A 1999 conference paper reports, citing White (1991) and Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992), that explicit negative evidence on English adverb placement produced only superficial change in French learners¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r1 · q2
Currency · newest study 1999 · 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 an ERIC document (a report, conference paper or thesis). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? White's (1991) attempt to get learners to notice the ungrammaticality of French-style adverb placement in English failed; changes were purely superficial with no grammar reorganization. → Young-Scholten 1999

Evidence¶

Young-Scholten 1999¶

Young-Scholten, M. (1999). Focus on Form and Linguistic Competence: Why Krashen Is Still Right about Acquisition. Paper presented at AAAL, Stamford. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED432919

q2 · i? · review · r1

The paper reports, citing White (1991) and Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992), that classroom negative evidence on adverb placement failed: learners' "performance revealed changeswere purely superficial" despite needing to reorganize their grammars to stop verb raising.

"Yet White (1991) attempted to accomplish just this, Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak (1992) thenrevealed that the attempt failed.Learners needed to reorganize their grammars to stop raising main verbs as if English were French, but their performance revealed changeswere purely superficial."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Explicit L2 grammar instruction leads to larger learning effects than implicit instruction, as reported in the reviewed synthesis literature — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Successes of form-focused manipulation of input in adult L2 are illusory with respect to linguistic competence, affecting only performance — a broader claim this one bears on
• Mental representation is not amenable to direct explicit instruction because UG and parsers operate only on input data — a broader claim this one bears on
• The article concludes adult learners acquire two things about English adverbs: their general syntactic positions and their scope — related
• Adult L2 learners can generally judge which English adverb placements are acceptable, based on true/false judgment data from ten college students — related
• Comprehensible input alone is insufficient for acquisition of high levels of grammatical proficiency — related
• Informal evidence that adults do not automatically process input to develop competence reopens the role of grammar instruction (as reported by the bibliography, citing Terrell) — related
• Learners show no first-language transfer for manner adverbs, judging sentence-final placement acceptable and pre-verbal placement unacceptable despite Chinese word order — related