Teaching a small foreign language vocabulary to children using tact and listener instruction with a prompt delay

Abstract

This study consisted of a systematic replication of previous research examining the effects of tact and listener instruction on the emergence of native‐to‐foreign (NF) and foreign‐to‐native (FN) intraverbals in children who had experienced difficulties learning to read and write. We assigned different sets of stimuli to tact and listener conditions, and taught 4 children to tact or respond as listeners in a foreign language using a progressive prompt delay with differential reinforcement. All participants mastered tacts and listener responses in the foreign language. For all participants, tact instruction yielded greater emergence of intraverbals compared to listener instruction. Tact instruction also produced all possible bidirectional (NF and FN) intraverbals relations for 3 of 4 participants, but listener instruction never resulted in the emergence of all possible relations. These results replicate previous findings suggesting that tact instruction is a more efficient way to teach a foreign language and extend them to progressive prompt‐delay procedures.

A Systematic Review of Emergent Learning Outcomes Produced by Foreign language Tact Training

“…After initial full-text eligibility screening, we identified nine articles that met the criteria (Cortez et al, 2020(Cortez et al, , 2021Daly & Dounavi, 2020;Dounavi, 2014;Matter et al, 2020;May et al, 2019;Petursdottir & Hafliđadóttir, 2009;Petursdottir et al, 2008;Wu et al, 2019). We then conducted reference and citation searches using Google Scholar and Web of Science.…”

“…We also evaluated a subset (seven) of the ten FTT studies through meta-analysis (Cortez et al, 2020(Cortez et al, , 2021Daly & Dounavi, 2020;Dounavi, 2011Dounavi, , 2014Petursdottir & Hafliđadóttir, 2009;Wu et al, 2019). We only included studies in the metaanalysis if they contained at least one within-subject evaluation comparing the emergent learning outcomes produced by FTT with at least one other verbal operant training condition.…”

“…The ten studies targeted six foreign languages-four trained English vocabulary to non-English speaking learners (Cortez et al, 2020(Cortez et al, , 2021Dounavi, 2011Dounavi, , 2014. Other than the one study that focused on Mandarin Chinese words (Wu et al, 2019), all target foreign languages were European: English (n = 4), Spanish (n = 2), French (n = 1), Italian (n = 1), and Welsh (n = 1).…”

“…In addition to FTT, studies included a range of verbal operant training procedures: FNI, NFI, listener behavior, and mands training. Instructional mastery criteria ranged from 83.3% correct responses across two consecutive sessions (Matter et al, 2020;Petursdottir & Hafliđadóttir, 2009;Wu et al, 2019) to 100% correct responses across three consecutive sessions (Cortez et al, 2020(Cortez et al, , 2021Petursdottir et al, 2008). Additionally, FTT studies tested a range of untrained relations: FNI, NFI, listener, and mands.…”

“…This literature applies emergent learning practices and verbal operants to foreign vocabulary training (Daly & Dounavi, 2020). The languages taught include Native American (Haegele et al, 2011), Japanese (Petursdottir et al, 2014), French (Daly & Dounavi, 2020;Polson et al, 1997;Polson & Parsons, 2000), German (Rocha e Silva & Ferster, 1966), Spanish (Joyce & Joyce, 1993;Matter et al, 2020;Petursdottir et al, 2008;Ramirez et al, 2009), Italian (Petursdottir & Hafliđadóttir, 2009), Chinese (Wu et al, 2019), Welsh (May et al, 2016(May et al, , 2019, and English (Cortez et al, 2020(Cortez et al, , 2021Dounavi, 2011Dounavi, , 2014Rosales et al, 2011Rosales et al, , 2012. This literature's validity.…”