White (1991) showed that the francophone students in intensive ESL classes produced and accepted sentences in which the placement of adverbs conformed to the rules of French instead of or in addition to sentences conforming to the rules for adverb placement in English. Their performance on a grammaticality judgement task included acceptance of English sentences in which adverbs of manner and frequency were placed between verb and object (SVAO), a position which French allows but English does not, as well as sentences with the adverb between subject and verb (SAVO), a position allowed by English but not by French. * Mary reads carefully newspapers. (SVAO) Marie lit attentivement des journaux. (SVAO) Mary carefully reads newspapers. (SAVO) * Marie attentivement lit des journaux. (SAVO) White hypothesised that it would be relatively easy for the students to learn, simply through exposure to grammatical sentences in English (‘positive evidence’), that English allows SAVO, even though French does not. However, she further hypothesised that students would require ‘negative evidence1‘ to get rid of the French SVAO structure. In this experimental study, White introduced an instructional module in which students were explicitly taught that, in English, SVAO is not grammatical. Students also had opportunities to hear sentences containing the grammatical SAVO pattern. During the intervention, which occupied a maximum of seven teaching hours spread over a period of two weeks, students participated in activities in which the use of adverbs was contextualised. They were induced to produce sentences with adverbs and they received feedback on their adverb



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placement errors. Immediately following the instruction and error feedback, students showed that they had learned to accept SAVO and reject SVAO, and this awareness was still present five weeks later. On a follow-up test, however, after these students had completed a year of one or two hours per week of ESL, without explicit instruction on adverb placement, students were accepting SVAO sentences at rates similar to those observed before the targeted instruction and feedback. This lack of long-term effect could be attributed either to the brevity of the instructional intervention, or to the subsequent absence of the target feature in the classroom input (and thus, the absence of opportunities for relevant input, practice or feedback on error). However, as White had predicted, the students continued to accept as grammatical the SAVO pattern which they had learned during the intervention. White’s hypotheses about the need for negative evidence to help learners reject interlanguage features which resembled their L1 were further tested in a follow-up study. In this study, a similar group of learners received only an ‘input flood’ of positive evidence – correct examples of adverb placement – in stories, games, and poems, etc. over a two-week period (Trahey & White, 1993). No explicit instruction or corrective feedback was provided. As in the original study, on the immediate post-tests, students showed that they had come to accept SAVO, and they continued to do so on a delayed posttest. However, in contrast to the original study, students in the input flood condition never decreased the rate at which they accepted ungrammatical SVAO sentences. The results of the adverb placement studies suggest that the L1-influenced interlanguage rule which allows SVAO could not be expunged in the absence of explicit instruction and error feedback. Question formation In another study, White et al. (1991) found that young French L1 learners in intensive ESL produced and accepted questions which conformed to word order rules typical of spoken French as well as those which corresponded to English word order rules. For example, many students produced and accepted questions without subject-auxiliary inversion (Why fish can live in water?/Pourquoi les poissons peuvent vivre dans l’eau?) as well as those with inversion (Where are you going?). In an experimental study, students were explicitly taught that English questions require inversion and teachers gave feedback on word order errors in students’ questions. White et al. found that students who received the explicit instruction and feedback on error had a higher rate of accuracy at the end of the study than a comparison group which did not have this type of instruction. The White et al. study focused on the accuracy of students’ questions. In a subsequent study, Spada and Lightbown (1999) explored how instruction might help students move along a developmental continuum of interlanguage stages in the acquisition of English questions. The principal research question which arose from Pienemann’s (1985, 1988) teachability hypothesis was: ‘Is instruction which is targeted to the next stage in the L2 learner’s development more effective than instruction which targets a more advanced stage?’ The developmental sequence on which the study was based was adapted from the framework for the acquisition of English which was proposed by Pienemann et al. (1988). The predicted sequence of question development is shown in Figure 1.

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STAGE 1 Single words or fragments A spot on the dog? A ball or a shoe? STAGE 2 SVO with rising intonation A boy throw the ball? Two children ride a bicycle?


STAGE 3* Fronting Do-fronting Do the boy is beside the bus? Do you have three astronaut? Wh-fronting What the boy is throwing? Where the children are standing? Other fronting Is the boy is beside the bus? STAGE 4 Wh- with copula BE Where is the ball? Where is the space ship? Yes/No questions with aux inversion Is the boy beside the garbage can? Is there a dog on the bus? STAGE 5 Wh- with auxiliary second What is the boy throwing? How do you say ‘lancer’? Figure 1 Developmental stages in English questions (adapted from Pienemann et al. 1988) * Stage 3 questions can be grammatical or ungrammatical. They are categorized by their word order, not their grammaticality or ungrammaticality.

Instruction in the Spada and Lightbown (1999) study was in the form of a targeted input flood. That is, students had high frequency exposure to correct English questions in a variety of classroom activities – games, surveys, projects, questionnaires, etc. The emphasis in almost all the activities was on comprehension and students were rarely called upon to produce novel or spontaneous questions in those tasks. No explicit metalinguistic teaching was done and when learners did produce questions, teachers usually responded to the meaning rather than the form of the question as long as the student’s meaning was clear. The intervention lasted for two weeks, near the end of the students’ five-month intensive ESL course. During the intervention, students were exposed to eight



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hours of high frequency input of questions. These questions were drawn primarily from stages 4 and 5 on the Pienemann et al. sequence. On an oral production task, we found that, contrary to the predictions of Pienemann’s teachability hypothesis, students who were at stage 3 on the oral pre-test did not show more signs of developmental advancement than students who were at stage 2 on the pre-test. On the other tasks, which were paper and pencil tasks (Preference Task and Scrambled Questions Task), some students who had been placed at stage 2 or 3 in oral production accepted and produced stage 4 and 5 questions even on the pre-test. The number of stage 4 and 5 questions produced and/or accepted as grammatical was higher on the post-test, after the intervention, even though many students showed no sign of ‘progress’ in their oral production. That is, on both the pre-test and the post-test, students tended to use stage 2 and 3 questions in the oral production task, but accepted and produced some stage 4 and 5 questions on the written tasks. Students’ performance on the Preference Task provided valuable information about the apparent contradiction between their performance on oral and written tasks. The overall pattern of their responses on both tasks showed that students were operating with an interlanguage rule which was based on a constraint brought over from their L1. According to this rule, subject-auxiliary inversion is grammatical in French questions when the subject is a pronoun, but inversion is usually not grammatical when the subject is a full noun. Peut-il venir chez moi? (Can he come to my house?) * Peut-Jean venir chez moi? (Can John come to my house?) When a noun subject is needed to make the meaning clear, it is preceded by the interrogative formula ‘est-ce que’ or it is topicalised by placing it at the beginning or the end of the sentence, and replaced by a pronoun subject. Est-ce que Jean peut venir chez moi? (Is it that John can come to my house?) Jean, peut-il venir chez moi? (John, can he come to my house?)2 Students’ performance on both the oral and written tasks is consistent with the interlanguage rule whereby subject-auxiliary inversion is permitted in questions with pronoun subjects but not with noun subjects (Zobl, 1979). The apparent difference arose because of the nature of the oral task, which requires students to ask questions about a picture, held by the interlocutor, which the student cannot see. Students tended to ask either stage 2 questions such as ‘The boy has a stick?’, stage 3 questions with ‘do you’, such as ‘Do you have a dog in your picture?’ or stage 3 wh-questions with noun subjects, such as ‘What the boy is throwing?’ On the Preference Task they revealed the limitations of their understanding of inversion in questions. In this task, they had to judge the grammaticality of pairs of questions and had the option of accepting one, both or neither of them. Students

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1.

When is my mother coming home? ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est: _______________________________________________________

2.

Lucy always watches television after school. ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est:


________________________________________________________

3.

What we can watch on TV tonight? ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est: _______________________________________________________

4.

Alexandra cleans sometimes her room. ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est: ________________________________________________________

Figure 2 Sample items from the Correction Task

accepted some stage 4 and 5 questions, for example, ‘Can they work on the computer?’. When stage 4 and 5 questions had noun subjects, however, students tended to reject them. Thus, the apparent contradiction in students’ performance – stage 2 and 3 on the oral tasks and the acceptance of some grammatical stage 4 and 5 questions on the Preference Task – was found to be systematic and to reflect an interlanguage rule governing the formation of questions.

The Current Study The results of these studies of learners’ knowledge and use of adverb placement and question formation led us to the following research question: ‘Are young students aware of their interlanguage rules or do these rules constrain their performance in English without their awareness?’ A new sample of students from the same population as that which participated in the studies described above were given tasks in which they were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences. One group was then directed simply to make corrections to the sentences which they judged to be incorrect (Correction Task), and the other group was asked to explain their judgements (Explanation


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Task). The inclusion of the Correction Task was based on our anticipation that explanation might be perceived as a difficult task and might lead students to judge sentences as correct in order to avoid having to provide an explanation.


Participants Approximately 300 students in ten intact grade 6 intensive ESL classes participated in the study. In June, at the time of the testing, students in the Correction Task group were completing the ESL portion of their school year. Students in the Explanation Task group had done intensive ESL from September to January and were completing the French programme. Two general measures of English proficiency were used to assess the overall English language ability of all students: (1) a Yes/No Vocabulary Recognition Test (Meara, 1992) and (2) a comprehension test (MEQ test) that was primarily a test of listening comprehension but also required some reading (Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec, 1981). There were no significant differences between the two groups on these measures (see Table 1) or between these groups and other samples of students from this population whose language we had observed in the earlier studies mentioned above. Table 1 Group comparisons for MEQ and Yes/No Vocabulary Recognition Tests MEQ test Yes/No test

Group Explanation Correction Explanation Correction

n 150 145 144 142

M (%) 77.05 76.79 70.00 73.10

s.d. 12.47 13.67 15.00 14.00

t 0.17

p ns

-1.82

ns

Procedures The two tasks which were used in this study were adapted from the Preference Task used in the Spada and Lightbown (1999) study. Both the Explanation Task and the Correction Task were paper and pencil tasks. Question formation and adverb placement were targeted on both tasks and two other linguistic features served as distractors.3 In both tasks, students were presented with sentences and asked to judge whether they were correct or not. In the Correction Task, they were asked to correct the sentences which they judged to be incorrect. In the Explanation Task, they were asked to explain (in either French or English) what was wrong with sentences which they judged to be incorrect. Figures 2 and 3 show examples from the two tasks. Because it was assumed the Explanation Task would be more demanding and time consuming, there were fewer items on this task (25) than on the Correction Task (35). The Correction Task was administered in the five classes where students were learning ESL intensively. The Explanation Task was administered to the five groups of students who were doing the French programme because we assumed that teachers in the French classes would not object to students being given the option of writing their explanations in French and also, since formal grammar instruction was part of their French language arts course, it seemed that students might be more accustomed to ‘thinking metalinguistically’.

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1.

What is your brother doing? ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que: __________________________________________________


2.

Do the children want to play? ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que: __________________________________________________

3.

John does quickly his homework. ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que: __________________________________________________

4.

What the chef likes to cook? ____ La phrase est correcte. ____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que: __________________________________________________

Figure 3 Sample items from the Explanation Task

For adverbs, there were three (two incorrect SVAO and one correct SAVO) items on the Explanation Task. The same three items plus one additional incorrect item appeared on the Correction Task. Adverbs of manner or adverbs of frequency were used in all sentences which targeted adverb placement. The question items (10 on the Explanation Task and 14 on the Correction Task) included correct and incorrect sentences with both noun and pronoun subjects. We did not include items with ‘do you’ and ‘can I’, on the grounds that these might represent formulaic expressions rather than evidence of a rule for inversion. Thus the yes/no question items with pronoun subjects used ‘they’, ‘we’, and ‘he’. ‘You’ occurred in more wh-questions in forms other than ‘do you’. The number of items for each of the features under investigation is relatively small. However, as noted, previous research with students in this population (Spada & Lightbown, 1999; White, 1991) using a larger number of items had already documented the effects of the apparent interlanguage rules. The purpose of this study was to investigate learners’ metalinguistic awareness of these rules



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which seemed to influence their L2 performance (including judgements of grammaticality) so strongly. It is evident that both the Correction and the Explanation Tasks are by nature ‘metalinguistic’. That is, students are asked to focus on the form of the sentences rather than on their meaning. However, we were looking for evidence that the students could provide an explicit metalinguistic explanation. Thus, in analysing the students’ performance on the Explanation Task, we defined ‘metalinguistic remarks’ as those which went beyond correction and offered some more general explanation, for example, ‘Il faut dire “can we” car c’est une phrase interrogative‘ (You have to say ‘can we’ because it’s an interrogative sentence.) We did not count as ‘metalinguistic’ an explanation such as il faut enlever ‘do’ (you have to remove ‘do’) or ‘reverse can and we’ on the grounds that this was essentially a correction, not an explanation.

Results We had anticipated that students doing the Explanation Task might tend to accept more items as grammatical than those doing the Correction Task. As noted above, this was due in part to the nature of the task, but also to the fact that students doing the Explanation Task were further from their intensive English instructional experience. These students had spent the preceding five months in intensive French studies with no ESL classes and little contact with English beyond that which they would have heard and used in the corridors of the school or on television at home. In addition, the Explanation Task asked students to do something they were not at all accustomed to doing, namely, to explain something about English language form. We anticipated that they might prefer to accept a sentence rather than to struggle with an explanation. This expectation was not confirmed. The overall rate of acceptance and rejection of items was similar on the Correction Task and the Explanation Task. This was true for both Adverb and Question items (see Table 2). Table 2 Overall percentage of acceptance of grammatically correct and incorrect items on the explanation and correction tasks Questions Explanation task Correction task Adverb Explanation Task Correction Task

Correct Inverted questions 62 61 Correct SAVO 76 76

Incorrect Non-inverted questions 80 78 Incorrect SVAO 79 74

Adverbs On both the Correction Task and the Explanation Task, students tended to accept both the SVAO sentences which reflect the French rule and the SAVO sentences which reflect the English rule (see Table 3).4 As these students had had no specific instruction on adverb placement, these findings further support White’s (1991) hypothesis that students can acquire SAVO without explicit

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instruction and error feedback, but will not learn that SVAO is ungrammatical without such explicit guidance. Thus, the picture of their interlanguage which emerges from their judgements includes both SAVO and SVAO. On the Explanation Task, three items targeted adverb placement. Thus the 150 students who completed this task produced a combined total of 450 judgements of the correctness of adverb placement. Of these, 95 were judged to be incorrect. Only four were accompanied by a metalinguistic remark and none reflected an awareness of the difference between the L1 and L2 rules.


Table 3 Percentage acceptance of sentences with SAVO and SVAO Lucy always watches TV after school. The doctor always washes her hands.* Alexandra cleans sometimes her room. John does quickly his homework.

Explanation Task 74 69 84

Correction Task 71 81 66 82

*Correction Task only

Questions Table 4 shows that, as expected, students were more likely to accept grammatical questions in which pronoun subject and auxiliary verb were inverted than grammatical questions in which the noun subject and auxiliary were inverted. Conversely, as Table 5 shows, they were more likely to accept ungrammatical questions in which the noun subject was not inverted with the auxiliary than ungrammatical questions in which the pronoun subject and auxiliary were not inverted. This result confirms that these students, like those observed previously, were operating, at least implicitly, with a rule like French which normally precludes inversion with noun subjects. Table 4 Percentage acceptance of grammatical questions with noun and pronoun subjects on the explanation and correction tasks Pronouns: Inversion Do they like pepperoni pizza? Can they work on the computer?* Nouns: Inversion Why do children like McDonald’s? What is your brother doing? Do the children want to play? When is my mother coming home? Can the children speak Spanish? Where are your parents working?* *Correction Task only

Explanation Task

Correction Task

90

90 90

54 51 66 51 61

48 46 65 39 51 56


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Table 5 Percentage acceptance of ungrammatical questions with noun and pronoun subjects on the explanation and correction tasks Pronouns: non-inversion What we can watch on TV tonight? When you are going to eat breakfast?* Why he’s at home today?* Nouns: non-inversion Why fish can live in water? Where the teacher is going? What the chef likes to cook?

Explanation Task

Correction Task

62

62 61 82**

91 77 89

92 87 86

* Correction Task only ** This item yielded results which were perplexing because they violated the students’ apparent preference for inversion with pronoun subjects. The reason for this is not clear and merits further investigation.

The number of metalinguistic explanations offered for their judgements overall was exceedingly small. Even though the instructions on the Explanation Task clearly called for (and gave an example of) an explanation of the perceived error, students most often simply corrected the sentences which they judged to be incorrect.Ten items targeted question formation on the Explanation Task. Thus the 150 students made a total of 1500 judgements of questions. They judged 570 question items to be incorrect. Of these, they gave metalinguistic explanations for 56 items, less than 10% of those they judged to be incorrect. Furthermore, as in the case of the adverb judgements, most of the metalinguistic remarks dealt with something other than the target feature. Only 15 metalinguistic remarks had anything to do with word order in questions, and most of these were consistent with the students’ interlanguage rule. That is, they ‘corrected’ a sentence which had inversion with a noun subject and explained that the verb had to come after the subject. For example, some students corrected the sentence ‘Where is your brother going?’ and offered the explanation ‘is after the subject’. A very small number of students gave a target like rule. For example:

il faut dire ‘can we’ dans une phrase interrogative; il faut enverser ‘we et can’ parce que la phrase est interrogative; c’est une question il faut inversé ‘we can’ pour ‘can we’; il faut inverser ‘can et fish’ car c’est une phrase interrogative; you should say the verb first; quand c’est une question, on inverse le sujet.

Thus, there is very little evidence that the students were consciously aware of an interlanguage rule related to subject-auxiliary inversion in questions. A very small number of students gave explanations such as ‘you have to say “can we” in an interrogative sentence’, but there was not a single example of explicit metalinguistic statements regarding different rules to govern the use of inversion with noun and pronoun subjects. The closest thing to such a comment was

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one student who said that ‘Can the children speak Spanish?’ could be ‘corrected’ by replacing ‘the children’ with ‘he’. On both the Explanation Task and the Correction Task, however, there were many cases where the students’ corrections showed that they were sensitive to word order and to differences between nouns and pronouns in the sentences they were asked to judge. Their ‘corrections’, whether they resulted in correct or incorrect questions, provide further confirmation of their implicit interlanguage rule for subject-auxiliary inversion. They frequently ‘de-inverted’ subject and auxiliary in correct questions when the subject was a noun (e.g. ‘What is your brother doing?’ became ‘What your brother is doing?’) and inverted subject and auxiliary in incorrect questions when the subject was a pronoun (e.g. ‘What we can watch on TV tonight?’ became ‘What can we watch on TV tonight?’). It is not the case that every judgement the students made was consistent with the interlanguage rule. Sometimes students accepted questions which violated the interlanguage rule, either because they were reading quickly and did not notice how the question differed from those which they usually accepted or because they had already progressed to a point where they recognised the grammatical questions which other students still judged according to the interlanguage rule. Nevertheless, when students did make changes, the version of the question which they created usually conformed to the interlanguage rule. That is, they used inversion with pronouns and removed the inversion in questions with noun subjects. Table 6 shows this pattern on the Correction Task. Table 6 Changes made by students which are consistent with the implicit interlanguage rule (inversion with pronoun subjects and non-inversion with noun subjects) Correction Task

Inversion with pronoun subjects Do they like pepperoni pizza? *What we can watch on TV tonight? *When you are going to eat breakfast? *Why he’s at home today? Non-inversion with noun subjects Why do children like McDonald’s? What is your brother doing? Do the children want to play? When is my mother coming home? Can the children speak Spanish? Where are your parents working? *Why fish can live in water? *Where the teacher is going? *What the chef likes to cook?

Number of students Percentage of (out of 145) who ‘corrections’ consistent made ‘corrections’ with interlanguage rule 48 70 84 26

85** 76 80 35

88 86 64 92 83 73 61 44 38

77 80 64 87 71 80 85 57 50

Notes: * Items presented on the tasks in the ungrammatical form. ** When students made changes to this item, they most often changed ‘they’ to another pronoun, usually ‘you’.



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Some of the corrections and explanations offered by the students reflected the difficulty they had with any task which required them to analyse and manipulate components of the language. Although these students received some exposure to written work, the emphasis in all classes was on oral interaction, and when they encountered written work, the typical instructional focus was on the comprehension of meaning. They rarely encountered written tasks or exercises which would require them to identify separate linguistic items – individual words – in sentences. They seemed to experience particular difficulty with words such as ‘do’ and ‘is’ which do not carry easily identifiable meaning when used as auxiliaries. For example, in questions which included ‘do’, students either removed ‘do’ or replaced it with ‘the’ (e.g. they changed ‘Why do children like McDonald’s?’ to ‘Why children like McDonald’s?’ or ‘Why the children like McDonald’s?). In oral language, the phonological realisation of do is reduced to /d /) and children do not equate /d / with the verb ‘do’. Thus, in the absence of any explicit instruction on question formation and an emphasis on spoken versus written language, when faced with a task which included mysterious items such as ‘do’, students were at a loss for what to do with it. Some students commented, ‘You can’t say “do”. “Do” is faire‘. That is, their only knowledge of this important auxiliary verb in English was in its role as a lexical verb. Similarly, the verb ‘is’ caused several problems. In response to the question, ‘What is your brother doing?’ many students said ‘is’ should be removed. Others suggested that ‘is’ should go after brother. The incorrect question ‘Where the teacher is going?’ also elicited many recommendations to delete ‘is’.

Discussion The findings of this study suggest that L1 constraints which appear to influence word order patterns in the interlanguage of francophone students in intensive communicative ESL classes are not readily available for metalinguistic reflection. The apparent inability or unwillingness to provide explanations contrasts with the findings of a recent study5 by White and Ranta (1999). They found that a sample of students drawn from the same intensive ESL program (in a subsequent academic year) were willing and able to express in metalinguistic terms their understanding of the use of possessive determiners ‘his’ and ‘her’. The difference may be due in part to the fact that errors in the possessive determiners can lead to a misunderstanding of the speaker’s intended meaning while errors in word order for adverbs or questions do not tend to interfere with meaning to the same extent. This finding is consistent with research on metalinguistic awareness showing that it is easier to notice semantic than syntactic errors (Gleitman & Gleitman, 1979). White and Ranta’s findings may also be due to the fact that students’ reflections were elicited orally. As noted above, in European research on language awareness, teachers and researchers have found that children are able, in guided oral interaction, to reflect on their knowledge of language. Furthermore, the students in the White and Ranta study had received some explicit instruction from the teacher and had participated in group work in which their task was to resolve differences of opinion about which word (‘his’ or ‘her’) would be more appropriate to fill the blanks in picture description texts. That is, they had been trained to notice and explain their choice of ‘his’ or ‘her’


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and had been given some explicit ‘rules of thumb’ on which to base their choices. A similar observation was made by Han and Selinker (1999) who found that their adult subject ‘was able to verbalise only the rule she derived from the pedagogical input and not that from the L1 influence’ (p. 266). The apparent absence of metalinguistic awareness of the interlanguage rules that they use for adverb placement and questions may prevent students from noticing how their English sentences differ from those which are available in the teacher’s speech. We know that these features are difficult for francophone learners and that incorrect versions are often fossilised in the interlanguage of learners who are far more advanced than those who participated in this study. This suggests that they do indeed have difficulty in perceiving that what they are saying is not what the teacher is saying. Noticing may be promoted by giving students exposure to a variety of ways of hearing and seeing the language, ways which permit them to identify some of the grammatical building blocks, such as ‘is’ and ‘do’ that they have difficulty noticing in oral communicative interaction or even in reading when the focus is exclusively on meaning. The value of this exposure may be maximised if the task requires learners to focus their attention on form as well as (or in some cases, instead of) meaning. Such tasks could include versions of the input processing instruction developed by VanPatten (1996) or production activities which require students not only to understand the general meaning, but also to produce the features in question (Swain, 1985, 1995). In some instances, it may be necessary to draw the learners’ attention to the language through explicit instruction, including contrastive L1/L2 information. This may be especially true for students who share the same L1 and whose utterances are comprehensible to other students and thus serve as comprehensible input which may confirm each other’s interlanguage patterns (Lightbown, 1985). Several studies have shown that young L2 learners can benefit from instruction which includes some explicit metalinguistic information (Harley, 1998; Day & Shapson, 1991, Lyster, 1994; White, 1991; White et al., 1991). The emphasis in these studies was not on explicit contrastive information, but rather on the patterns and rules in the target language itself. In fact, to our knowledge, there are no studies in which young school-age learners have been presented with instruction based on explicit contrasts between the L1 and the L2 in communicative or content-based teaching. In a study with older school-age learners, Kupferberg and Olshtain (1996) compared the learning outcomes of Israeli high school students who were taught certain features of English using either a variety of communicative activities or a combination of communicative activities and explicit contrastive information about English and Hebrew. The results showed that the group who received the contrastive information performed better than those who did not. Other research which has examined the effects of providing contrastive information has been done almost exclusively with adult learners receiving traditional L2 instruction – e.g. grammar translation or some version of the audiolingual approach. This research has also reported benefits for instruction which include contrastive information. Sheen (1996) quotes Von Elek and Oskarsson (1973) in their comparative study of adult L2 learners claiming that explicit deductive instructional practices, including contrastive analysis, are ‘superior to the combination of techniques constituting the implicit method’


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(p. 201). Although many dispute such a claim even with adult learners (Krashen, 1982; Schwartz, 1993), it appears that this claim has not yet been tested with young L2 learners in communicative classrooms. In Birdsong’s (1989) review of the research on the role of negative evidence, which he characterises as ‘metalinguistic input par excellence‘ (p. 127), he concluded that:


the role of negative evidence in language acquisition depends, minimally, on the types of hypotheses entertained by the learner, the inherent usability of the evidence, the expertise of the learner in incorporating the evidence in to learning mechanisms, and the implied goals or benefits of the use of negative evidence. (p. 133) We may hypothesise that the impact of metalinguistic teaching for young L2 learners would also depend on these factors. An approach to L2 instruction which includes explicit contrastiveinformation might be seen by some as anachronistic and may immediately bring to mind behaviourist notions of learning, structure-based approaches to teaching and the fear that first language interference was ‘an unstoppable epidemic’ (James, 1996: 145). But as James points out, ‘… since [contrastive analysis] took on a cognitive complexion, where the learner is more in charge of his own learning destiny, … the structural and semantic relations between [L1 and L2] are now seen as appropriate objects for study’ (p. 145). It is important to note that contrastive information need not be presented in lengthy, teacher-fronted ‘grammar lessons’ which are isolated from ongoing communicative activities. Nor is it necessary for students to do extensive exercises practising the contrasted features in decontextualised sentences or memorising grammar rules. Explicit information contrasting the L1 and L2 can be presented briefly and visually, without the use of unfamiliar metalinguistic terminology which, in some situations, simply adds to the students’ learning tasks. It can also be made available to learners through specially prepared materials which help learners see the relationship between L1 and L2 patterns. For example, White (1998b) has developed activities which give students access to this kind of contrastive information through cooperative learning in group work. Information, once presented by the teacher or discovered in group work, can often be integrated into the ongoing communicative activities, in the form of a quick reminder of what has been presented. This would include the repetition plus recast technique used by the teacher in the Doughty and Varela (1998) study or the ‘elicitation’ technique described by Lyster and Ranta (1997). The goal of such instruction is to get the learners to notice the information which is available to them in the input. This may be the first step in changing the interlanguage rules which distinguish the learners’ language from the target language. The study reported here was not a test of the hypothesis that the inclusion of contrastive information will be more effective than instruction which excludes it. The empirical questions associated with this hypothesis are the subject of research we are currently carrying out. One thing is clear from the SLA research of the past 30 years: providing students with explicit information or feedback, including contrastive, metalinguistic information, does not lead to immediate long term changes in their interlanguage performance. Such changes usually

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come about gradually and depend in part on learners’ developmental readiness, the extent to which they attend to the information, and perhaps to the opportunities they have to practise. We also know that many aspects of second language acquisition will evolve with time and continued exposure to the target language, without explicit intervention by the teacher. It is those features which are common to all students with the same first language background and which do not impede comprehension which are most likely to benefit from – or indeed to require – explicit contrastive teaching and repeated feedback on error.


Acknowledgements The funding for this research was provided by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (FCAR) of Quebec. We are grateful to the teachers and students who generously agreed to participate in this research. Research assistants who were involved in collecting and tabulating the data include Christine Brassard, Patrick Burger, Laura Collins and Lucy Lightbown. Randall Halter helped with many aspects of the research, especially the quantitative analyses. We would like to thank Roy Lyster, Leila Ranta, Daphnée Simard and Joanna White who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Patsy M. Lightbown, TESL Centre, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 ([email protected]). Notes 1. Negative evidence is information provided to the learners about which sentences or features are not grammatical in the language they are learning. 2. In spoken Quebec French, there is another option – the insertion of the question marker -tu or -ti after the finite verb, for example, Il veut-tu venir chez moi? This form, which would be known to all children in Quebec, is not an example of inversion but rather of the addition of an invariant form which signals a question. 3. The distractor items were sentences with grammatical or ungrammatical use of verb tense and aspect and the possessive determiners ‘his’ and ‘her’. Like the target features, the distractors have been shown to be difficult for francophone learners of English (Collins, 1999; White, 1998a). Results for these features were not analysed for this paper. 4. The overall pattern of results shown in Tables 3, 4 and 5 is consistent. We did not do inferential statistics on either the adverb or the question results. It would have been inappropriate to do so because the number of items for each structure was small and uneven. 5. The White and Ranta study was conducted after the one reported here.

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