Explicit grammar instruction in the L2 classroom. Issues in teaching and learning English word order

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate the effect of explicit instruction on the acquisition of word order in declarative sentences with adverbs in the medial position and topicalised declaratives. Both constructions are shown to be problematic for Norwegian learners of English because of negative influence from Norwegian, which uses the V2 rule in the two structures. The study consists of a grammaticality judgment pre- and posttest and an intervention. The intervention focuses on explicit word order teaching, exposure to positive and negative evidence, as well as error correction. The thesis investigates techniques appropriate to teach problematic sentence structures and to investigate their effectiveness in the classroom.

The results of the intervention show that the participants improve the most with detecting ungrammaticality. This is especially clear for the lower proficiency learners. I can thus conclude that the intervention has a positive effect on learning word order in the L2 English classroom. At the same time the results of the present study reveal that many of the participants has high language proficiency and near-target like knowledge of word order from the start. Therefore the intervention does not reveal significant improvement in the higher proficiency learners.