Abstract
This study attempted to find answers for the following questions: (1) Are students errors in grammatical structures, as they will appear in their written output, due to deficiency in their conscious grammar rules, or to deficiency in their abilities to transfer this knowledge (if it exists) to other language tasks such as writing compositions in English?, and (2) Can conscious rules of grammar guide students' performance in monitoring (self-correcting) their written output once their attention is drawn to an error?. The subjects of this study consisted of fifteen foreign students enrolled in the advanced level of the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. The instruments of this study were (1) questionnaire; (2) free composition; (3) unfocused correction and focused correction tasks; and (4) interviews. The results of this study demonstrate, among other things, that deficiency in the subjects knowledge of grammar results in accurate composition writing and unsuccessful correction of errors, even if their attention is drawn to their errors.
Highlights
Recent research in second language acquisition has been characterized by continuous efforts to construct theoretical models of learning and in so doing to explain the function of explicit, formally acquired knowledge of the target language (Brown, 2009)
In the unfocused correction task, he made thirteen morphosyntactic errors; eight of them were previously made in the essay and never corrected, and the other five errors were new
In the unfocused correction task; Subject (3) made four morphosyntactic errors; three of them were previously made in the essay and never corrected, and the fourth error was new
Summary
Recent research in second language acquisition has been characterized by continuous efforts to construct theoretical models of learning and in so doing to explain the function of explicit, formally acquired knowledge of the target language (Brown, 2009). In general (but not always), superior learning is seen in subjects whose attention researchers attempt to focus on the items during performance of a task using such devices as prior instructions to attend to both form and meaning (Hulstijn, 1989), showing them rules applied to examples in order to structure the input To conclude, reviewing the role of conscious knowledge of grammar in second language learning and L2 learners' performance has shown the following: (1) The issue of the relationship between conscious knowledge of grammar and the accuracy of the written production of advanced language learners is worth investigating This issue is of special importance to both second language pedagogy and theory. This study, is a modest contribution to the empirical research in applied linguistics
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