Instruction and L2 Acquisition

Instruction and L2 Acquisition

Form-focused instruction

Traditionally, language pedagogy has emphasized form-focused instruction. More recently, however, language pedagogy has emphasized the need to provide learners with real communicative experiences. Communicative Language Teaching is premised on the assumption that learners do not need to be taught grammar before they can communicate but will acquire it naturally as part of the process of learning to communicate. In some versions of Communicative Language Teaching, then, there is no place at all for the direct teaching grammar.

Teresa Lea stated that the effects of instruction may depend on the target structure that is being taught. If the structure is formally simple and manifests a straightforward form-function relationship instruction may lead to improved accuracy. If the structure is formally simple and salient but is functionally fairly complex instruction may help learners to learn the form but not its use so learners end up making a lot of mistakes and errors

There are, in fact, strong theoretical grounds for believing that instruction will not have any long-lasting effect on the way in which learners construct their interlanguage system. This claim can be tested by investigating whether instruction has any effect on the sequence of acquisition of particular grammatical structures. Another way of testing the claim is by designing instructional experiments to see if teaching a particular structure results in its acquisition.

Learner-instruction matching

A distinct possibility, however, is that the same instructional option is not equally effective for all L2 learners. Individual differences to do with such factors as learning style and language aptitude are likely to influence which options work best.

It is obviously important to take individual differences into account when investigating the effects of instruction. For example, even if it is eventually shown that input-based instruction works better overall than production-based instruction, it does not follow that this will be true for all learners.

Strategy training

Teaching learners specific grammatical structures constitutes an attempt to intervene directly in interlanguage development. An alternative approach is to intervene more indirectly by identifying strategies that are likely to promote acquisition and providing training in them.

The idea of strategy training is attractive because it provides a way of helping learners to become autonomous. The main problems is that not enough is known about which strategies and which combinations of strategies work best for L2 acquisition.