English 418 Second Language Acquisition Session Twenty Four ...

• Second Language Instruction
• 2) Ultimate Level of Attainment
• Less research in this area, but equally compelling
• Major study done by Pavesi (1984), who compared relative clause formation in instructed
and naturalistic acquirers
• Second Language Instruction
• The instructed learners were 48 Italian high school students, aged 14 to 18, who had
received from two to seven years of grammar-based EFL instruction, but had had no
informal exposure to English
• Second Language Instruction
• The naturalistic acquirers were 38 Italian workers (mostly waiters), aged nineteen to fifty,
in Edinburgh, Scotland, who had received only minimal or (usually) no formal English
instruction
• Had been in Britain from three months to twenty five years (average of six years), during
which they had been exposed to English in a variety of home, work, and recreational
settings
• Second Language Instruction
• Non-equivalent group design: age discrepancy between groups
• Lower socio-economic levels for naturalistic learners, less education
• On the other hand, balance of exposure to language clearly in favor of naturalistic learners
• Results: High school students outperformed the naturalistic acquirers on virtually every
measure of language attainment
• Second Language Instruction
• Bottom line: formal SL instruction does not seem able to alter acquisition sequences, except
temporarily and in trivial ways which may even hinder subsequent development
• On the other hand, instruction has positive effects on the rate at which learners acquire the
language, and probably beneficial effects on their ultimate level of attainment
• Second Language Instruction
• The other bottom line: without it, naturalistic or not, the learning process would simply
never begin, if learners are left to their own devices
• Syllabuses
• Translate decisions into actual teaching units
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