Teaching agreement through grammar instruction in the lower secondary school: A comparison between implicit and explicit grammar instruction in L1 Norwegian learners of L2 English

Abstract

In this master’s thesis, L1 Norwegians in the lower secondary school are tested on their knowledge of L2 English subject-verb agreement. The main aim of the study is to examine why this grammatical phenomenon is challenging, and, additionally, to compare the effects of two instructional methods on grammar acquisition. The instructional methods under investigation are Task Based Language Teaching and Presentation-Practice-Production, which respectively teach grammar implicitly and explicitly. Consequently, the present study combines methods from linguistics and language acquisition as well as from language didactics and pedagogy. The study uses acceptability judgement testing to assess the participant's accuracy in judging the grammaticality of subject-verb agreement and an instructional intervention (60 minutes) to compare the effects of the two instructional methods. The acceptability judgement task is used in a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test to assess the intervention's short- and long-term effects. The results may indicate some short-term effects from the implicit grammar instructional intervention; however, the results were largely inconclusive. However, subject-verb agreement was found to be challenging for L1 Norwegians. Thus, instruction of this grammatical construction should be prioritized in the English language classroom.