Linguistic and Psycholinguïstic Determinants of the efficacy of explicit instruction in second language acquisition.

This research project aims to investigate to what extent and under what circumstances expliciet instruction about language structure can facilitate the acquisition of implicit competence and profiency in a second language. First, we will investigate whether the effects of explicit instuction also manifest themselves in spontaneous language use and not just in controlled, form-focused language tasks. Then, we will centre us on the grammatical stuctures and rules. We will use a number of independent linguistic and psycholinguïstic variables. the relevant variables for the structures are (a) their linguistic-typological markedness and (b) their contrastive markedness. With regard to the rules, the variables are (a) its reliability and (b) its psycholinguistic complexity. The research hypotheses will be tested, using an experimental pre-test/post-test design in a classroom context. Type of explicit instruction will be kept constant. Subjects will be pretested for prior mastery of the target structures and rules and will then be randomly assigned to one of six groups of 20 subjects each. The six groups represent two control and four experimetnal conditions.