The Effects of Multiple‐Exposure Textual Enhancement on Child L2 Learners’ Development in Derivational Morphology: A Multi‐Site Study

Abstract

Much research exists on the role of textual enhancement in instructed second language (L2) development, yet little is known about how its effectiveness is influenced by multiple exposures, whether it can facilitate the acquisition of L2 derivational morphology, and how it may affect child language learning. To fill these gaps, this study employed a six‐week multiple‐exposure design to investigate the extent which to textual enhancement can benefit children’s knowledge of L2 derivational morphemes. The study employed a pretest‐posttest design, with six treatment sessions. Participants were 91 L2 learners of English in two primary school EFL contexts (Romania, Sweden). In each context, participants were randomly assigned to two groups: the +highlight group received textually enhanced texts, whereas the –highlight group read unenhanced texts during the treatment. The children read the texts through a digital reader application during their English lessons. The target constructions were the –ion and –ment morphemes. The pretest and posttest included a non‐word derivational suffix choice and a nonword derivational suffix decomposition task. Results of linear mixed effects models found a small advantage of textual enhancement for the acquisition of the –ion morpheme by Swedish learners on the suffix choice task, but Romanian learners showed no benefits from highlighting.

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“…Hence, the evidence is consistent with the notion that while input enhancement may effectively trigger noticing, noticing alone "does not guarantee [the target forms] will be incorporated into [learners'] developing interlanguage" (Ellis, 2001, p. 8), which has been echoed by several other studies (e.g., Meguro, 2019;Labrozzi, 2016;Rassaei, 2020;Szudarski & Carter, 2016;Winke, 2013). In addition, the effectiveness of input enhancement can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as the format of textual enhancement (i.e., types and number of typographical cues) (Labrozzi, 2016;Simard, 2009) as well as the target form and learners' first language (L1) backgrounds (Révész et al, 2021). Given the distinct but finite function that it seems to serve in L2 learning, numerous researchers (e.g., Han et al, 2008;Indrarathne & Kormos, 2017;Lee, 2021;Leow & Martin, 2017) have suggested that the efficacy of input enhancement would increase when implemented in conjunction with other instructional techniques, such as those introduced below.…”