Second language grammar learning in refugee children

Abstract

This exploratory study aims to investigate the effectiveness of group dictation in primary school children with a refugee background. More specifically, running dictation was employed in the teaching of two grammatical phenomena in L2 Greek, tense and gender agreement. Two studies were conducted to investigate each grammatical structure separately. Each study consisted of a pre-test that investigated the pupils’ performance on the grammatical structure, the teaching intervention via running dictation, and a post-test that explored its efficiency on pupils’ accuracy. All pupils that participated in the studies were enrolled in formal Greek education and their L1s were Arabic, Farsi or Kurdish. According to the results from both studies, the children’s post-intervention performance did not improve significantly. However, the pupils’ accuracy on some of the grammatical forms tested as well as their error patterns indicated that running dictation helped the pupils notice the target grammatical phenomena and thus become more aware of them. Moreover, some data showed that older pupils benefited more from the target-activity than younger ones. Therefore, the present study provides evidence that running dictation may have a positive qualitative rather than quantitative impact on learners’ grammatical development and is dependent on the pupils’ age.