| This study evaluated the effects of input enhancement techniques and metalinguistic/collaborative awareness on the acquisition of the plural -s morpheme. Additionally, the durability of these interventions on the target linguistic feature was examined. The two treatment groups and the comparison group consisted of 101 grade 5 students enrolled in a French-language school board in the Montreal area. A pretest-posttest design was used to assess participants before and after the treatments. A series of 8 oral and written treatment activities focusing on plural -s were specifically created for the study, which lasted 4 weeks. The findings demonstrate that both groups showed durable, definite intervention effects for written production. The metalinguistic/collaborative group significantly outperformed the input enhancement group in oral production, indicating that input enhancement in conjunction with metalinguistic awareness is effective. Nonetheless, the learning effect for oral production was found to be robust for both groups, 5 months after the end of the treatment period, as well as for a small subsample selected from each group 10 months later. |
