Every now and then I post concise summaries of research findings from studies I come across in my quest for emprical evidence which supports or negates my intuitions or experiences as a language teacher and learner. As I have mentioned in a previous post (‘ten reasons why you should not trust ground-breaking educational research’), much of the research evidence out there is far from being conclusive and irrefutable, due to flaws in design, data elicitation and analysis procedures which often undermine both their internal and external validity. However, when three or more  reasonaby well-crafted studies (however small) find concurring evidence which challenge commonly held assumptions  and/or resonates with our own ‘hunches’ or experiences about teaching and learning, it is reasonable to assume that ‘there is no smoke without fire’.

The following studies have been picked based on the above logic. They are small and less than perfect in design, but do reflect my professional experience and indicate that the validity some dogmata many teachers hold about language teaching and learning may be questionable.

1. Baudrand-Aertker (1992) – Effects of journal writing on L2-writing proficiency

21 students of French in the third year at a high school in Louisiana were asked to keep a journal over a nine-month period. They were required to write two entries per week at least and were not engaged in any other type of writing tasks for the whole of the duration of the study. The teacher responded to the students’ journal entries focusing only on content – not on form. Using a pre-/post-test design Baudrand-Aertker found that:

• The students’ written proficiency improved significantly as evidenced by the post-test and their own perception;
• The students felt that the journals helped them improve their overall mastery of the target language;
• The students reported positive attitudes towards the activity;
• The vast majority of the students did not want to be corrected on their grammatical mistakes when engaging in journal writing.

Although this study has important limitations in that there was no control group to compare the independent variable’ effects with, I find the results interesting and I intend to give journal-writing a try myself next year.

2. Cooper and Morain (1980) – Effects of sentence combining instruction

The researchers investigated the effect of grammar instruction involving sentence combining tasks on the essay writing of 130 third quarter students of French. The subjects were divided into two groups: the experimental group received 60 to 150 minutes instruction per week through sentence combining exercises whilst the control group was taught ‘traditionally’ through workbook exercises. The experimental group outperformed the control group on seven of the nine measures of syntactic complexity adopted. Although the study did not look at the overall quality of the informants’ essays but only at the syntactic complexity, its findings are very interesting and has encouraged me to incorporate sentence combining tasks more regularly in my teaching strategies. Here is an discussion of the merits of sentence combining instruction and how it can be implemented

3. Florez Estrada (1995) – Effects of interactive writing via computer as compared to traditional journaling

In this small scale study (28 university students of Spanish) Florez-Estrada compared a group of learners exchanging e-mail and chatting online with native-speaking partners with another group of students engaged in interactive paper writing with their teachers. The researcher found that the computer group outperformed the control group on the accuracy of key grammar points such as preterite vs imperfect, ‘ser’ vs ‘estar’, ‘por’ vs ‘para’ and others. The findings of this study were echoed by another study of 40 German students, Itzes (1940), which involved students in chatting via computer amongst themselves in the TL. A notable feature of this study is that the students chose the topics they wanted to chat about. These two studies confirms finding from my own practice; I often use Edmodo or Facebook to create a slow student-initiated chat on given topics in which the whole class is involved, every students sharing their opinions/comments with their peers with the assistance of the dictionaries. I have found this activity very beneficial even with groups of less able learners.

4. Nummikoski (1991) and Caruso (1994) – Effects of extensive L2-reading on L2-writing proficiency as contrasted with written practice.

Both studies investigated if L2 learners who are engaged in extensive L2-reading (with no writing instruction/practice) write more effectively than L2 learners who are involved in writing tasks but do no reading. The results of both studies show a significant advantage for the writing-only condition. These studies, which are by no means flawless, do challenge the commonly held assumption that we can improve our students’ writing proficiency by engaging them in extensive reading.

5. Martinez-Lage (1992) – Comparison of focus-on-form with focus-on-form-free writing

The researcher investigated the impact of two writing-task types on the writing output of 23 second-year university Spanish students. The same students were asked to write (a) typical assigned compositions and (b) dialogue journals in which they were told they would not be assessed on grammar accuracy. The surprising finding was that the syntactic complexity across both task types was equivalent but the focus-on-form-free task type (journal writing) was grammatically more accurate. I concur with Martinez-Lage on this one as I have tried this strategy myself with many of my AS groups over the years.

6. Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992) – Effect of peer feedback in L2 writing

The researchers studied 30 students in an accelerated first year college French class, who wrote two essays involving three separate drafts. The experimental group was involved in peer feedback (essays were read aloud to each other and oral feedback was given), whilst the other group received written teacher feedback. In terms of performance from the first to the second essay both groups made significant improvements, but in different areas: the peer-feedback group got worse in grammar but did better on content, organization and vocabulary; the teacher feedback group, exactly the opposite. It should be noted that a previous study by Piasecki (1988) which adopted a very similar design but lasted much longer (8 weeks) and involved 112 students of third-year high school students of Spanish, found no significant differences between the two conditions. This confirms my reservations about using peer-feedback as an effective way to correct learner output and as a blanket corrective strategy; in my opinion it may work quite well with certain groups of individuals with highly developed grammar knowledge and critical thinking skills but not with others.