Post-instruction Processing of Generics in English by Japanese L2 Learners

Abstract

Over the past couple of decades there has been a concentrated effort to look at the acquisition of articles by adult second language (L2) learners of English. Many studies have tended to focus on whether adult L2 learners can successfully acquire articles, whilst other studies have conducted interventions to determine if instruction can be an effective way to facilitate acquisition though explicit learning. However, more often than not, in studies that implement a pre-test > post-test > delayed post-test design, there is no real way of ascertaining whether any of the explicit knowledge gained through instruction can change underlying linguistic competence. The current study addresses the question of whether explicit instruction can affect real-time reading times by administering a self-paced reading task. The aim of using a self-paced reading task is to find out whether instruction leads to faster or slower reading times for the instruction group of definite kind sentences, e.g., The dodo is extinct, compared with the non-instruction group. The findings reveal that the instruction group is faster in their reading times compared with the non-instruction group, from the critical region (kind predicate, e.g., be extinct) onwards, for the definite kind condition. We discuss the implications of our findings for the Competing Systems Hypothesis (Rothman J, Lang Contrast 8:74–106, 2008).