Specific Structures and L1 Development: Two Case Studies
PELIC is a rich source of data for investigating the development of specific structures in the IEP. Combining training in TESOL with teaching in the IEP at Pitt allows new teachers to gain both practical and research experience. In this section, we review two studies by former MA students who used PELIC to learn more both about the structures that they chose and track development of those structures in the IEP. In the section on articles, an experimental study conducted in the IEP is also reviewed.
Articles
Learners find the English article system particularly challenging due in part to conditioning from context and pragmatics and in spite of it being the most frequent word in the English language (e.g., Burton-Roberts, 1976; Hawkins, 1978; Huebner, 1983; Master, 1997). A great deal of research has focused on whether corrective feedback on articles in L2 English is useful or not (e.g., Bitchener, 2017; Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, & Takashima, 2008), with some researchers arguing against corrective feedback (Truscott, 2007). As stated earlier, IEP programs are expected to provide such assistance as reasonable given that articles are so frequent and mastery of the system is a key to clear writing. We will consider two studies in our IEP that relate directly to development and instruction of the English article system. Stehle (2009) tracked students’ development in article use over several semesters, and Wylie, Koedinger, and Mitamura (2009) carried out an instructional intervention in a CALL cognitive tutor with the IEP students.
Stehle’s (2009) work is an MA thesis carried out on the spoken data in the IEP. It is not appropriate to provide all the details of Stehle’s work here, but complete data and full details of the theoretical frameworks Stehle used can be accessed free of charge from the University of Pittsburgh electronic thesis web site. Stehle (2009) used Huebner’s theory of article use as a theoretical framework for her study. Huebner’s ‘semantic wheel’ divides article usage into four ‘quarters’ with the concepts of ‘±Specific Reference’ and ‘±Hearer Knowledge’. Generic NPs, in which all three articles can be used, are [+SR, ZHK], for example, The tiger is a fierce animal, A tiger is a fierce animal, and 0 Tigers are fierce animals, where o = null articles. In sentences such as The moon is bright tonight, (unique reference) is coded as [+SR, +HR], where the NP is specific and the speaker assumes the hearer knows about the NP being refereed to. Referential indefinites, for example, I am going to see a tiger at the zoo today, implies that I know that I am going to see a tiger, but that the hearer doesn’t know [+SF, ZHK]. Finally, non-referentials [ZSR, ZHK] usually require the indefinite article a, for example, This is a mistake.
Stehle also included the concept of count/non-count in her study, for example, This is 0/*a river-water (non-count); ‘The rivers are wide in the Pittsburgh (count).
Stehle (2009) intensively studied three Chinese-speaking and three Arabic-speaking learners over a period of three semesters. Chinese does not have articles (but does have equivalents of this and that), while Arabic only has a definite article. Her data came from the Recorded Speaking Activities described in more detail in Chapter 6. Overall, Stehle’s analysis confirmed the advantage seen for definite article use with these three learners (see Section 5.3 for Schepps’ [2014] study that confirms this with more students). However, the Chinese learners are a little better at indefinites and use them more accurately (in terms of percentage). Stehle proposes different stages of acquisition for the learners based on LI influence. For example, although at stage 1, both groups of learners use the with specific reference and 0 with [DSR], at stage 2, the Chinese learners begin to master indefinite articles for [ZSR], while the Arabic speakers are more accurate with the for [+SR, +HK] and are not as accurate with indefinites until later.
Stehle suggests that in teaching, instructional focus on the Chinese speakers’ overuse of the with proper nouns would be helpful. For learners whose LI does not have an indefinite article, practice with examples based on specific reference and hearer knowledge could be helpful. As would be expected in a communicative curriculum, instruction with realistic discourse contexts is very important.
In contrast to Stehle’s detailed qualitative analysis of the data, Wylie et al. (2009) carried out an experimental intervention with Pitt IEP students using a cognitive tutor. A cognitive tutor is a software package that guides learners through problems and examples in order to teach them the content. Learning scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have been particularly successful in teaching mathematics (e.g., Ritter, Anderson, Koedinger, & Corbett, 2007). In such tutors, hints about the how to solve problems have been a particular focus of research, as well as asking students to ‘self-explain’ why certain solutions are better.
Wylie et al. (2009) focused on ‘self-explanation’ of English articles in their study. In research on learning science and mathematics, the authors note that learning gains had been observed for students who were prompted to ‘self-explain’. Self-explanation is defined as ‘asking students to speak aloud as they study and counting any utterance beyond paraphrasing material as a possible self-explanation’ (https://learnlab. org/research/wiki/Self-explanation). In the case of a cognitive tutor with English articles, self-explanation was operationalized as students being asked to justify their answers through a pull-down menu or writing in their own explanation. The full details of the tutor, along with screen shots, are published in the research paper, which is available online free of charge. Sixty-one IEP students took part in the training with the
Grammatical Development in an I EP 159 tutor. Students took part in one of three conditions: pull-down menu ‘self-explanation’, free writing in self-explanation, and a control condition with no self-explanation. Results showed that all groups benefitted from using the tutor: instruction was effective. However, the results also showed that the time taken for the students to ‘self-explain’ did not lead to higher learning gains. Article use is abstract, complex, and varies pragmatically (that is, it relies on assumptions about hearer knowledge.) The authors conclude that more practice without explanation could be better for probabilistic types of grammar knowledge:
It appears that for procedures that are difficult to explain (i.e., those for determining which article to use), receiving more practice opportunities with less reflective instructional practice (i.e., 3 times as many items in the no self-explanation condition) is better than fewer opportunities but more reflection per item.
(Wylie et al., 2009, p. 1305)
Development of Passive in the Intensive English Program
In very general terms, the passive voice in English is used to foreground the undergoer in an event in order to focus on that particular participant in the event rather than the causer or doer. Thus, The cat scratched the dog can be put into the passive voice as The dog was scratched by the cat. However, not all verbs permit the use of passive voice, and a large body of literature exists on common errors with passive and a subtype of intransitive verb (Oshita, 2001; Zobl, 1989). These errors persist even in very advanced writers and speakers, for example, the following was printed in Soekkha (1997, p. 112) * ‘The A-310 AIRBUS air-accident was happened during a period of important changes inside of TAROM company the national carrier’ Such errors are also now addressed in ESL grammar textbooks for teachers (Lock, 1996, p. 90).
In addition, Spinner (2011, p. 553) indicates that in the speaking data from our IEP, the passive voice was one of the last structures to emerge in production, but it was not clear whether sufficient contexts existed for passive to be produced. In other words, Spinner suggests that passive is a structure that learners use only later in their speaking, even if they have been taught the structure.
Due to this late emergence and documented set of errors with passive, Adler (2012) examined a subset of PELIC data to look into any developmental patterns with the passive. Adler chose to focus on Arabic and Korean speakers in her analysis and used both written and spoken data from PELIC. Adler selected six Arabic-speaking students and six Korean-speaking students (three males and three females in each case) for her analysis. (Passive is reviewed in Level 4 [used insimple past and present only] and in Level 5 in more depth [all tenses, modals, stative passives, and ‘reporting passives’]). Adler’s study found relatively few errors with the passive voice - in part because in Level 3, they did not produce passive. This finding is consistent with Spinner (2011). In addition, she found no errors at all with over-passivization of intransitive verbs like die or happen. In some cases, the use of passive seemed to indicate some ‘chunking’ such as is/was located. Such uses occur a great deal as a lexical chunk and may not even be a ‘passive’ at all, and, of course, was born is technically a passive but does not function as such. Adler confirmed that use of passive increases from Level 3 to Level 5 and even more in Level 5. This result might be expected in writing due to more elaborate topics in writing, but it is striking that the six Arabic learners produced 0 passives in Level 3 speaking, 14 in Level 4, and 30 in Level 5. There was also some individual variation in that in writing one learner produced only 4 passives, whereas another learner produced 50. The main error for all learners was incorrectly omitting the passive auxiliary be, using it more with emotional content, and chunking. Both groups of learners exhibited similar learning profiles. Adler’s study confirms Spinner’s (2011) study in that learners are not producing passive at lower levels of proficiency in either speaking or writing. Many of Adler’s examples actually come from Level 5 grammar exercises.
Adler notes that Xiao, McEnery, and Qian (2006) compared English and Chinese use of passive. It may be the case that other languages use fewer passive constructions, which in turn affects the use of the structure in the L2. Hinkel (2004) reported that expert users of English used far more passive that the learners in her data and recommends a focus on the form and use of passive and active sentences. This argument has been made for the difference in production of other structures, for example, relative clauses (Kamimoto, Shimura, & Kellerman, 1992). Thus, it may not necessarily be the case that learners are avoiding grammar points due to structural difficulty but rather the form-function uses in LI and L2 English may vary and these pairings are yet to be acquired.
