Abstract
L2 researchers increasingly agree that task-based teaching, combined with timely form-focused instruction, offers an ideal environment for L2 learning. However, the timing of form-focused instruction is debated, with concerns that pre-task interventions may distract learners from focusing on meaning. While some studies address this issue for adults, little is known about children. Hence, this study examined the impact of post-task explicit instruction on children’s task-based interactions in an online EFL setting. Thirty-three Korean EFL children aged 7–11 participated in seven online lessons using Zoom and Padlet. They read a storybook and completed a collaborative post-reading task. The +Explicit Instruction group (+EI) received a three-minute grammar explanation before the task, while the −Explicit Instruction group (−EI) did not. The children’s interaction was analysed for language-related episodes (LREs). Although the number of LREs was small, the −EI group generated significantly more and more elaborate LREs than the +EI group. Regardless of group, the participants attempted to address the majority of linguistic issues raised, but importantly, LREs related to the target form hardly ever occurred. Overall, the analyses of task-based interactions revealed that participants’ primary attention remained on meaning, regardless of whether or not they received explicit instruction.
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Research ethics: Research ethics approval was received from the Research Ethics Committee at University College of London, Institute of Education. Prior to the study, the participants and their guardians were given an introduction and an information sheet describing (a) the purpose of the study (b) the duration and procedure of the study, (c) the participants’ freedom to withdraw from the study at any time, and (d) the measures taken to ensure privacy and confidentiality. Each participants’ and guardian’s agreement to participate in the study was obtained by signing an online consent form.
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Author contributions: The authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.
A.1 Pre-reading activity
A.2 Post-reading activity
A.3 Post-reading activity
A.4 Class Padlet wall
Appendix B: Explicit instruction slide
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
- Research Articles
- Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
- Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
- Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
- Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
- Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
- Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
- Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
- “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
- Regular Articles
- Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
- A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
- Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
- Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
- Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
- General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
- Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
- Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
- Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
- The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
- An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
- “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
- Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
- Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
- A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
- Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
- The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Young L2 learners in diverse instructional contexts
- Research Articles
- Impact of post-task explicit instruction on the interaction among child EFL learners in online task-based reading lessons
- Can we train young EFL learners to ‘notice the gap’? Exploring the relationship between metalinguistic awareness, grammar learning and the use of metalinguistic explanations in a dictogloss task
- Exploring self-regulated learning behaviours of young second language learners during group work
- Developmental trajectories of discourse features by age and learning environment
- Implementing an oral task in an EFL classroom with low proficient learners: a micro-evaluation
- Exploring teacher-student interaction in task and non-task sequences
- Children learning Mongolian as an additional language through the implementation of a task-based approach
- “Black children are gifted at learning languages – that’s why I could do TBLT”: inclusive Blackness as a pathway for TBLT innovation
- Regular Articles
- Defining competencies for training non-native Korean speaking teachers: a Q methodology approach
- A cross-modal analysis of lexical sophistication: EFL and ESL learners in written and spoken production
- Using sentence processing speed and automaticity to predict L2 performance in the productive and receptive tasks
- Distance-invoked difficulty as a trigger for errors in Chinese and Japanese EFL learners’ English writings
- Exploring Chinese university English writing teachers’ emotions in providing feedback on student writing
- General auditory processing, Mandarin L1 prosodic and phonological awareness, and English L2 word learning
- Why is L2 pragmatics still a neglected area in EFL teaching? Uncovered stories from Vietnamese EFL teachers
- Validation of metacognitive knowledge in vocabulary learning and its predictive effects on incidental vocabulary learning from reading
- Anxiety and enjoyment in oral presentations: a mixed-method study into Chinese EFL learners’ oral presentation performance
- The influence of language contact and ethnic identification on Chinese as a second language learners’ oral proficiency
- An idiodynamic study of the interconnectedness between cognitive and affective components underlying L2 willingness to communicate
- “I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers
- Development and validation of Questionnaire for Self-regulated Learning Writing Strategies (QSRLWS) for EFL learners
- Language transfer in tense acquisition: new evidence from English learning Chinese adolescents
- A systematic review of English-as-a-foreign-language vocabulary learning activities for primary school students
- Using automated indices of cohesion to explore the growth of cohesive features in L2 writing
- The impact of text-audio synchronized enhancement on collocation learning from reading-while-listening: an extended replication of Jung and Lee (2023)