Learning vs Acquisition – How much does learning grammar help?

This presentation, given at the 4^th international conference of Linguistics Beyond and Within at the Institute of English Studies, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland in October 2016, was a renewed attempt at investigating matters in connection with the monitor theory and the distinction between learning and acquisi-tion. It was an upgraded version of my first article, outlined in section 6.1. Since this paper had not been submitted for review at the time of the writing of this thesis, it is presented here in more detail than the other papers.

This paper followed a methodology similar to the one in my first attempt, a correlation analysis. However, this study included more informants and more data types. This paper considered the students of the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016, altogether 81 informants, 42% more than in the first article. The study also considered the results of the so-called survey 0, whose purpose was to measure the students’ initial knowledge of English grammar (Section 3.2.2.1). This survey had not yet been available for the first article.

Secondly, the presentation attempted to consider the informants’ development as well. This addressed a shortcoming of the first article, which correlated only data that indicated the informants’ academic level at a given point of time. Finally, the informants were divided into five subgroups according to their academic standing.

This was done in order to gain a more detailed picture of which group of students might gain most from learning theoretical grammar. Unfortunately, the division of the informants into subgroups yielded results that I have not been able to interpret yet and therefore have to re-evaluate. Three hypotheses were proposed and tested:

1. Students who are better at theoretical grammar are better, i.e. more precise, at writing English than those who are less well versed in theoretical grammar.

(This basic hypothesis was also entertained in the first article.)

1b. The correlation is stronger in the case of translations than in the case of free compositions. (This refinement of the hypothesis above was added because it was assumed that translation from Danish into English would be a more de-manding task than “just” writing in English directly. This assumption was based on earlier findings that the students tended to make considerably more

mistakes in translations, even from English into Danish, than in free composi-tions and summaries (see Table 3-6).

2. Students who are better at theoretical grammar will have improved their writing skills more than those who are less well versed in theoretical grammar.

(This hypothesis represents the idea that I also wanted take the informants’ de-velopment into account. This assumption was not based on any particular find-ing prior to the paper, but was merely a formulation of what is secretly hoped by teachers, including myself, who teach and advocate the teaching of theoreti-cal grammar.)

Hypotheses 1 and 1b were tested by correlating various precision metrics. For sur-vey 0, the combined score of its morphological and its syntactical analysis part served as its precision metric. For the grammar exam, its overall score served as its precision metric. For the texts from Production of Written Texts, the frequency of grammatical mistakes and the frequency of all mistakes combined served as their precision metrics.

The precision metric of survey 0 was correlated with the precision metric of the free composition and of the translation from Danish into English in the autumn se-mester. The precision metric of the grammar exam was correlated with the precision metric of the free composition, translation from Danish into English and the reflec-tion in the spring term. Table 6-4 below shows the correlareflec-tion coefficients.

Table 6-4: Correlation between survey 0 and the grammar exam as well as various texts

Correlates

Grammati-cal mistakes

All mis-takes Survey 0 & 1^st free composition 0.104 0.340 Survey 0 & 1^st translation from Danish into English 0.324 0.275 Grammar exam & 2^nd free composition 0.245 0.371 Grammar exam & 2^nd translation from Danish into

English

0.269 0.350

Grammar exam & 2^nd reflection 0.161 0.272

Even though the correlation coefficients are not particularly impressive, they do corroborate hypothesis 1. Hypothesis 1b seems only partially corroborated since the correlation is only stronger in the case of the translations with respect to

grammati-cal mistakes, but is actually weaker when the correlation is done with all mistakes combined.

Judging from Table 6-4 above, the chances of hypothesis 2 to be corroborated seem bleak. The correlation coefficient of the reflection in the spring semester, which was the last text written by the freshmen as freshmen, does not seem stronger than the coefficient of the free composition in the autumn semester, which was the freshmen’s first text written at the university. This does not suggest an improvement at all. However, hypothesis 2 was also tested by other means.

The correlation between the performance at the grammar exam and the im-provement in writing skills was calculated. The imim-provement in writing skills was calculated as the difference in mistakes per 100 words between the reflection in the second semester and the free composition in the first semester. The correlation coef-ficients are 0.070 (grammatical mistakes) and -0.002 (all mistakes), which clearly falsifies hypothesis 2.

7 Conclusion

The following subsections summarise the results of the project with respect to the individual research questions posed in the introduction. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the pedagogical implications of the findings of this project.

7.1 What are the major difficulties of Danish students in