Text enhancement and the acquisition of English verbal morphology by L1 Haitian Creole speakers
Description
This doctoral research investigates the potentially facilitative effect of text enhancement on the acquisition of two English grammatical features---the bound morpheme -s in the third-person present indicative verb (3PS) and the free morpheme will-future---by 72 adult L1 Haitian Creole speakers. Specifically, the major research questions addressed are (1) whether typographically enhanced input of 3PS and will-future facilitates 'noticing' and subsequent acquisition and (2) whether learners receiving textually enhanced input of the free morpheme will demonstrate a more accurate ability to recognize and produce this target feature than learners receiving enhanced input of the bound morpheme -s A controlled experimental study addressed these questions, with two separate experiments conducted on each variable. Half of the research participants engaged in the experiment with 3PS, half in the experiment with will -future. Participants were further divided into two treatment groups within each experiment: the Enhanced group and the Control group. Enhanced treatment group participants read a passage orally while attending to visually enhanced learning targets (enlarged and boldfaced, or colored red). Control group participants read a passage orally without enhancement The major findings are: (1) textual enhancement did not improve participant metalinguistic knowledge of 3PS but did improve their metalinguistic knowledge of will-future, as measured by grammaticality judgment tasks; (2) textual enhancement promoted perceptual noticing of both target features, as measured by reading tasks; (3) textual enhancement promoted the acquisition of both target features in a constrained environment, as measured by picture description tasks, although it positively affected only the acquisition of will-future, not the acquisition of 3PS in a less constrained environment, as measured by free response tasks; (4) the present study found a weak relationship between noticing and acquiring the targeted grammatical forms; (5) textual enhancement did not affect acquisition per se since no subject met the acquisition criterion of 90% set at the beginning of the study An examination of these results in view of relevant SLA literature suggests that getting adult learners to notice target features may not suffice for their acquisition and that the relationship between the two is less direct than generally SLA literature assumes