Effects of Inductive and Deductive Grammar Instruction Based on the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy: on Korean EFL Middle School Students

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to examine the implicational generalization of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) under two instructional contexts. According to the NPAH, indirect object (IO) relative clause is seen as more marked than direct object (DO) and subject (SU) relative clause, suggesting that the hierarchy may be implicational with respect to the difficulty order of acquisition or learnability (Gass, 1979). In addition, Implicational Generalization Hypothesis (IGH), proposed by Hamilton (1991), posits that knowledge of more marked forms implies the knowledge of less marked ones. All in all, this study aims to investigate Korean middle school L2 learners’ generalization of knowledge of IO relative clause to SU and DO relative clauses under two experimental conditions, which are inductive and deductive instruction respectively. The knowledge of relative clauses were measured by Sentence Combination Task (SCT) and Interpretation Task (IT). The findings demonstrated that Korean middle school learners can generalize knowledge of IO to less marked SU and DO relative clauses only when they learn IO relative clauses under the condition of deductive instruction. The pedagogical implications will be discussed.