Week 8 Class Summary & Reflection

Doughty, C. (1991). Second language instruction does make a difference: Evience from an empirical study of SL relativization. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 431-469.

** Catherine J. Doughty is Associate Research Director for SLA at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland and affiliate faculty in the Department of Second Language Acquisition and Application at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Week 8 Summary & Reflection:
This week, we discussed a study conducted by Catherine Doughty (1991) and implications for L2 teaching and learning.

Quasi-experimental Studies
The concept of "quasi-experiment" was first brought up since it iscrucial in understanding Doughty's study. As discussed in class onTuesday, a quasi-experiment is one of the quantitative research designs which often convert what the learners perform (e.g., via tests)into numbers. This is to compare how much the learners knew beforereceiving any treatment (or instruction) and how much they improved after receiving the treatment.

From my own further research on "quasi-experimental studies", I learned that the word "quasi" means "as if" or "almost" in Latin, which means a quasi-experiment has some but not all of the characteristics of a true experiments. It is similar to true experiments to some degree, such as having subjects, treatments, pre-& post-tests, etc. However, the missing element is random assignmentof subjects from a wider population to the control and experimental conditions. "The sampling is always non-random because intact classes or volunteers are called to participate in the study, not truly random members of whatever the "population" is thought to be. That is, we use convenience samples, rather than random samples. But then we assignment randomly to each treatment" (from Dr. Ortega's email, October 16, 07).

Dougthy's Research Design
Having said that, we discussed important processes of Dougthy's quasi-experimental study, including participants, tests, treatments,results, and interpretation.

Participants:
Doughty examined whether particular aspects of relative clauses would benefit from instruction. Twenty adult university students of ESL were divided into three groups: two experimental and one control. All groups received exposure to relative clauses over a period of ten days through computer-delivered reading lessons. During these lessons, all learners were asked to read a series of passages from "Sophie's Dilemma" and answer comprehension questions which focused on reading skills.

Treatments:
While the control group simply read the passages containing relative clauses and answered comprehension questions, for the experimental groups, two instructions were added. One experimental group received instruction which focused on rules for constructing relative clauses. Another experimental group received instruction which clarified the meaning of the relative clauses, such as vocabulary assistance. All learners were pre-tested before receiving the instructional treatment and post-tested after ten days of the instruction in relative clauses.

Results:
The results clearly illustrated that both experimental groups, who received either implicit or explicit explanations on relative clause formation, had an advantage compared to the control group. The experimental groups outperformed the control group on post-test. As the study title indicates, Doughty concluded that instruction on relative clauses made a difference. Yet, we have to understand that the instruction worked because it was given at a time when the learners were developmentally ready to acquire relative clauses. Please note that Doughty made sure her learners were ready to learn relative clauses based on their performance on placement tests.

Teachability of Particular Forms
There are more research findings in relation to teachability of particular forms in L2. Researchers who are associated with "teach what is teachable" perspective believe that certain features of a language (e.g., negation, word order) are acquired in a particular sequence, and some grammatical features develop according to the learners' natural developmental process. From his research findings on L2 German learners, Pienemann (1988) claims that learners cannot acquire what they are not developmentally ready to learn. Two groups of Australian university students who were at stage 2 in their acquisition of German word order were taught the rules at stage 3 and stage 4, respectively. The results showed that the learners who received instruction on stage 3 rules moved successfully into stage 3 from stage 2. However, those learners who received instruction on stage 4 rules did not move into stage 3. Any instruction to teach "stage 4 word order patterns" to learners at "stage 2" did not work because they have to go through "stage 3" to get to "stage 4" before they are ready to acquire what is at "stage 4". Please read Pienemann, M (1988). Determining the influence of instruction on L2 speech processing. AILA Review 5(1), 40-72.

How do we know our students are ready to move on? Finding out whether our students are developmentally ready to learn a certain rule will be a challenge for all teachers. However, I personally believe that teachers' constant observations, dialogues with students, and ongoing evaluations will offer some insights.

Acquisition and Comprehension
Another interesting observation from Doughty's findings is the gap between how much the learners acquired and how much they comprehended. Although both experimental groups were equally successful in acquiring relative clauses, they performed differently on comprehension test. For example, the experimental group who received rule-based instruction comprehended less than the experimental group with meaning-oriented instruction. One possible reason would be that the former became distracted by dealing with the story and learning grammar at the same time.

Given this interesting result, we learn that acquisition and comprehension are two different learning processes. Even if the learner comprehended a lot, she or he may not have acquired the grammatical form being taught. One example would be Wes who had no problem understanding native speakers' conversations, but has not developed a good command of English grammar. Teachers and researchers should not hastily conclude that the learners acquired a certain aspect of L2 on the basis of their comprehension ability. They should measure both whether they comprehended and acquired. In addition to that, I believe we should also make sure whether the learners can produce the learned grammatical forms in the natural speech, moving beyond the simple oral excercises. Although the learners could produce more advanced forms on tests or in very restricted excercises immediately after instruction, their ability to integrate what they learned into simultaneous conversations will be limited.

Finally, in order to facilitate the learners' SLA process, it would be helpful to utilize visual aid so that they can pay attention to how grammatical rules are operated and constructed in sentence levels. It would be also helpful to encourage the learners to "notice" the grammatical element being taught by asking what they think happened in the text.