Do They Know What They're Doing? L2 Learners' Awareness of L1 Influence

Abstract

In this paper we report on the extent to which learners can make explicit L1 rules which appear to influence their L2 performance. The learners were 11–12-year-old francophone students learning English in intensive communicative ESL classes in Quebec. In previous research we had found that their knowledge and use of English questions and adverbs, while systematic, was not target-like. In question forms, the pattern in their interlanguage reflected the French constraint which allows subject-auxiliary inversion with pronouns and prohibits it with nouns. Regarding adverb placement, students accepted sentences with both SAVO (ungrammatical in French) and SVAO (grammatical in French but ungrammatical in English). In this study, students from the same population were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences and to explain their judgements. The results confirmed the patterns previously observed. That is, students' performance on adverbs and questions showed clear influence of transfer from French. However, there was no evidence that students were aware of how their intuitions about L1 grammaticality influenced their L2 judgements. It is suggested that research is needed to explore the potential effectiveness of drawing learners' attention to these L1 influences. Such research is needed particularly with young learners in communicative L2 learning contexts.