do they know what they're doing? l2 learners' awareness of l1 influence

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Do They Know WhatThey're Doing? L2 Learners'Awareness of L1 InfluencePatsy M. Lightbown & Nina SpadaPublished online: 29 Mar 2010.

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Do They Know What They’re Doing? L2Learners’ Awareness of L1 Influence

Patsy M. LightbownTESL Centre, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal,Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8

Nina SpadaModern Language Centre, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West,Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6

In this paper we report on the extent to which learnerscan make explicit L1 rules whichappear to influence their L2 performance. The learners were 11–12-year-oldfrancophone students learning English in intensive communicative ESL classes inQuebec. In previous research we had found that their knowledge and use of Englishquestions and adverbs, while systematic, was not target-like. In question forms, thepattern in their interlanguage reflected the French constraint which allowssubject-auxiliary inversion with pronouns and prohibits it with nouns. Regardingadverb placement, students accepted sentences with both SAVO (ungrammatical inFrench) and SVAO (grammatical in French but ungrammatical in English). In thisstudy, students from the same population were asked to judge the grammaticality ofsentences and to explain their judgements. The results confirmed the patterns previ-ously observed. That is, students’ performance on adverbs and questions showed clearinfluence of transfer from French. However, there was no evidence that students wereaware of how their intuitions about L1 grammaticalityinfluenced their L2 judgements.It is suggested that researchis needed to explore the potential effectivenessof drawinglearners’ attention to these L1 influences. Such research is needed particularly withyoung learners in communicative L2 learning contexts.

Second language (L2) acquisition research has confirmed that certain character-istics of learners’ knowledge and use of the L2 are typical of learners, regardlessof their first language (L1). However, there is also ample evidence thatinterlanguages reflect the influence of previously learned languages. In thispaper, we report on a study of the extent to which young school-age learners ofL2 English showed awareness of word order rules from their L1 which appearedto influence both their production of L2 sentences and their judgements of L2grammaticality.

The influence of L1 on developing interlanguages is not straightforward, andit can be manifested in a variety of ways (see Odlin (1990) for review).Researchers have identified L1 influence in learners’ errors (Odlin, 1996;Selinker, 1969). It has also been observed that learners are sometimes reluctant toattempt certain L2 features which are very distant from comparable L1 features(Schachter, 1974). On grammaticality judgement tasks, learners have beenobserved to accept ungrammatical sentences which resemble the interlanguagesentences which they, and other learners with the same L1, produce in spontane-ous speech (White, 1991; Schachter et al., 1976). In addition, learners sometimesreject grammatical L2 sentences which do not correspond to related sentences in

0965-8416/00/04 0198-20 $16.00/0 © 2000 P.M. Lightbown and N. SpadaLANGUAGE AWARENESS Vol. 9, No. 4, 2000

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L2 Learners’ Awareness of L1 Influence

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their interlanguage (Spada & Lightbown, 1999). L1 has also been observed toinfluence the rate and pattern of L2 learners’ progress through developmentalstages, causing learners to linger longer in developmental stages where theinterlanguage sentences resemble their L1 (Selinker & Lakshmanan, 1992;Wode,1976; Zobl, 1980a, 1980b). Learners have also been observed to reject correct L2words and grammatical features which resemble cognate words and features inthe L1, suggesting that learners have a sense of what is and what is not transfer-able from one language to another (Kellerman, 1983; Lightbown & Libben, 1984).Selinker and Lakshmanan (1992) and Han and Selinker (1999) have proposedthat L1 influence is almost always involved in the fossilisation of errors.

Most of the work on L1 influence has been done with adult learners, and somehave even claimed that children acquire L2 without reference to their L1 (Dulay& Burt, 1974a, b). Although there is good evidence that young simultaneousbilinguals are able to speak multiple languages without confusing them(Genesee et al., 1995), young learners with limited L2 proficiency, especiallythose whose exposure to the L2 is restricted to classroom interaction, have beenobserved to draw on L1 knowledge in trying to create novel L2 sentences whenthe demands of the communicative situation go beyond what they have learnedin class (Ervin-Tripp, 1974; Harley & Swain, 1984; Lightbown, 1980, 1991;Selinker et al., 1975).

Most of the research on the impact of learners’ metalinguistic awareness oftheir L2 acquisition has also been restricted to adult or older adolescent learners(e.g. Birdsong, 1989; Green & Hecht, 1992; Bialystok & Fröhlich, 1978). This ispartly related to the assumption that younger learners do not have sufficientlywell-developed metalinguistic awareness to reflect on their L2. However, youn-ger learners do seem to have metalinguistic awareness of some features. This isevident in the numerous studies of L1 metalinguistic awareness, especially as itrelates to the development of literacy (see Dickinson et al., 1989). In Europe, thereis a long tradition of work in the area of ‘language awareness’, exploring chil-dren’s ability to reflect on their L1 knowledge and its role in second languagelearning in guided oral interactions (Bailly, 1998; Bengtsson, 1980; Hawkins,1984; Redard, 1977). While L1 learners vary in both the rate of development ofmetalinguistic awareness and the level of awareness which they ultimatelyattain (Gleitman & Gleitman, 1970; Gleitman et al., 1972), there is evidence thatchildren as young as five reliably recognise violations of word order rules. Evenyounger children are known to be sensitive to word order errors (e.g. Hakes,1980; de Villiers & de Villiers, 1972, 1974). Thus, in assessing the metalinguisticawareness of young L2 learners, it is important to choose features which mostyoung children are known to be able to recognise in their L1. Word order, thefocus of the present study, is such a feature.

BackgroundThis study arises from previous research with francophone students in

communicative, intensive ESL classes. Students in these classes spend fivemonths in intensive ESL and five months during which they cover the regularGrade 6 curriculum in French (see Lightbown & Spada, 1994, 1997). The modelon which their ESL classes are based is a strong version of communicative

L2 Learners’ Awareness of L1 Influence 199D

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language teaching in which the emphasis is on meaning rather than form and inwhich explicit metalinguistic instruction is virtually excluded. One kind ofexplicit instruction which teachers in these classes particularly avoid is thecomparison of English and French. They are convinced that it is neither neces-sary nor desirable to use French in the English class. In addition, they have astrong commitment to the belief that students will acquire English incidentally ifthey are exposed to a substantial amount of comprehensible input and givenopportunities to use English in communicative interaction. Activities in theseclassrooms almost always involve oral interaction. Students sometimes engagein reading and writing activities for small projects or the creation of plays forpresentation to the class, but there is little or no emphasis on analytic activitiesusing the written language.

In our previous research, we found that young francophone students in inten-sive ESL classes produced, and accepted as grammatical, English sentenceswhich reflect the word order of French, their L1, rather than or in addition tothose which conform to the word order of English. The word order featuresanalysed in this study are the placement of adverbs in simple sentences andsubject-auxiliary inversion in questions.

Adverb placementWhite (1991) showed that the francophone students in intensive ESL classes

produced and accepted sentences in which the placement of adverbs conformedto the rules of French instead of or in addition to sentences conforming to therules for adverb placement in English. Their performance on a grammaticalityjudgement task included acceptance of English sentences in which adverbs ofmanner and frequency were placed between verb and object (SVAO), a positionwhich French allows but English does not, as well as sentences with the adverbbetween subject and verb (SAVO), a position allowed by English but not byFrench.

* Mary reads carefully newspapers. (SVAO)

Marie lit attentivement des journaux. (SVAO)

Mary carefully reads newspapers. (SAVO)

* Marie attentivement lit des journaux. (SAVO)

White hypothesised that it would be relatively easy for the students to learn,simply through exposure to grammatical sentences in English (‘positiveevidence’), that English allows SAVO, even though French does not. However,she further hypothesised that students would require ‘negative evidence1‘ to getrid of the French SVAO structure.

In this experimental study, White introduced an instructional module inwhich students were explicitly taught that, in English, SVAO is not grammatical.Students also had opportunities to hear sentences containing the grammaticalSAVO pattern. During the intervention, which occupied a maximum of seventeaching hours spread over a period of two weeks, students participated in activ-ities in which the use of adverbs was contextualised. They were induced toproduce sentences with adverbs and they received feedback on their adverb

200 Language AwarenessD

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placement errors. Immediately following the instruction and error feedback,students showed that they had learned to accept SAVO and reject SVAO, and thisawareness was still present five weeks later. On a follow-up test, however, afterthese students had completed a year of one or two hours per week of ESL, with-out explicit instruction on adverb placement, students were accepting SVAOsentences at rates similar to those observed before the targeted instruction andfeedback. This lack of long-term effect could be attributed either to the brevity ofthe instructional intervention, or to the subsequent absence of the target featurein the classroom input (and thus, the absence of opportunities for relevant input,practice or feedback on error). However, as White had predicted, the studentscontinued to accept as grammatical the SAVO pattern which they had learnedduring the intervention.

White’s hypotheses about the need for negative evidence to help learnersreject interlanguage features which resembled their L1 were further tested in afollow-up study. In this study, a similar group of learners received only an ‘inputflood’ of positive evidence – correct examples of adverb placement – in stories,games, and poems, etc. over a two-week period (Trahey & White, 1993). Noexplicit instruction or corrective feedback was provided. As in the original study,on the immediate post-tests, students showed that they had come to acceptSAVO, and they continued to do so on a delayed posttest. However, in contrast tothe original study, students in the input flood condition never decreased the rateat which they accepted ungrammatical SVAO sentences. The results of theadverb placement studies suggest that the L1-influenced interlanguage rulewhich allows SVAO could not be expunged in the absence of explicit instructionand error feedback.

Question formationIn another study, White et al. (1991) found that young French L1 learners in

intensive ESL produced and accepted questions which conformed to word orderrules typical of spoken French as well as those which corresponded to Englishword order rules. For example, many students produced and accepted questionswithout subject-auxiliary inversion (Why fish can live in water?/Pourquoi lespoissons peuvent vivre dans l’eau?) as well as those with inversion (Where are yougoing?). In an experimental study, students were explicitly taught that Englishquestions require inversion and teachers gave feedback on word order errors instudents’ questions. White et al. found that students who received the explicitinstruction and feedback on error had a higher rate of accuracy at the end of thestudy than a comparison group which did not have this type of instruction.

The White et al. study focused on the accuracy of students’ questions. In asubsequent study, Spada and Lightbown (1999) explored how instruction mighthelp students move along a developmental continuum of interlanguage stages inthe acquisition of English questions. The principal research question which arosefrom Pienemann’s (1985, 1988) teachability hypothesis was: ‘Is instruction whichis targeted to the next stage in the L2 learner’s development more effective thaninstruction which targets a more advanced stage?’ The developmental sequenceon which the study was based was adapted from the framework for the acquisi-tion of English which was proposed by Pienemann et al. (1988). The predictedsequence of question development is shown in Figure 1.


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Instruction in the Spada and Lightbown (1999) study was in the form of atargeted input flood. That is, students had high frequency exposure to correctEnglish questions in a variety of classroom activities – games, surveys, projects,questionnaires, etc. The emphasis in almost all the activities was on comprehen-sion and students were rarely called upon to produce novel or spontaneousquestions in those tasks. No explicit metalinguistic teaching was done and whenlearners did produce questions, teachers usually responded to the meaningrather than the form of the question as long as the student’s meaning was clear.The intervention lasted for two weeks, near the end of the students’ five-monthintensive ESL course. During the intervention, students were exposed to eight

202 Language Awareness

STAGE 1Single words or fragments

A spot on the dog?A ball or a shoe?

STAGE 2SVO with rising intonation

A boy throw the ball?Two children ride a bicycle?

STAGE 3*Fronting

Do-frontingDo the boy is beside the bus?Do you have three astronaut?

Wh-frontingWhat the boy is throwing?Where the children are standing?

Other frontingIs the boy is beside the bus?

STAGE 4Wh- with copula BE

Where is the ball?Where is the space ship?

Yes/No questions with aux inversionIs the boy beside the garbage can?Is there a dog on the bus?

STAGE 5Wh- with auxiliary second

What is the boy throwing?How do you say ‘lancer’?

Figure 1 Developmentalstages in English questions (adapted fromPienemann et al. 1988)* Stage 3 questions can be grammatical or ungrammatical. They are categorized by their wordorder, not their grammaticality or ungrammaticality.

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hours of high frequency input of questions. These questions were drawn primar-ily from stages 4 and 5 on the Pienemann et al. sequence.

On an oral production task, we found that, contrary to the predictions ofPienemann’s teachability hypothesis, students who were at stage 3 on the oralpre-test did not show more signs of developmental advancement than studentswho were at stage 2 on the pre-test. On the other tasks, which were paper andpencil tasks (Preference Task and Scrambled Questions Task), some studentswho had been placed at stage 2 or 3 in oral production accepted and producedstage 4 and 5 questions even on the pre-test. The number of stage 4 and 5 ques-tions produced and/or accepted as grammatical was higher on the post-test,after the intervention, even though many students showed no sign of ‘progress’in their oral production. That is, on both the pre-test and the post-test, studentstended to use stage 2 and 3 questions in the oral production task, but acceptedand produced some stage 4 and 5 questions on the written tasks.

Students’ performance on the Preference Task provided valuable informationabout the apparent contradiction between their performance on oral and writtentasks. The overall pattern of their responses on both tasks showed that studentswere operating with an interlanguage rule which was based on a constraintbrought over from their L1. According to this rule, subject-auxiliary inversion isgrammatical in French questions when the subject is a pronoun, but inversion isusually not grammatical when the subject is a full noun.

Peut-il venir chez moi?

(Can he come to my house?)

* Peut-Jean venir chez moi?

(Can John come to my house?)

When a noun subject is needed to make the meaning clear, it is preceded by theinterrogative formula ‘est-ce que’ or it is topicalised by placing it at the beginningor the end of the sentence, and replaced by a pronoun subject.

Est-ce que Jean peut venir chez moi?

(Is it that John can come to my house?)

Jean, peut-il venir chez moi?

(John, can he come to my house?)2

Students’ performance on both the oral and written tasks is consistent with theinterlanguage rule whereby subject-auxiliary inversion is permitted in questionswith pronoun subjects but not with noun subjects (Zobl, 1979). The apparentdifference arose because of the nature of the oral task, which requires students toask questions about a picture, held by the interlocutor, which the student cannotsee. Students tended to ask either stage 2 questions such as ‘The boy has a stick?’,stage 3 questions with ‘do you’, such as ‘Do you have a dog in your picture?’ orstage 3 wh-questions with noun subjects, such as ‘What the boy is throwing?’ Onthe Preference Task they revealed the limitations of their understanding of inver-sion in questions. In this task, they had to judge the grammaticality of pairs ofquestions and had the option of accepting one, both or neither of them. Students


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accepted some stage 4 and 5 questions, for example, ‘Can they work on thecomputer?’. When stage 4 and 5 questions had noun subjects, however, studentstended to reject them. Thus, the apparent contradictionin students’ performance– stage 2 and 3 on the oral tasks and the acceptance of some grammatical stage 4and 5 questions on the Preference Task – was found to be systematic and to reflectan interlanguage rule governing the formation of questions.

The Current StudyThe results of these studies of learners’ knowledge and use of adverb place-

ment and question formation led us to the following research question: ‘Areyoung students aware of their interlanguage rules or do these rules constraintheir performance in English without their awareness?’

A new sample of students from the same population as that which partici-pated in the studies described above were given tasks in which they were askedto judge the grammaticality of sentences. One group was then directed simply tomake corrections to the sentences which they judged to be incorrect (CorrectionTask), and the other group was asked to explain their judgements (Explanation


Figure 2 Sample items from the Correction Task

1. When is my mother coming home?____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est:

_______________________________________________________

2. Lucy always watches television after school.____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est:

________________________________________________________

3. What we can watch on TV tonight?____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est:

_______________________________________________________

4. Alexandra cleans sometimes her room.____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte. La bonne phrase est:

________________________________________________________

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Task). The inclusion of the Correction Task was based on our anticipation thatexplanation might be perceived as a difficult task and might lead students tojudge sentences as correct in order to avoid having to provide an explanation.

ParticipantsApproximately 300 students in ten intact grade 6 intensive ESL classes partici-

pated in the study. In June, at the time of the testing, students in the CorrectionTask group were completing the ESL portion of their school year. Students in theExplanation Task group had done intensive ESL from September to January andwere completing the French programme.Two general measures of English profi-ciency were used to assess the overall English language ability of all students: (1)a Yes/No Vocabulary Recognition Test (Meara, 1992) and (2) a comprehensiontest (MEQ test) that was primarily a test of listening comprehension but alsorequired some reading (Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec, 1981). There wereno significant differences between the two groups on these measures (see Table1) or between these groups and other samples of students from this populationwhose language we had observed in the earlier studies mentioned above.

ProceduresThe two tasks which were used in this study were adapted from the Prefer-

ence Task used in the Spada and Lightbown (1999) study. Both the ExplanationTask and the Correction Task were paper and pencil tasks. Question formationand adverb placement were targeted on both tasks and two other linguisticfeatures served as distractors.3 In both tasks, students were presented withsentences and asked to judge whether they were correct or not. In the CorrectionTask, they were asked to correct the sentences which they judged to be incorrect.In the Explanation Task, they were asked to explain (in either French or English)what was wrong with sentences which they judged to be incorrect. Figures 2 and3 show examples from the two tasks. Because it was assumed the ExplanationTask would be more demanding and time consuming, there were fewer items onthis task (25) than on the Correction Task (35).

The Correction Task was administered in the five classes where students werelearning ESL intensively. The Explanation Task was administered to the fivegroups of students who were doing the French programme because we assumedthat teachers in the French classes would not object to students being given theoption of writing their explanations in French and also, since formal grammarinstruction was part of their French language arts course, it seemed that studentsmight be more accustomed to ‘thinking metalinguistically’.

L2 Learners’ Awareness of L1 Influence 205

Table 1 Group comparisons for MEQ and Yes/No Vocabulary Recognition Tests

Group n M (%) s.d. t pMEQ test Explanation 150 77.05 12.47 0.17 ns

Correction 145 76.79 13.67Yes/No test Explanation 144 70.00 15.00 -1.82 ns

Correction 142 73.10 14.00

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For adverbs, there were three (two incorrect SVAO and one correct SAVO)items on the Explanation Task. The same three items plus one additional incor-rect item appeared on the Correction Task. Adverbs of manner or adverbs offrequency were used in all sentences which targeted adverb placement.

The question items (10 on the Explanation Task and 14 on the Correction Task)included correct and incorrect sentences with both noun and pronoun subjects.We did not include items with ‘do you’ and ‘can I’, on the grounds that thesemight represent formulaic expressions rather than evidence of a rule for inver-sion. Thus the yes/no question items with pronoun subjects used ‘they’, ‘we’,and ‘he’. ‘You’ occurred in more wh-questions in forms other than ‘do you’.

The number of items for each of the features under investigation is relativelysmall. However, as noted, previous research with students in this population(Spada & Lightbown, 1999; White, 1991) using a larger number of items hadalready documented the effects of the apparent interlanguage rules. The purposeof this study was to investigate learners’ metalinguistic awareness of these rules


Figure 3 Sample items from the Explanation Task

1. What is your brother doing?____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que:

__________________________________________________

2. Do the children want to play?____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que:

__________________________________________________

3. John does quickly his homework.____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que:

__________________________________________________

4. What the chef likes to cook?____ La phrase est correcte.____ La phrase n’est pas correcte parce que:

__________________________________________________

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which seemed to influence their L2 performance (including judgements ofgrammaticality) so strongly. It is evident that both the Correction and the Expla-nation Tasks are by nature ‘metalinguistic’. That is, students are asked to focus onthe form of the sentences rather than on their meaning. However, we were look-ing for evidence that the students could provide an explicit metalinguistic expla-nation. Thus, in analysing the students’ performance on the Explanation Task,we defined ‘metalinguistic remarks’ as those which went beyond correction andoffered some more general explanation, for example, ‘Il faut dire “can we” car c’estune phrase interrogative‘ (You have to say ‘can we’ because it’s an interrogativesentence.) We did not count as ‘metalinguistic’ an explanation such as il fautenlever ‘do’ (you have to remove ‘do’) or ‘reverse can and we’ on the grounds thatthis was essentially a correction, not an explanation.

ResultsWe had anticipated that students doing the Explanation Task might tend to

accept more items as grammatical than those doing the Correction Task. Asnoted above, this was due in part to the nature of the task, but also to the fact thatstudents doing the Explanation Task were further from their intensive Englishinstructional experience. These students had spent the preceding five months inintensive French studies with no ESL classes and little contact with Englishbeyond that which they would have heard and used in the corridors of the schoolor on television at home. In addition, the Explanation Task asked students to dosomething they were not at all accustomed to doing, namely, to explain some-thing about English language form. We anticipated that they might prefer toaccept a sentence rather than to struggle with an explanation. This expectationwas not confirmed. The overall rate of acceptance and rejection of items wassimilar on the Correction Task and the Explanation Task. This was true for bothAdverb and Question items (see Table 2).

AdverbsOn both the Correction Task and the Explanation Task, students tended to

accept both the SVAO sentences which reflect the French rule and the SAVOsentences which reflect the English rule (see Table 3).4 As these students had hadno specific instruction on adverb placement, these findings further supportWhite’s (1991) hypothesis that students can acquire SAVO without explicit


Table 2 Overall percentage of acceptance of grammatically correct and incorrectitems on the explanation and correction tasks

Questions Correct IncorrectInverted questions Non-inverted questions

Explanation task 62 80Correction task 61 78Adverb Correct Incorrect

SAVO SVAOExplanation Task 76 79Correction Task 76 74

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instruction and error feedback, but will not learn that SVAO is ungrammaticalwithout such explicit guidance. Thus, the picture of their interlanguage whichemerges from their judgements includes both SAVO and SVAO. On the Explana-tion Task, three items targeted adverb placement. Thus the 150 students whocompleted this task produced a combined total of 450 judgements of the correct-ness of adverb placement. Of these, 95 were judged to be incorrect. Only fourwere accompanied by a metalinguistic remark and none reflected an awarenessof the difference between the L1 and L2 rules.

QuestionsTable 4 shows that, as expected, students were more likely to accept grammat-

ical questions in which pronoun subject and auxiliary verb were inverted thangrammatical questions in which the noun subject and auxiliary were inverted.Conversely, as Table 5 shows, they were more likely to accept ungrammaticalquestions in which the noun subject was not inverted with the auxiliary thanungrammatical questions in which the pronoun subject and auxiliary were notinverted. This result confirms that these students, like those observed previ-ously, were operating, at least implicitly, with a rule like French which normallyprecludes inversion with noun subjects.


Table 3 Percentage acceptance of sentences with SAVO and SVAO

Explanation Task Correction TaskLucy always watches TV after school. 74 71The doctor always washes her hands.* 81Alexandra cleans sometimes her room. 69 66John does quickly his homework. 84 82

*Correction Task only

Table 4 Percentage acceptance of grammatical questions with noun and pronounsubjects on the explanation and correction tasks

Explanation Task Correction TaskPronouns: Inversion

Do they like pepperoni pizza? 90 90Can they work on the computer?* 90

Nouns: InversionWhy do children like McDonald’s? 54 48What is your brother doing? 51 46Do the children want to play? 66 65When is my mother coming home? 51 39Can the children speak Spanish? 61 51Where are your parents working?* 56

*Correction Task only

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The number of metalinguistic explanations offered for their judgements over-all was exceedingly small. Even though the instructions on the Explanation Taskclearly called for (and gave an example of) an explanation of the perceived error,students most often simply corrected the sentences which they judged to beincorrect.Ten items targeted question formation on the Explanation Task. Thusthe 150 students made a total of 1500 judgements of questions. They judged 570question items to be incorrect.Of these, they gave metalinguistic explanations for56 items, less than 10% of those they judged to be incorrect. Furthermore, as in thecase of the adverb judgements, most of the metalinguistic remarks dealt withsomething other than the target feature. Only 15 metalinguistic remarks hadanything to do with word order in questions, and most of these were consistentwith the students’ interlanguage rule. That is, they ‘corrected’ a sentence whichhad inversion with a noun subject and explained that the verb had to come afterthe subject. For example, some students corrected the sentence ‘Where is yourbrother going?’ and offered the explanation ‘is after the subject’. A very smallnumber of students gave a target like rule. For example:

� il faut dire ‘can we’ dans une phrase interrogative;� il faut enverser ‘we et can’ parce que la phrase est interrogative;� c’est une question il faut inversé ‘we can’ pour ‘can we’;� il faut inverser ‘can et fish’ car c’est une phrase interrogative;� you should say the verb first;� quand c’est une question, on inverse le sujet.Thus, there is very little evidence that the students were consciously aware of

an interlanguage rule related to subject-auxiliary inversion in questions. A verysmall number of students gave explanations such as ‘you have to say “can we” inan interrogative sentence’, but there was not a single example of explicitmetalinguistic statements regarding different rules to govern the use of inver-sion with noun and pronoun subjects. The closest thing to such a comment was


Table 5 Percentage acceptance of ungrammatical questions with noun and pronounsubjects on the explanation and correction tasks

Explanation Task Correction TaskPronouns: non-inversion

What we can watch on TV tonight? 62 62When you are going to eatbreakfast?*

61

Why he’s at home today?* 82**Nouns: non-inversion

Why fish can live in water? 91 92Where the teacher is going? 77 87What the chef likes to cook? 89 86

* Correction Task only** This item yielded results which were perplexing because they violated the students’ apparentpreference for inversion with pronoun subjects. The reason for this is not clear and merits furtherinvestigation.

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one student who said that ‘Can the children speak Spanish?’ could be ‘corrected’by replacing ‘the children’ with ‘he’.

On both the Explanation Task and the Correction Task, however, there weremany cases where the students’ corrections showed that they were sensitive toword order and to differences between nouns and pronouns in the sentencesthey were asked to judge. Their ‘corrections’, whether they resulted in correct orincorrect questions, provide further confirmation of their implicit interlanguagerule for subject-auxiliary inversion. They frequently ‘de-inverted’ subject andauxiliary in correct questions when the subject was a noun (e.g. ‘What is yourbrother doing?’ became ‘What your brother is doing?’) and inverted subject andauxiliary in incorrect questions when the subject was a pronoun (e.g. ‘What wecan watch on TV tonight?’ became ‘What can we watch on TV tonight?’). It is notthe case that every judgement the students made was consistent with theinterlanguage rule. Sometimes students accepted questions which violated theinterlanguage rule, either because they were reading quickly and did not noticehow the question differed from those which they usually accepted or becausethey had already progressed to a point where they recognised the grammaticalquestions which other students still judged according to the interlanguage rule.Nevertheless, when students did make changes, the version of the questionwhich they created usually conformed to the interlanguage rule. That is, theyused inversion with pronouns and removed the inversion in questions withnoun subjects. Table 6 shows this pattern on the Correction Task.


Table 6 Changes made by students which are consistent with the implicitinterlanguage rule (inversion with pronoun subjects and non-inversion with nounsubjects)

Correction Task Number of students(out of 145) who

made ‘corrections’

Percentage of‘corrections’ consistentwith interlanguage rule

Inversion with pronoun subjectsDo they like pepperoni pizza? 48 85***What we can watch on TV tonight? 70 76*When you are going to eat breakfast? 84 80*Why he’s at home today? 26 35

Non-inversion with noun subjectsWhy do children like McDonald’s? 88 77What is your brother doing? 86 80Do the children want to play? 64 64When is my mother coming home? 92 87Can the children speak Spanish? 83 71Where are your parents working? 73 80*Why fish can live in water? 61 85*Where the teacher is going? 44 57*What the chef likes to cook? 38 50

Notes: * Items presented on the tasks in the ungrammatical form.** When students made changes to this item, they most often changed ‘they’ to another pronoun,usually ‘you’.

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Some of the corrections and explanations offered by the students reflected thedifficulty they had with any task which required them to analyse and manipulatecomponents of the language. Although these students received some exposure towritten work, the emphasis in all classes was on oral interaction, and when theyencountered written work, the typical instructionalfocus was on the comprehen-sion of meaning. They rarely encountered written tasks or exercises which wouldrequire them to identify separate linguistic items – individual words – insentences. They seemed to experience particular difficulty with words such as‘do’ and ‘is’ which do not carry easily identifiable meaning when used as auxilia-ries. For example, in questions which included ‘do’, students either removed ‘do’or replaced it with ‘the’ (e.g. they changed ‘Why do children like McDonald’s?’ to‘Why children like McDonald’s?’ or ‘Why the children like McDonald’s?). In orallanguage, the phonological realisation of do is reduced to /d /) and children donot equate /d / with the verb ‘do’. Thus, in the absence of any explicit instruc-tion on question formation and an emphasis on spoken versus written language,when faced with a task which included mysterious items such as ‘do’, studentswere at a loss for what to do with it. Some students commented, ‘You can’t say“do”. “Do” is faire‘. That is, their only knowledge of this important auxiliary verbin English was in its role as a lexical verb. Similarly, the verb ‘is’ caused severalproblems. In response to the question, ‘What is your brother doing?’ manystudents said ‘is’ should be removed. Others suggested that ‘is’ should go afterbrother. The incorrect question ‘Where the teacher is going?’ also elicited manyrecommendations to delete ‘is’.

DiscussionThe findings of this study suggest that L1 constraints which appear to influ-

ence word order patterns in the interlanguage of francophone students in inten-sive communicative ESL classes are not readily available for metalinguisticreflection. The apparent inability or unwillingness to provide explanationscontrasts with the findings of a recent study5 by White and Ranta (1999). Theyfound that a sample of students drawn from the same intensive ESL program (ina subsequent academic year) were willing and able to express in metalinguisticterms their understanding of the use of possessive determiners ‘his’ and ‘her’.The difference may be due in part to the fact that errors in the possessive deter-miners can lead to a misunderstanding of the speaker’s intended meaning whileerrors in word order for adverbs or questions do not tend to interfere with mean-ing to the same extent. This finding is consistent with research on metalinguisticawareness showing that it is easier to notice semantic than syntactic errors(Gleitman & Gleitman, 1979). White and Ranta’s findings may also be due to thefact that students’ reflections were elicited orally. As noted above, in Europeanresearch on language awareness, teachers and researchers have found that chil-dren are able, in guided oral interaction, to reflect on their knowledge oflanguage. Furthermore, the students in the White and Ranta study had receivedsome explicit instruction from the teacher and had participated in group work inwhich their task was to resolve differences of opinion about which word (‘his’ or‘her’) would be more appropriate to fill the blanks in picture description texts.That is, they had been trained to notice and explain their choice of ‘his’ or ‘her’


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and had been given some explicit ‘rules of thumb’ on which to base their choices.A similar observation was made by Han and Selinker (1999)who found that theiradult subject ‘was able to verbalise only the rule she derived from the pedagogi-cal input and not that from the L1 influence’ (p. 266).

The apparent absence of metalinguistic awareness of the interlanguage rulesthat they use for adverb placement and questions may prevent students fromnoticing how their English sentences differ from those which are available in theteacher’s speech. We know that these features are difficult for francophone learn-ers and that incorrect versions are often fossilised in the interlanguage of learnerswho are far more advanced than those who participated in this study. Thissuggests that they do indeed have difficulty in perceiving that what they aresaying is not what the teacher is saying.

Noticing may be promoted by giving students exposure to a variety of ways ofhearing and seeing the language, ways which permit them to identify some of thegrammatical building blocks, such as ‘is’ and ‘do’ that they have difficulty notic-ing in oral communicative interaction or even in reading when the focus is exclu-sively on meaning. The value of this exposure may be maximised if the taskrequires learners to focus their attention on form as well as (or in some cases,instead of) meaning. Such tasks could include versions of the input processinginstruction developed by VanPatten (1996) or production activities whichrequire students not only to understand the general meaning, but also to producethe features in question (Swain, 1985, 1995). In some instances, it may be neces-sary to draw the learners’ attention to the language through explicit instruction,including contrastive L1/L2 information. This may be especially true forstudents who share the same L1 and whose utterances are comprehensible toother students and thus serve as comprehensible input which may confirm eachother’s interlanguage patterns (Lightbown, 1985).

Several studies have shown that young L2 learners can benefit from instruc-tion which includes some explicit metalinguistic information (Harley, 1998; Day& Shapson, 1991, Lyster, 1994; White, 1991; White et al., 1991). The emphasis inthese studies was not on explicit contrastive information, but rather on thepatterns and rules in the target language itself. In fact, to our knowledge, thereare no studies in which young school-age learners have been presented withinstruction based on explicit contrasts between the L1 and the L2 in communica-tive or content-based teaching. In a study with older school-age learners,Kupferberg and Olshtain (1996) compared the learning outcomes of Israeli highschool students who were taught certain features of English using either a vari-ety of communicative activities or a combination of communicative activitiesand explicit contrastive information about English and Hebrew. The resultsshowed that the group who received the contrastive information performedbetter than those who did not. Other research which has examined the effects ofproviding contrastive information has been done almost exclusively with adultlearners receiving traditional L2 instruction – e.g. grammar translation or someversion of the audiolingual approach. This research has also reported benefits forinstruction which include contrastive information. Sheen (1996) quotes Von Elekand Oskarsson (1973) in their comparative study of adult L2 learners claimingthat explicit deductive instructional practices, including contrastiveanalysis, are‘superior to the combination of techniques constituting the implicit method’


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(p. 201). Although many dispute such a claim even with adult learners (Krashen,1982; Schwartz, 1993), it appears that this claim has not yet been tested withyoung L2 learners in communicative classrooms.

In Birdsong’s (1989) review of the research on the role of negative evidence,which he characterises as ‘metalinguistic input par excellence‘ (p. 127), heconcluded that:

the role of negative evidence in language acquisition depends, minimally,on the types of hypotheses entertained by the learner, the inherent usabilityof the evidence, the expertise of the learner in incorporating the evidence into learning mechanisms, and the implied goals or benefits of the use ofnegative evidence. (p. 133)

We may hypothesise that the impact of metalinguistic teaching for young L2learners would also depend on these factors.

An approach to L2 instruction which includes explicit contrastiveinformationmight be seen by some as anachronistic and may immediately bring to mindbehaviourist notions of learning, structure-based approaches to teaching and thefear that first language interference was ‘an unstoppable epidemic’ (James, 1996:145). But as James points out, ‘… since [contrastive analysis] took on a cognitivecomplexion, where the learner is more in charge of his own learning destiny, …the structural and semantic relations between [L1 and L2] are now seen as appro-priate objects for study’ (p. 145).

It is important to note that contrastive information need not be presented inlengthy, teacher-fronted ‘grammar lessons’ which are isolated from ongoingcommunicative activities. Nor is it necessary for students to do extensive exer-cises practising the contrasted features in decontextualised sentences or memo-rising grammar rules. Explicit information contrasting the L1 and L2 can bepresented briefly and visually, without the use of unfamiliar metalinguisticterminology which, in some situations, simply adds to the students’ learningtasks. It can also be made available to learners through specially prepared mate-rials which help learners see the relationship between L1 and L2 patterns. Forexample, White (1998b) has developed activities which give students access tothis kind of contrastive information through cooperative learning in group work.Information, once presented by the teacher or discovered in group work, canoften be integrated into the ongoing communicative activities, in the form of aquick reminder of what has been presented. This would include the repetitionplus recast technique used by the teacher in the Doughty and Varela (1998) studyor the ‘elicitation’ technique described by Lyster and Ranta (1997). The goal ofsuch instruction is to get the learners to notice the information which is availableto them in the input. This may be the first step in changing the interlanguagerules which distinguish the learners’ language from the target language.

The study reported here was not a test of the hypothesis that the inclusion ofcontrastive information will be more effective than instruction which excludes it.The empirical questions associated with this hypothesis are the subject ofresearch we are currently carrying out. One thing is clear from the SLA researchof the past 30 years: providing students with explicit information or feedback,including contrastive, metalinguistic information, does not lead to immediatelong term changes in their interlanguage performance. Such changes usually


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come about gradually and depend in part on learners’ developmental readiness,the extent to which they attend to the information, and perhaps to the opportuni-ties they have to practise. We also know that many aspects of second languageacquisition will evolve with time and continued exposure to the target language,without explicit intervention by the teacher. It is those features which arecommon to all students with the same first language background and which donot impede comprehension which are most likely to benefit from – or indeed torequire – explicit contrastive teaching and repeated feedback on error.

AcknowledgementsThe funding for this research was provided by grants from the Social Science

and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Fonds pour laformation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (FCAR) of Quebec. We are grateful tothe teachers and students who generously agreed to participate in this research.Research assistants who were involved in collecting and tabulating the datainclude Christine Brassard, Patrick Burger, Laura Collins and Lucy Lightbown.Randall Halter helped with many aspects of the research, especially the quantita-tive analyses. We would like to thank Roy Lyster, Leila Ranta, Daphnée Simardand Joanna White who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts.

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Professor Patsy M. Lightbown,

TESL Centre, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal,Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 ([email protected]).

Notes1. Negative evidence is information provided to the learners about which sentences or

features are not grammatical in the language they are learning.2. In spoken Quebec French, there is another option – the insertion of the question

marker -tu or -ti after the finite verb, for example, Il veut-tu venir chez moi? This form,which would be known to all children in Quebec, is not an example of inversion butrather of the addition of an invariant form which signals a question.

3. The distractor items were sentences with grammatical or ungrammatical use of verbtense and aspect and the possessive determiners ‘his’ and ‘her’. Like the targetfeatures, the distractors have been shown to be difficult for francophone learners ofEnglish (Collins, 1999; White, 1998a). Results for these features were not analysed forthis paper.

4. The overall pattern of results shown in Tables 3, 4 and 5 is consistent. We did not doinferential statistics on either the adverb or the question results. It would have beeninappropriate to do so because the number of items for each structure was small anduneven.

5. The White and Ranta study was conducted after the one reported here.

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do they know what they're doing? l2 learners' awareness of l1 influence

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