Earticle

Given the prominent status of grammar learning in a foreign language milieu, seeking an effective grammar instruction remains a prevailing challenge for most linguists and foreign language teachers. The common paradigm still heavily focuses on language input and meaning-oriented tasks. While these two aspects are of indispensable importance for learning, the development of L2 interlanguage grammar system requires another learning process. At this juncture, Swain (1994) sheds light on roles of output as a potential learning mechanism. This study is an attempt to probe the degree to which the underlying process of output in a collaborative interactional grammar task can lead to grammar learning. Involving ten advanced and ten intermediate level students working on a text reconstruction tasks, this study revealed that output can provide a rich forum for learning to take place through its mechanisms: gap- noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic function. Yet, it exerted a different impact upon different levels of students. Gap-noticing was likely to be perceivable in the case of intermediate group whereas the other two mechanisms, hypothesis testing and metalinguistic function, seemed to be more prevailing in the advanced group. This study also found that a grammar-sensitive task can pave the way to L2 grammar learning by pushing students to deeper syntactic processing, rather than solely relying on semantic processing. In so doing, output serves a complementary function to foster L2 grammar learning.

The study attempts to provide the explicit information and form-focused tasks for teaching Korean perfect aspect markers, ‘-e iss-’, ‘-ko iss-’, and ‘-ess-’. The analysis on the current Korean text books has shown that the information on Korean perfect aspect markers was presented in an isolated way and the tasks were confined only to pre-communicative activities on each markers. We found the need to differentiate the markers in terms of aktionsart and transitivity. The current study has presented four collaborative output tasks including the Dictogloss, Reconstruction cloze task, Text-editing task, and Collaborative output jigsaw task to facilitate the L2 learners’ meta-linguistic information, learner attention, and increase learner involvement.

This study was motivated by the pedagogic interest in dictogloss as a procedure combining form-focused and communication driven pair/group work leading to collaborative dialogue and looked inside a dictogloss to analyze learners’ spoken attention to form while doing the task. The dictogloss task employed in this study elicited discussions on a wide variety of forms, as has been claimed. However, there was a difference in the amount of form-focused episodes (FFEs) the learners produced. The linguistic feature targeted by the study was less frequently noticed and discussed by the learners although one single chosen structure appeared in the text repeatedly. The success rate of the FFEs was moderately high but the problem was that the learners had no way of knowing which linguistic forms to those problems they identified were correct at the moment when they had to make a decision. These results were discussed and implications for pedagogy were suggested.