Input Variability in Foreign Language Verb–Argument Construction Learning: A Primary School Intervention

Abstract

Input variability (i.e., varied experience with different grammar exemplars; “[talk/think/rant/wonder] about [god/bicycles/dogs]”) can improve generalization (i.e., “[Verb] about [Noun]”) and enhance learning. Controlled experiments show that input variability benefits children's generalization and extension of linguistic information from input structures to novel contexts (Wonnacott et al., 2012). Such findings drove our investigation into extending input variability benefits to classrooms.

Following a usage‐based constructionist approach, we present a two‐week quasi‐experimental teaching intervention with two British Year 2 classes learning German (6‐to‐7‐year‐olds; 20 students per class). The intervention featured a variability and no‐variability condition, using 16 German “approach” event verb–argument constructions (“To the X [verb] the Y”), featuring four separate or just one verb in the verb slot, respectively. Posttests indicated that children exposed to variability generalized better to novel verbs. The findings corroborate controlled experiments. Even in “noisy” classrooms, input variability can benefit students’ construction generalization and extension to novel verbs.