Practice of grammar rules improves only the practiced skill, showing skill specificity of L2 automatization¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 2 studies · 1 causal r?, 1 review r2 · q2–q3
Currency · newest study 2022 · 1 of 2 entries checked against their sources (automated) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? A large amount of practice of grammar rules in comprehension and production leads to improvement in the practiced skill, evidence of skill specificity. → Aydinbek C 2022

q3 i? The learning of morphosyntactic rules in a second language is highly skill-specific, so that practicing a rule in comprehension does not automatically confer production skill and vice versa. → Robert M. DeKeyser 1997

Evidence¶

Aydinbek C 2022¶

Aydinbek C. (2022). Contributions of cognitive theory to the problem of automatization of grammatical structures in teaching foreign language. Educational Research and Reviews. https://doi.org/10.5897/ERR2022.4230

q2 · i? · review · r2

In the Results and Discussion section the review reports the longitudinal and fine-grained study by DeKeyser (1997), which supported the model of skill acquisition and showed improvement confined to the practiced skill; no effect size is printed.

"a large amount of practice of grammar rules in comprehension and production leads to improvement in the practiced skill, that is to say, the results have presented evidence of the skill specificity of the learning process"

Robert M. DeKeyser 1997¶

Robert M. DeKeyser. (1997). Beyond Explicit Rule Learning: Automatizing Second Language Morphosyntax. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Volume 19, Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263197002040

q3 · i? · causal · r?

Controlled experiment in an artificial language: all subjects received identical instruction and equal amounts of comprehension and production practice, while the assignment of rules to modality varied between groups. The study reports that "the learning of morphosyntactic rules is highly skill-specific."

"All subjects were taught the same rules and then practiced them, and all subjects had the same amount of comprehension and production practice, but which ruleswere practiced in comprehension and which in production varied between groups. Results showthat the learning of morphosyntactic rules is highly skill-specific"

Studies bearing on this claim¶

Does second-language practice carry over to skills and tasks other than the one practised? This table gathers the studies behind this claim and the 6 narrower claims that bear on it: 5 distinct studies (2 review, 1 causal, 1 theoretical, 1 design), q2–q3, 0 of 5 with an effect size coded. One row per study, codes as each entry records them; no effect is averaged and no verdict is drawn. Built by scripts/synthesize_claim.py from eval/synthesis/; a row that looks wrong is fixed on the claim it comes from.

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Syntax — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• In one experiment with 256 undergraduates, computer-based lesson versions that included practice produced significantly higher posttest scores than versions without practice — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Automatization of L2 skills requires extensive practice in a consistent environment, not repetition of grammar rules as in traditional exercises — related

• A 1982 bilingual-education teacher-training packet asserts, citing Krashen, that repetitive drill and grammar-focused instruction are ineffective for second language acquisition — related
• Low-frequency or low-salience L2 elements are hard or impossible to learn through mere exposure and require extensive practice to proceduralize form-meaning mappings — related
• Grammar instruction and skill drills show little carryover to composition success — related
• Explicitly learned L2 rules can be automatized through systematic practice after a metalinguistic criterion is reached — related
• Automatized L2 morphosyntactic skills develop very gradually over time, following a power function learning curve like other cognitive skills — related
• The training-by-content interaction is not specific to test question type, indicating transfer between skill and fact learning — related
• Peer assessment skills are complex and not automatically acquired, so training and guidance are a crucial design variable — related
• Task rehearsal improves fluency and complexity on the repeated task but does not transfer to a new task of the same type — related