Abstract
This study investigates the effects of input and interaction activities on the acquisition of French reflexive verbs. In this research project, I address the following two research questions: 1) Will acquisition and production of French reflexive verbs vary according to instructional treatment? 2) Will acquisition and production of French reflexive verbs vary according to the proficiency level of the participants? The findings will be discussed within the input-interaction framework of second language acquisition. All data collection takes place within the university classroom environment. Intact university classes from first semester French (N=62), second semester French (N=54), and third semester French (N=64) participated in this study based upon communicative classroom activities. Proficiency level was divided into three groups that received the following forms of instruction: input (N=68), interaction (N=74), and no instruction/control (N=38). The interaction groups were further divided into “high” and “low” learners according to each individual’s teacher rankings. The target forms chosen for this experiment were French reflexive verbs. Comprehension, acquisition, and production of the target forms were measured three times during a pretest, immediate posttest, and a 7-day delayed posttest using two tasks: a composition of daily routines and a translation of typical daily routines. Two tasks were evaluated: 1) a composition task that was evaluated according to attempted target forms and correct target forms; and 2) a translation task that was evaluated by correct target forms. The results for attempts on the composition task revealed that input and interaction groups significantly increased their production of French reflexive verb attempts from pretest to posttest; overall the first semester students did better than the advanced students. The results for the correct target forms on the composition task revealed that overall input and interaction groups performed significantly better than the control groups and first semester performed better than the advanced students. For the translation task, the results indicated that each class performed relatively the same on this task at each point in time; significant results were found for time and its interactions with class and activity. As before, the input and interaction groups performed significantly better than the control groups from pretest to posttest. The results suggest that indeed production and accuracy does vary according to treatment type. The results also suggest that proficiency has an effect on production and accuracy as well. However, as we will see, the results are counterintuitive because the lower proficiency groups performed higher than the more proficient groups. Implications for evaluating the data using a qualitative analysis will be discussed as well.
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