Advanced L2 learners taught the core senses of to, for and at with diagrams show pre- to post-test gains in knowing when to use them, in one uncontrolled study reported second-hand¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2014 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on a source with no registered publication record (a web page, book or unpublished report). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Advanced L2 learners taught the core senses of to, for and at with diagrams showed significant pre- to post-test improvement in knowing when to use the prepositions. → Sáez 2014

Evidence¶

Sáez 2014¶

Sáez, N. (2014). Enhancing the Role of Meaning in the L2 Classroom: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective. Teachers College, Columbia University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1176947

q2 · i? · theoretical · r2

The article reports the experimental study by Tyler, Mueller and Ho (2011), in which seven senses of at stemming from its core meaning, plus to and for, were taught to advanced learners with diagrams of core spatial scenes; pre/post testing showed "significant improvements in participants' understandings". No effect size is printed.

"Pre- and post-test results showed significant improvements in participants' understandings of when to use the prepositions to, for and at, that is, of their distributional patterns based on how abstract uses are conceptually represented by their core meanings."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Comprehensible input alone is insufficient for acquisition of high levels of grammatical proficiency — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Morphological noticing focuses mainly on verb forms, especially modals, and on preposition choice — related
• Diagram-comprehension scores were already high before the treatment and showed no significant pre-to-post increase — related
• ESL students taught concept mapping show significantly greater pretest-to-posttest achievement gains than students taught an alternative learning strategy — related