An Empirical Study of the Teachability and Learnability of L2 “Thinking for Speaking” Patterns

Abstract

This study examines whether explicit pedagogical instructions of multimodal strategies based on typological contrastive analysis have any facilitative effect on the restructuring of “thinking for speaking” patterns, focusing on motion event construal which has been demonstrated to be notoriously difficult in second language acquisition (Hendriks and Hickmann 2011, Slobin 1996). Eighty adult Chinese intermediate-level EFL learners were recruited for a classroom-based quasi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design. Teaching TFS instructions with awareness enhancement strategies as an independent variable divided the participants into two groups, the experimental group that received instructions and control group that followed a traditional teaching approach over a period of 4 weeks. Writing data were elicited by means of the <i>Frog Story</i> and was coded on specific measures of accuracy and complexity of the properties of lexicalization patterns: the description of Motion, Path and Ground. The results showed positive instructional effect on learners’ writing performance of motion event expression and confirmed the possibility of restructuring L1 thinking-for-speaking patterns in L2 through pedagogical instructions. The findings provide practical implications for teachers, typological contrastive awareness and explicit pedagogical instructions prove to be significant for learners’ development of L2 thinking for speaking patterns.