The Role of Grammar in Programs Centered in Oral Proficiency

Abstract

This presentation reported the results of an investigation carried out in a Portuguese summer program in an immersion environment (School of Portuguese, Middlebury College, summer of 2004). The primary goal of the exploratory study was to gather information about the impact of grammar texts on the oral acquisition of the target language and program performance. The design of the exploratory study comprised two basic research groups: grammar-assigned vs. grammar-not-assigned (but available). The nature of the eight-week immersion program, i.e., the number of students enrolled and their levels of proficiency, made it impossible to comprise a true experimental design. Instead, four groups were studied: Beginners (no background either in Portuguese or another Romance language), Advanced Beginners (background in a Romance language), Intermediate and Advanced. The following measures were used in the study: a) Letter grades assigned by instructors in Grammar (Language), Pronunciation and Culture for all groups; b) Preand PostOPIs (Weeks 2 and 7); c) End-of-program questionnaire in which students were asked to rank the relevance of each activity of the program in terms of how influential on their learning they had been and indicate how much they had participated in or utilized each one; d) End-of-program brief interview and book-check to verify how many people had used the grammar text and filled in the exercises; e) Participant observation by the researcher throughout the program. Results of this study show that the use of a grammar text in immersion programs appears to be associated with better grades, greater gains in oral proficiency, and more homogeneous grades. The study confirms, albeit on a small scale, that providing a grammar text as a recom mended learning resource does not guarantee that all students will use it; however, some will. There is also compelling evidence that the level of acquisition of the student may be an intervening variable for grammar-text usage, and that students who use a grammar as a learning resource appear to value it highly. A few possibly intervening variables emerged in the study and deserve future attention. The first and more important one is students' language background. This leads to the core of the primary research question, i.e., whether metalanguage (speaking theoretically about the target language) is an effective learning resource for all. A review of the literature in teaching-learning consistently points out the benefits for the cognate-languages student of systematically establishing contrasts between the two from an early stage and at all levels, that is, phonol ogical, syntactic, and lexical. The results of the present study partially confirm this, as some of the most substantial gains and enthusiastic comments came from students with backgrounds in Spanish, who especially valued the contrast between languages offered in the grammar text. A second possible intervening variable is free-choice vs. teacher-imposition in the use of a grammar text. Because learning styles vary, it is possible that only students with a certain learning style benefit from using a grammar text. Although learning style was not controlled in this study, generally students who chose to use the grammar text did not do better or worse than