The Role of Instruction in the Acquisition of the English Locative Alternation by Korean High School Students

This study aims to explore what role instruction plays in the acquisition of the English locative alternation and how it interacts with other factors influencing SLA within the learnability issue. The framework of Pinker (1989) is taken as the theoretical basis. 89 high-level high school students participated in the study and received three types of instruction for two class days, I.e. fill-in-blank instruction, negative evidence instruction, and semantic constraint instruction. Tests consisting of the video-clip description task and the acceptability judgment task were taken before and after the treatment. The results showed that the knowledge of the broad-range rule increased after the instruction, while the one of the narrow-range rule did not. The increase in the application of the broad-range rule mainly occurred in the change-of-state meaning which could not bring the help of L1 and language universal knowledge. Few instructional effects for the narrow-range rule posed the question of the nature of the narrow-range rule itself and the appropriateness of teaching tasks presented in the study. The most effective instructional method was the semantic constraint instruction which significantly improved the knowledge of the change-of-state meaning. These findings lend support to the multi-faceted nature of L2 learnability and the interaction of various factors in L2 grammar development.