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- Title
THE ROLE OF EXPLICIT CONTRASTIVE INSTRUCTION IN LEARNING DIFFICULT L2 GRAMMATICAL FORMS: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE AWARNESS.
- Authors
Ghabanchi, Zargham; Vosooghi, Marjan
- Abstract
Most of the scholars in the fields of language learning and teaching assert that, when confronted with difficult grammatical forms, learners often conduct an L1 - L2 comparison and since this comparison is implicit, it may result in the formation of wrong rules due to an incomplete L2 knowledge. (Selinker, 1992; Robinson, 1995). Here, it was intended to evaluate one specific approach pertained to the findings of contrastive analysis referred to as contrastive instruction. It provides a kind of interlingual comparison on the basis of contrastive analysis database. Such an approach may facilitate the learning process especially if the structures are difficult with respect to the learners' L1. Here, an attempt was made to induce contrastive data in the classroom. Testing the null hypotheses (Ho) demanded an experimental research. The sample consisted of some 450 female high school students of Sabzevar. To do first, a validated proficiency test based on University Entrance Examinations (UEE) was given to some 145 pre-university students. Here, two structures; active/ passive voice and conditional sentences provided evidence for our supposed scale of difficulty. The supposed difficult forms were elaborated through the due contrastive instruction approach performed by two groups of high school teachers. Data collection was conducted via two controlled recognition and production, tasks administered during two subsequent post tests. The t-value needed for our selected significance level of 0.05 for the two-tailed t-test was 1.64. The result of this comparison revealed that the application of contrastive linguistic input (CLI) to Iranian EFL high school students would improve their status as to internalizing those mentioned difficult structures (Ho1). As to the mentioned subsidiary hypothesis (Ho2), we also cared for other factors such as 'maturation' or age. The intention was that ' maturation' might have a facilitative impact in the process of learning in this regard. We compared two groups from first and second grade students of high school and did the same task we carried out for the control and experimental groups in order to quest for the effect of the due factor; age. We had two groups of population; first and second grade students of high school. This aspect was also investigated on both recognition and production tasks. Again, an independent sample t-test was selected for the statistical measurements. The t- observed for these groups showed the predominance of the second over the first grade students just in recognition tasks. Here it implies that since the contrastive instruction input can strengthen the learners' meta-linguistic knowledge and due to their age, second grade students benefited much more than the first grade students concerning recognition tasks. While this is not the case for production tasks because in such sorts of tasks the learners need some other skills too.
- Subjects
TEACHING methods; FOREIGN language education; TEACHING; COMPARATIVE grammar education; LEARNING; LANGUAGE &; education
- Publication
Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal, 2006, Vol 6, Issue 2, p144
- ISSN
1533-242X
- Publication type
Article