English Language Teaching in its Social Context

FOCUS ON FORM 185An example of the probable effect of instruction on ultimate attainment comes fromwork on the acquisition of relative clauses in a SL. Several studies (e.g., for English: Gass1982; Gass and Ard 1980; Pavesi 1986; Eckman, Bell and Nelson 1988; for Swedish:Hyltenstam 1984) have shown that both naturalistic and instructed acquirers develop relativeclauses in the order predictable from the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (Keenan andComrie 1977; Comrie and Keenan 1979; see Figure lO.l), although with occasionalreversals of levels 5 and 6.least marked1. subject (The man that stole the car . . .)2. direct object (The man that the police arrested . . .)3. indirect object (The car that he paid nothing for . . .)4. object of a preposition (The man that he spoke to . . .)5. possessive/genitive (The man whose . . .)6. object of a comparative (The man that Joe is older than . . .)most markedFigure 10.1 Noun phrase accessibility hierarchyOf particular interest in the present context, Pavesi (1 986) compared relative clauseformation by instructed and naturalistic acquirers. The former were 48 Italian high schoolstudents, ages 14-18, who had received from 2 to 7 years (an average of 4 years) ofgrammar-based EFL instruction and who had had minimal or (in 45 of 48 cases) no informalexposure to English. The untutored learners were 38 Italian workers (mostly restaurantwaiters), ages 19-50, who had lived in Scotland anywhere from 3 months to 25 years (anaverage of 6 years), with considerable exposure to English at home and at work, but whohad received minimal (usually no) formal English instruction.Relative clause constructions were elicited using a set of numbered pictures andquestion prompts: (“Number 7 is the girl who is running”, and so on). Implicational scalingshowed that both groups’ developmental sequences correlated significantly with the nounphrase accessibility hierarchy. There were two other kinds of differences, however. First,naturalistic learners produced statistically significantly more full nominal copies than theinstructed learners (e.g. “Numbcr 4 is the woman who the cat is looking at the woman”),whereas instructed learners produced more pronominal copies (“Number 4 is the womanwho the cat is looking at her”). Given that neither English nor Italian allow copies of eitherkind, this is further evidence of the at least partial autonomy of IL syntax, a claim alsosupported by the developmental sequence itself, of course. Interestingly, the relativefrequencies of the diffcrent kinds of copies suggest that the instructed learners had“grammaticized” more, even in the errors they made, a result consistent with findings byPica (1 983) and Lightbown (1 983). Second, more instructed learners reached 80 percentcriterion on all of the five lowest NP categories in the hierarchy, with differences attainingstatistical significance at the second lowest (genitive) level and falling just short (p. 06) atthe lowest (object of a comparative) level. More instructed learncrs (and very fewnaturalistic acquirers) were able to relativize out of the more marked NPs in the hierarchy.In considerably less average time, that is, instructed learners had reached higher levels ofattainment.