Geoff Jordan

2017-01-20

In Part One of this post, two different research paradigms were discussed and their major point of agreement - namely that implicit knowledge is ‘better’ than explicit knowledge - was highlighted. Part Two is a summary of the final sections of the review article by Whong et al. It looks at several published studied and argues that researchers should pay more attention to the question of “what” is learned, in terms of linguistic phenomenon. This kind of paradigm shift in research, which puts more focus on language complexity as much as it does language processes, could have serious implications for classroom practice.

Article

Whong, M., Gil, K., Marsden, H. (2014). Beyond paradigm: The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of classroom research. Second Language Research, 30(4), 551–568. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0267658314526749.

Linguistics and classroom research

The question of "what" was the intuition underlying the meta-analysis of Spada and Tomita (2010), which asks whether the effectiveness of type of instruction depends on type of language feature, making a distinction between ‘complex’ and ‘simple’ linguistic phenomena. It turned out that this distinction was faulty, and no connection between type of linguistic phenomenon and effectiveness of teaching was found. Spada and Tomita’s failure to properly define a complexity measure leads the authors of this article to suggest that more attention should be given to the generativists’ focus on understanding  SLA in terms of the properties of language itself. In Section 4 they explore “how the property-theoretic nature of the generative paradigm can provide the basis for exploring what should be taught”.

Two questions are explored: (1) the domains of language, such as functional morphology and syntax, and (2) questions of interaction between domains, for example, the interaction between phonology and semantics (e.g. the sentence You want this becomes a question if uttered with question intonation) or between discourse and syntax (rendering the non-canonical word order in Coffee, I like grammatical, if coffee is a discourse topic). The authors conclude that ease of acquisition of a given property appears to depend on the particular domain of language, or interface between domains and they then showcase two studies that aim to consider how such findings might be exploited in the language classroom.

First, a study by Toth and Guijarro-Fuentes (2013), which shows attention to linguistic properties and recognizes the importance of measuring implicit knowledge. The study asks whether L2 Spanish learners can develop implicit knowledge of the Spanish particle “se” if explicit instruction is given. Second, a study by Yusa et al. (2011) on the effect of instruction on implicit knowledge which used neuroimaging technology to focus on never inversion, whereby subject–auxiliary inversion is required when the negative adverb never is fronted for stylistic purposes, as in the example “Never will I eat Sushi.” Never inversion was chosen because it is rare in the input and not usually taught. Thus, Yusa et al. could be reasonably sure that their participants had had very little, if any, exposure to this structure prior to the study.

The authors welcome “the explicit challenge to the question of the relationship between explicit and implicit knowledge”. They note that while both studies show gains in implicit knowledge that come after learners are given explicit instruction, the same old conundrum looms: explicit instruction is always going to include positive input, so how do we know that explicit knowledge becomes implicit?  The authors argue that this methodological conundrum is all the more reason why researchers “should abstract away from their theory-dependent biases”.  It is possible, they argue, to make useful claims about the effectiveness of instruction on the development of both explicit and implicit knowledge which does not depend on questions of mental architecture, and to instead, focus on which aspects of language seem to benefit from instruction, in conjunction with how differing types of instruction compare.

Conclusion

Accepting the conclusion that the most successful language teaching is likely to include focused explicit instruction, the authors argue that researchers would do well to pay more careful attention to the nature of the linguistic property under investigation. “It is the nature of Generativist SLA as a property theory (Gregg, 2001) that may provide the most useful contribution to the existing agenda of classroom research”. Moreover, there are implications for pedagogy. Knowing that some aspects of language – like functional morphology – seem impervious to mastery, while others – like core word order properties – seem to be acquirable, could help a teacher decide how to approach different aspects of grammar, and what to expect from instruction. In sum, they argue for an approach to classroom research in which "what" is added to the question of "how" language develops.

The authors also argue that it is important for SLA researchers to avoid the instructed SLA bind so that type of instruction is not erroneously conflated with type of resulting knowledge. They prioritize the testing of implicit knowledge, but they acknowledge that isolating implicit knowledge is very difficult in terms of research methodology.