Down the Garden Path: Inducing and correcting overgeneralization errors in the foreign language classroom

Abstract

In this study we compared two methods for teaching grammatical exceptions in the foreign language classroom. Thirty-nine students in two sections of an introductory college French course served as subjects. Eight target structures, exemplifying "exceptions to a rule," were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions for a section taught in the spring; each structure was assigned to the opposite teaching condition for a section taught the following fall. In one condition we simply taught the students the exception as an exception. In the other -what we called the Garden Path conditionwe presented canonical exemplars encouraging students to induce the rule; we then asked them to generate the form (which we knew to be an exception) and then corrected their resulting overgeneralization error. Analysis of subsequent formal testing showed that students learned the exception better in the Garden Path condition and that this advantage persisted throughout the semesterlong course. We hypothesized that this technique helped students to focus attention both on the rule and on the features of the particular structure that marked it as an exception.

Lost in parallel concordances

“…There is also some evidence that the first language may actually contribute towards the development of a second language. Tomasello & Herron (1988, 1989, for example, report that a group of English-speaking learners of French learned more when the influence of English upon French was openly discussed in class than when instruction focused only on French.…”

The Role of Knowledge about the L2 Code in Adult Second Language Acquisition: A Review of Theories and Research

“…In the theory and research reviewed in this paper, there is no evidence that the traditional presentation of formalized book knowledge about the L2 is seen to be an effective instructional strategy.6 Rather researchers are exploring different ways to alert the L2 learner to formal features of the L2 code in contexts where this knowledge about the L2 code is relevant to needs-either developmental needs (Pienemann, 1984;White, 1985), task needs (Bialystok, 1985;Swain, 1988), or L2 code gaps (White, 1985;Herron & Tomasello, 1988;Tomasello & Herron, 1990). The key seems to be to motivate and guide the learner to attend to aspects of the L2 code at times and in ways that will lead to a restructuring (McLaughlin, 1990) of the learner's internal representation.…”

“…The role of form-focused corrective feedback is to direct and motivate learners to do the appropriate processing to restructure their knowledge representation. Herron & Tomasello (1988) and Tomasello & Herron (1990) have investigated this in two experimental instructional studies. In one study (1988), they examined the learning of grammatical structures in two instructional treatment conditions (feedback versus modelling); subjects in the feedback condition were directed through a self-correction process while those in the modelling treatment only listened to appropriate examples of the target item.…”

“…some learning of code features occurs unintentionally at the point of input encoding in communication as long as the learner is attending to form (Hulstijn & Hulstijn, 1984;Hulstijn, 1989); 2. some aspects of the code (variational rather than developmental features) may be more amenable to instruction than others and developmental features may be "teachable" if the learner has reached the prerequisite stage in L2 development (Pienemann, 1984(Pienemann, , 1985; 3. instructor feedback on errors is potentially one form-focused instructional strategy that can motivate and guide the learner to the necessary restructuring (Tomasello & Herron, 1990;White, 1990); 4. another potentially effective instructional strategy is to embed form-focus in the communication task itself so that the learner's attention is naturally drawn to aspects of the L2 code according to task demands and the realization knowledge gaps (Swain, 1988); 5. and finally, the L2 learner can be taught learning strategies that will allow for an effective exploitation of communication events not only to develop skill proficiency (Carrell, 1985;O'Malley, 1987) but also to increase knowledge about the L2 code (Corbeil, 1989).…”

The Communicative Approaches Revisited and the Relevance of Teaching Grammar

“…Larson-Freeman (2003) discusses techniques and gives examples of students working together to arrive at the right structural form within a meaningful context. Another form of noticing is corrective feedback which is introduced by Tomasello and Herron (1988) who carried empirical studies arriving at "the garden path technique" where the learners are lead to overgeneralize, then the induced error are self corrected by the learner. That technique yielded better results that were sustained throughout the course.…”