An Investigation into the Effects of Structured Input, Referential Activities, and Affective Activities on the Acquisition of English Causative Forms

Abstract

The present study was conducted to investigate the relative effect of structured input, referential activities, and affective activities on the acquisition of English causative forms. The processing of English causative structures is hindered by The First Noun Principle. Forty-one school-age Chinese learners of English as a second language were assigned to three treatment groups: (1) Structured input group; (2) Referential-only group; (3) Affective-only group. This classroom-based study adopted a pretest-posttest design. The test in the study assessed the interpretation and production of the target feature at the sentence level. Results showed that the structured input group, and the referential-only group made significant improvements in both the interpretation and production of English causative structure, while the affective-only group yielded almost no learning gains from pre-test to post-test.

Keywords

• input processing
• structured input activities
• referential activities
• affective activities
• English causative forms