The Teaching and Acquisition of Focus Constructions: An Integrated Approach to Language Awareness Across the Curriculum

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where information cannot be highlighted by prosodic means. They are also important with respect to idiomaticity and stylistics, and thus, an ideal topic for an integration of linguistics and literature in the foreign language classroom. German university students of English were confronted with a literary text in which focus constructions abound, and then given several tasks to assess their awareness of and ability to (re-)produce them. The findings show that even advanced students have only a very general awareness of information highlighting by means of formal aspects and genre-specific devices, while their awareness of syntactic means is very low. The paper discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings and argues for a discourse grammar approach to the teaching of focus constructions, proposing a teaching unit designed to raise students' awareness for the fundamentals of information structure.

Keywords:

• writing
• awareness-raising
• second language learning
• stylistic variation
• metalinguistic awareness
• language awareness

Notes

1. See Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999; Hewings, 1999; Frodesen & Eyring, 2000. In addition, we recommend Esser, 1995; Kortmann, 1999: Chapter V.2, and Sammon, 2002: Chapter I, all of which are intended particularly for German EFL learners.

2. Studies that have employed between-methods triangulation, e.g. Callies (2006) who triangulated experimental data (elicited production, metapragmatic assessment and introspection) and learner corpus data, produced corroborating evidence: The findings from elicited and free production tasks were confirmed, even strengthened in retrospective interviews.

3. It could be suggested that the instructions may have been difficult or even misleading for subjects untrained in linguistics. It was exactly because of the fact that our informants were university students of English with little metalinguistic knowledge, however, that we chose the more neutral, non-technical term ‘information’, rather than a formal linguistic term, such as ‘sentence constituent’ or the like. We also considered it essential not to elaborate too much on this notion to avoid prompting the informants. In fact, their responses show that they had few problems in completing the tasks (see Callies, 2006 for similar findings).