The Effectiveness of Computer‐Assisted Metalinguistic Instruction: A Case Study in Japanese

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines the effectiveness of computer‐assisted metalinguistic instruction for teaching complex grammatical structures such as Japanese particles. Fourteen students enrolled in second‐year Japanese at the university level participated in the study. First, a particle test was administered. The result suggested that the students employ two main strategies to assign a particle in a sentence: one is to follow metalinguistic rules and the other is to rely on English translations. Next, the students were divided into two groups. One group performed particle exercises on a computer programmed to provide metalinguistic feedback (i.e., detailed explanations about grammatical and semantic functions of the particles). The other group did the same exercises on a computer, but the computer program provided translation feedback (i.e., English LI translations of Japanese particles) rather than linguistic rules. The result was that the metalinguistic feedback group performed significantly better on an achievement test than the translation feedback group. The study suggests that computers' ongoing metalinguistic feedback can lead learners to perform significantly better than translation feedback in using complex grammatical structures, and that it does so by increasing the student's tendency to actually use such metalinguistic information in production of the target language.