A Study Of The Effects Of Language Aptitudes On Interactional Feedback In Chinese Children's Acquisition Of English Questions

Michael Long's Interaction Hypothesis is widely claimed as the theoreticalguideline of the interaction research,which has grown up into a new researchapproach to SLA studies since the early 1980's.Theoretically originated from threemajor theories,Evelyn Hatch's discourse analysis,Stephen Krashen's Inputhypothesis,and Talmy Giv6n's cognitive grammar,the Interaction Hypothesis haswitnessed three developmental stages,the preliminary version (1981),the classicversion (1983),and the updated version (1996).In his preliminary version,Long made a distinction between input andinteraction,referring the former to the linguistic forms used,the latter to thefunctions served by those forms.In a challenge against the traditional view of pointthat input is the facilitator of second language acquisition (SLA),Long proposed thatinteraction is the necessary and sufficient condition of SLA.The classic versionredefined interaction as the adjustment of conversational structure,and illustratedsome devices and strategies of adjustments of conversational structure.This versionstands for the formal establishment of the Interaction Hypothesis.The updatedversion explained why interaction facilitates SLA.According to Long (1996,451-52),"negotiation for meaning,and especially negotiation work that triggersinteractional adjustments by the NS or more component interlocutor,facilitatesacquisition because it connects input,internal learner capacities,particularlyselective attention,and output in productive ways."From its theoretical sources and evolutions,we conclude that the InteractionHypothesis,distinct from the social interaction theories,is philosophically based oninteractionism and methodologically based on psycholinguistics.With the cognitivefunction of conversational interaction as its basis,the Interaction Hypothesis claimsthe adjustment of conversational structure as its core.Implied in the hypothesis isthat SLA is facilitated by negotiation for meaning alongside with negotiation of form:the former functions as the priming force,into which the latter is integrated. With the updated version of the Interaction Hypothesis as the watershed,theinteraction approach has witnessed two major evolutional stages:the first stage tendsto be descriptive and observational,and the second stage tends to be interpretive andexplorational.The two research focuses in its first stage are the role of interaction andits social mediating factors.The basic conclusion is that interaction,mediated bysocial factors such as task types,familiarity,and gender,benefits comprehension andproduction.The major research in the second stage is orientated to the role of interactionalfeedback and its mediating variables.The cognitive factors such as language analyticability,attention,memory,and proficiency have increasingly become the majorconcerns in the mediating variables of interacitonal feedback.Research about theeffectiveness of interactional feedback has not yet provided clear-cut evidence tosupport the theoretical claims that a certain feedback type as the ideal technique todraw learners' attention to the formal properties of the language.The previous interaction research is beset with some methodological problems.First,confusions exist in the coding of interactional feedback.Second,experimentaldesigns vary enormously.Language testing measures are obsessed with confusionbetween deployment and acquisition.In case of theoretical orientation,researchershave concentrated too much effort to investigate the mediating role of attention whileturning a blind eye to other cognitive abilities,such as intelligence.This study aimed to explore the effects of language aptitude on interactionalfeedback in Chinese children's development in syntactic forms of English question,under the theoretical framework of interaction research.Three central researchquestions were formulated:Q~1.Does interactionai feedback of different kinds (including rejections,explanations,recasts,and prompts) have a differential effect on Chinesechildren's development in syntactic forms of English question.?Q~2.Do individual differences in language aptitudes (including generalintelligence,working memory intelligence,verbal comprehensionintelligence,language analytic ability,and error correction attitudes) mediate the relationship between interactional feedback and children'sdevelopment in question forms?Q~3.To what extent does each of the language aptitudes predict the effectivenessof interactional feedback on language development?This study took a laboratory-based experimental design with pretests,immediateposttests,and delayed posttests.A total of 123 Chinese primary school students withan average of twenty months of English learning on class participated in the presentstudy.In accordance with the method of stratified random sampling,participants weredivided into six groups:control group,negotiation-for-meaning group,rejection group,explanation group,recast group,and prompt group.The control group were requiredto self-study by reading the textbook themselves while the experimental groups doingtreatment work.The negotiation-for-meaning group did negotiation but received nofeedback.The other four experimental groups were separately provided with one typeof interactional feedback on their syntactic and morpheme errors.Participants received one treatment one week,altogether two consecutive weeks.In either treatment,the participant did dyadic negotiation with one interactor,carryingout two tasks in ten minutes.Pretests were accomplished a week before TreatmentⅠ,immediate posttests just on the day when TreatmentⅡfinished,and delayed postteststwo weeks later.We adopted three types of measure of language development:developmental stages,explicit knowledge,and implicit knowledge.The timedgrammaticality judgment tests and the oral imitation tests were used to measure theimplicit knowledge,and the unntimed grammaticality judgment tests and thetranslation multiple choice tests were used to measure the explicit knowledge.As for the effects of interactional feedback,the experimental results displayed:①Conversational interaction without any feedback does not facilitate developmentin either language knowledge or question stages.②Rejection is the only strategyof interactional feedback to prompt language development,moreover,in terms of thedelayed effects on implicit knowledge.As regards the relevance of feedback toaptitude factors,the experiment revealed:③Rejection correlates with none of the five language aptitude factors.④Explanation has highly strong positivecorrelations with general intelligence in terms of the immediate effects on explicitknowledge,the same with language analytic ability in terms of the immediate effectson implicit knowledge.It has positive relevance to general intelligence in terms ofthe delayed effects on implicit and explicit knowledge,to working memoryintelligence in terms of immediate and delayed effects on explicit knowledge,toverbal comprehension intelligence in terms of immediate effects on implicit andexplicit knowledge,to language analytic ability in terms of delayed effects onimplicit knowledge,and to error correction attitudes in terms of delayed effects onexplicit knowledge.⑤Recasts have highly strong positive correlations withworking memory intelligence in terms of delayed effects on implicit knowledge.They have positive correlations with general intelligence in terms of delayed effectson implicit knowledge,and with working memory intelligence in terms of immediateand delayed effects on explicit knowledge.⑥Prompts have positive correlationswith verbal comprehension intelligence in terms of delayed effects on implicitknowledge,and with error correction attitudes in terms of immediate and delayedeffects on explicit knowledge.In terms of degrees of predicting the effects for astrategy of interactional feedback on the children's language development inquestion forms,the experimental results indicate three types of predicting degrees.⑦The first one is none-effect type.None of the language aptitude factors predictthe effects of rejections on language development.⑧The second one isone-factor-effect type.Working memory intelligence predicts the immediate/delayedeffects of recasts on explicit knowledge.Error correction intelligence predicts thedelayed effect of prompts on explicit knowledge and verbal comprehension onimplicit knowledge.⑨The four hierarchy types involve more than one predictingaptitude factors.(a)There are three aptitude factors predicting the delayed effects ofexplanation on the explicit knowledge,general intelligence coming to the fore,working memory intelligence in the middle,and error correction intelligence at theend.(b)General intelligence precedes language analytic ability in the aptitudefactors predicting the delayed effects of explanation on the implicit knowledge.(c) Among the aptitude factors predicting the immediate effects of explanation on theimplicit knowledge,language analytic ability precedes the first,then follows generalintelligence,and last comes verbal comprehension intelligence.(d)Working memoryintelligence ranks the first and general intelligence the second in the aptitude factorspredicting the delayed effect of recasts on the implicit knowledge.In referring to our interpretations of the research findings,we came up with thefollowing conclusions:①Not all strategies of interactional feedback facilitatechildren's foreign language learning.Rejection,as a factor decisive enough not to beaffected by the language aptitude factors,plays a more helpful role than explanation,recasts,and prompts to facilitate children's implicit knowledge in a long term.②All the five language aptitude factors affect the effects of explanations on children'sforeign language learning.General intelligence and working memory intelligencemediate the effects of recasts on children's foreign language learning.Verbalcomprehension intelligence and error correction attitudes mediate the effects ofprompts of on children's foreign language learning.③All the aptitude factorspredict the effects of feedback on children's explicit knowledge,but languageanalytic ability and verbal comprehension intelligence predict no effect of feedbackon children's implicit knowledge.The present study contributes to the interaction research in several aspects.Theoretically,the contribution is fivefold.Our first theoretical contribution lies in thetheorization of the Interaction Hypothesis,the guideline of the interaction research.Michael Long's special term interaction has otten been mistaken as the socialcommunication.It is the first time that the definition of interaction was pinpointed tobe the adjustment of conversational structure rather than the inter-personalcommunication from the perspective of theorization of the Interaction Hypothesis.Our second contribution to the interaction research lies in the firstcomprehensive review of the interaction research.In reviewing the previous studiesof interaction research,we explored the problems beset with the interaction researchfrom the perspectives of methodology and theoretical orientation.Our third theoretical contribution consists in our exploration of the features of interactional feedback in the context of Chinese children's EFL.It is the first timethat a laboratory-based experimental design was adopted to explore the effects ofinteractional feedback of different kind in the context of Chinese children's Englishas a foreign language learning.The fourth theoretical contribution of the study lies in the exploration of theeffects of language aptitude on interactional feedback.This is either the first time thatintelligence was introduced to the interacitonal feedback as one of the languageaptitude factors,or the first time that the effects of language aptitude on interacitonalfeedback was explored in Chinese children's EFL.The last but not the least theoretical contribution of our empirical study lies inour exploring the extent to which each of the language aptitude factors predict theeffectiveness of interactional feedback on language development.This is the firsttime that the hierarchy effects of language aptitude factors was introduced into theinteraction research.Methodologically,we made two new contributions in the empirical study.First,a combination of three types of measure were used to test language development:thedevelopmental stages of questions,the explicit knowledge,and the implicitknowledge.Second,in respect of measurement of the implicit knowledge,weinitiated the oral imitation test to fit in with the English proficiency of the primarypupils.Pedagogically,the present study on the features of interactional feedback inChinese children's foreign language learning sheds light on the possible solutions toforeign language teaching in China.As a small scale exploratory study,the findings presented here have necessarilybeen modest and suggestive rather than conclusive.The present study is not withoutits problems with a small size of samples and the practice effect because of therepeated tests.