Rule difficulty: teachers’ intuitions and learners’ performance

Abstract

The need for some form of explicit grammar instruction is recognized in most current approaches to second language teaching. Since the usefulness of explicit instruction is at least to some extent dependent on the difficulty of the rules that are taught, an important question for teachers is whether their judgements of rule difficulty are reliable. This study investigates the question of whether there is a significant relationship between teachers' assessment of rule difficulty and learners' ability to produce controlled output based on explicit rules. In the study, 25 Polish teachers of English were asked to evaluate the difficulty of 12 pedagogical rules of English grammar. After that, 50 Polish learners of English were asked to produce example sentences based on the same rules. To test the null hypothesis of no significant relationship a Spearman rank order correlation coefficient was calculated (rs = -0.9). The results were found to be significant (p< 0.01 for a two-tailed test). They are discussed in terms of what they mean for the process of selecting rules for explicit instruction.

Perceived Learning Difficulty and Actual Performance

“…Thus it appears that the teachers may have been the best judges, in the sense that they were the only judges whose difficulty rankings showed a trend toward capturing the difficulty of the targeted grammar points in terms of both implicit and explicit knowledge. The teachers’ relative predictive success in the present study is broadly in keeping with Scheffler’s (2011) finding that the teachers he worked with were able to accurately predict their learners’ performance on a rule-illustration task.…”

“…The teachers' relative predictive success in the present study is broadly in keeping with Scheffler's (2011) finding that the teachers he worked with were able to accurately predict their learners' performance on a rule illustration task.…”

“…Some empirical findings suggest that this may be a sound strategy. Thus Scheffler (2011) reports a very strong significant correlation between Polish secondary school teachers’ ( n = 25) difficulty judgements of grammar points relating to the form and meaning of the L2 English verb phrase on a 5-point scale ranging from very easy to very difficult and their students’ ( n = 50) performance on a metalinguistic test requiring the production of English sentences exemplifying the targeted pedagogical grammar rules. Along similar lines, Ziętek and Roehr (2011) found that Polish college-level learners ( n = 20) performed significantly worse on metalinguistic test items targeting six grammar points judged to be of higher explicit learning difficulty than on items targeting six grammar points judged to be of lower explicit learning difficulty based on the R&G taxonomy.…”

“…'Simple past tense'), the associated pedagogical grammar rule, an example sentence illustrating the use of the linguistic structure and an example of a typical learner error. (Absi, 2014;Scheffler, 2011).…”

Problems in Grammatical Structure: A Case Study of B.Ed. Student at the Education Department

“…As the quantity of non-local speakers surpasses the number of local speakers showing English as a second language (ESL) or unknown dialect (EFL), in this manner, has changed hugely in recent decades on account of its job as a language for worldwide contact. Educational programs, showing strategies, and instructing materials have been created to meet the changing needs of the ESL/EFL populace (Scheffler, 2011).…”