Examining the Interface between Metalinguistic Task Performance and Oral Production in a Second Language

Different theories of SLA offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. We examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners ‘his/her’in English. Learners’ oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to developmental stages;a parallelframework was developed to classifylearners’performance on a metalinguistic task. Two classes of French-speaking children in an intensive ESL programme in Quebec participated in the study. Both received instruction which can be characterised as communication-oriented. In addition, the Rule class was given metalinguisticinformation about the possessive determineragreementrule and participated in a seriesof cooperative learning activitieswhich provided practice in articulating and applying the rule. The Comparison class received no special treatment with respect to possessive determiners. We found that there was considerable correspondence between oral and metalinguistic task performance for the Comparison class. In contrast, the instructional intervention appeared to alter the relationship between performance on the two tasks in the Rule class. These findings are considered from the perspective of five hypothetical positions posited to exist between oral production and metalinguistic task performance.