The effects of written input on young EFL learners’ oral output

Abstract

The present paper explores whether the incentive of written input affects oral language development of young learners of English in a minimal input situation. After an eight-week instruction period with both written and oral input in the experimental group and just oral input in the control group, data were obtained by means of an oral test consisting of question and answer, picture description and L1 translation tasks. The effects on the learners’ oral output were measured with respect to the number of target words, semanticpragmatic appropriateness, syntactic acceptability and L1 translation. The experimental group shows higher scores in all variables tested and a number of significant differences emerge with respect to the control group. These results are in line with studies conducted with other learner populations which suggest that students should write to learn and indicate that young learners’ oral proficiency is benefitted from integrating written language with oral production.