Grammar Task Research Articles

Do Learners Collaborate During Task Performance

The research based on sociocultural theory suggests that studying learner interaction during task performance will provide a window for understanding the cognitive processes that are involved in acquiring a second language. The study reported here investigated the extent to which pairs of learners collaborated in performing rule-discovery grammar tasks. It took into account the proportion of contribution each learner made to the task and the type of scaffolded assistance they provided each other. The findings indicate that learners do generally collaborate while performing tasks, often sharing talk equally and with little indication of a dominant partner. The interaction between the learners of all pairs investigated in the study displayed evidence of scaffolding in various forms, indicating that they generally approached the tasks with a mutual, collaborative orientation. Learners adopted the roles of experts and novices, which were at times interchangeable, and helped each other to arrive at a shared solution.

Consciousness-raising and practice in ELT coursebooks

Most general ELT coursebooks currently include grammar tasks, suggesting a common view in ELT that learners bene>t from form-focused tasks to improve their L2 accuracy. To investigate the nature of such tasks, we developed a framework of consciousness-raising and practice task types, applied it to nine contemporary ELT coursebooks, and thus identi>ed a number of current trends. Despite notable di=erences among the nine coursebooks, each one is essentially based on a Presentation-Practice approach to grammar teaching. Both inductive and deductive approaches are seen in the presentation stages, followed by two types of practising task. There is little evidence to date of focused communication tasks. These >ndings are discussed, and should be useful for teachers wishing to evaluate their own selection of grammar tasks and coursebooks.

An investigation of Grade 5 children's knowledge of the doubling rule in spelling

The goal of this study was to investigate Grade 5 children's knowledge of a common word pattern in English, to double the final consonant of a one‐syllable word when adding –ed. Significant correlations were found between –ed spelling and general spelling ability, as well as correct pronunciation of –ed words in isolated word reading and spelling. The correlation between –ed spelling and –ed word reading (r=0.31) is lower than one would expect to find in general spelling and reading ability. Individual interviews were conducted to assess children's explicit awareness of the doubling rule, followed by a measure of consistency in spelling a selected number of –ed words. Performance on an artificial grammar task indicated a correlation between implicit learning of nonsense letter strings and spelling ability. Overall results point to the unstable nature of children's knowledge of the doubling rule. Implications for instruction are discussed.

A comprehensive study of task-specific adaptation of speech recognition models

Most published adaptation research focuses on speaker adaptation, and on adaptation for noisy channels and background environments. In this paper, we present a study of task adaptation, where the speech recognition models are adapted to a specific application or task, giving significant performance gains. We explore several new questions about adaptation which have not been studied before, and present novel solutions to these problems. For example, we show that adaptation can result in increased out-of-grammar error rates. We present an automatic confidence score mapping algorithm to correct this problem. We show that grammar-dependent acoustic adaptation gives improved performance. In addition, we show that in-grammar acoustic adaptation gives significantly better results. We study acoustic and grammar task adaptation, and show that the gains are additive. Finally we show that adaptation improves both accuracy and speed, where traditional studies have been more focused on accuracy alone. We also study traditional adaptation modes such as supervised and unsupervised adaptation, the use of confidence thresholds for unsupervised adaptation, and the effect of the amount of data on task adaptation.

The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects’ liking ratings (a “structural mere exposure effect”) in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.

The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process.

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects' liking ratings (a "structural mere exposure effect") in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.

Preserved Implicit Learning on Both the Serial Reaction Time Task and Artificial Grammar in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

Thirteen nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were compared with age-matched controls on two standard tests of implicit learning. A verbal version of the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task was used to assess sequence learning and an artificial grammar (AG) task assessed perceptual learning. It was predicted that PD patients would show implicit learning on the AG task but not the SRT task, as motor sequence learning is thought to be reliant on the basal ganglia, which is damaged in PD. Patients with PD demonstrated implicit learning on both tasks. In light of these unexpected results the research on SRT learning in PD is reconsidered, and some possible explanations for the sometimes conflicting results of PD patient samples on the SRT task are considered. Four factors which merit further study in this regard are the degree to which the SRT task relies on overt motor responses, the effects of frontal lobe dysfunction upon implicit sequence learning, the effects of cerebellar degeneration, and the degree to which the illness itself has advanced.

Comparing Second Language Learners' Attention to Form Across Tasks

Recent literature on second language grammar pedagogy promotes the use of tasks which require learners to produce output collaboratively (e.g. Kowal & Swain, 1994; Swain & Lapkin, 1997). Yet there are relatively few studies which have investigated the nature of learners' attention to grammar on such tasks, nor how performance on such tasks compares to performance on more 'traditional' grammar tasks. This paper reports on a small-scale study which set out to compare the performance of adult ESL learners of intermediate second language proficiency on four tasks: multiple choice, rational deletion (cloze), text reconstruction and composition. Each task was completed collaboratively. The data collected included student pair talk on the collaborative tasks, individual student retrospections and the researcher's observations notes. Data from the collaborative tasks were analysed for the quantity and nature of attention to grammatical choices each task generated. Learner attention to grammatical forms varied in quantitative terms across tasks and within task types. Furthermore, there were variations in the amount of articulated reflection on grammatical choices, with the least found in the cloze task and the most in the text reconstruction task.

Plasticity in language and music acquisition in infancy

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5–8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared with rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two nonlinguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing nonlanguage control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, the results of this study provide additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music and warrant future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.

Consciousness Raising and Noticing through Focus on Form: Grammar Task Performance versus Formal Instruction

Consciousness Raising and Noticing through Focus on Form: Grammar Task Performance versus Formal Instruction

Communicating about Grammar: A Task-Based Approach

Providing learners with grammar problems they must solve interactively integrates grammar instruction with opportunities for meaningful communication. This article reports the results of an exploratory study of the use of a communicative, grammar-based task in the college EFL classroom. The two research questions addressed are whether the task successfully promoted L2 linguistic knowledge of a specific grammar point and whether it produced the kind of negotiated interaction which has been assumed to facilitate L2 acquisition. The limited results of this investigation suggest that the grammar task encouraged communication about grammar and enabled EFL learners to increase their knowledge of a difficult L2 rule.

Some Criteria for the Development of Communicative Grammar Tasks

communicative curriculum has sometimes been accompanied by a devaluation of grammar as one of the organizing principles in commercially available language-learning materials. Moreover, one cannot always assume that students at higher secondary-school level or in tertiary education institutions have an adequate grasp of English grammar, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for efficient and effective communication at these levels of language use. Second, the article provides a working definition of grammar. From the above perspectives, the third section focuses on some of the criteria of communicative grammar-learning tasks and on the implications for the design and implementation of these tasks within the communicative curriculum.

Speech Defects and Related Oral Anomalies

Syntax is habitually named as what sets human language apart from other communication systems, but how did it evolve? Comparative research on animal behaviour has contributed in important ways, with mainly three sets of data. First, animals have been subjected to artificial grammar tasks, based on the hypothesis that human syntax has evolved through advanced computational capacity. In these experiments humans generally outperform animals, but there are questions about validity, as experimental stimuli are (deliberately) kept devoid of semantic content. Second, animal communication has been compared in terms of the surface structures with the aim of developing a typology of animal syntax, based on the hypothesis that syntax is an evolutionary solution to the constraints of small signal repertoires. A wide range of combinatorial phenomena has been described, mainly in nonhuman primates, but there is little support for the hypothesis that syntax has emerged due to repertoire size constraints. A third way of studying the evolution of syntax is to compare how animals perceive and communicate about external events, the mental deep structure of syntax. Human syntax is closely aligned with how we perceive events in terms of agency, action and patience, each with subsidiary functions. The event perception hypothesis has been least explored in animals and requires a serious research programme.

THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR EXERCISES IN HYBRID TEACHING

In modern times hybrid education which is widely developing not only abroad, but also in our country is a type of education that allows students to communicate with the teacher both in the classroom and through virtual networks. In the article general information about hybrid education and the role of grammar exercises in learning a foreign language were analyzed and an experimental analysis of grammar tasks was carried out.