Teaching and learning of French verb inflections : a classroom experiment using processing instruction

Abstract

This study was conducted in two UK schools / year 9 classrooms.  It adopted a quasi-experimental design to compare PI with Enriched Input (EI), which focused learners’ attention on lexical items and / or overall sentential meaning, but allowed an implicit mode of learning the target verb inflections.  This shares many similarities with current listening and reading activities in UK classrooms.  Progress in learning the target features was also monitored in a non-active control class in school 1.  A battery of pre, post and delayed post tests was used to assess the short and longer term impacts on learners’ ability to understand and use, in oral and written modalities, a selection of French verb inflections in the present and perfect tenses.  Lessons were monitored in all three classes prior to and throughout the study and the pupils’ and teachers’ reactions to the materials were surveyed to strengthen the study’s validity.

In general, instructional type alone did not have a significant impact on the pupils’ learning.  However, it was found that in school 2 (class B) the learners who experienced PI made and maintained statistically significant learning gains in all the measures taken, whereas the EI learners did not.  This suggests there are potential benefits of using PI to promote the learning of verb inflectional system with such learners.

In contrast, in school 1 (Class A), both the EI and PI learners made and maintained statistically significant learning gains, suggesting that with these learners a more incidental mode of processing was equally beneficial.  This may be due to a background school ethos of teaching and testing grammar, as the parallel, non-active control class also made some gains between pre and post test.  However, this does not account for the extent of the gains by EI learners in class A in the listening, reading and writing measures.  It is therefore suggested that the EI learners in class A, unlike those in class B who were at a lower developmental stage, had sufficient processing resources to interpret the meaning of verb inflections as well as lexical items and/or sentential meaning (i.e. engage in incidental / multiple processing).  In addition, it is acknowledged that it is possible that more general characteristics of the normal class teaching in class A (e.g. sequencing of grammar pedagogy tasks) may have enabled learners in class A to benefit from EI more than learners in class B.

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