When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
Purpose: This article summarizes the shared principles and evidence underpinning methods employed in the three sentence-level (syntactic) grammatical intervention approaches developed by the authors. We discuss associated clinical resources and map a way forward for clinically useful research in this area. Method: We provide an overview of the principles and perspectives that are common across our three syntactic intervention approaches: MetaTaal (Zwitserlood, 2015; Zwitserlood, Wijnen, et al., 2015), the SHAPE CODING™ system (Ebbels, 2007; Ebbels et al., 2014, 2007), and Complex Sentence Intervention (Balthazar & Scott, 2017, 2018). A description of each approach provides examples and summarizes current evidence supporting effectiveness for children with developmental language disorder ranging in age from 5 to 16 years. We suggest promising directions for future research that will advance our understanding of effective practices and support more widespread adoption of syntactic interventions with school-age children. Conclusion: In each approach to syntactic intervention, careful and detailed analysis of grammatical knowledge is used to support target selection. Intervention targets are explicitly described and presented systematically using multimodal representations within engaging and functional activities. Treatment stimuli are varied within a target pattern in order to maximize learning. Similar intervention intervals and intensities have been studied and proven clinically feasible and have produced measurable effects. We identify a need for more research evidence to maximize the effectiveness of our grammatical interventions, encompassing languages other than English, as well as practical clinical tools to guide target selection, measurement of outcomes, and decisions about how to tailor interventions to individual needs.
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In L1 grammar teaching, teachers often struggle with the students’ conceptual understanding of the subject matter. Frequently, students do not acquire an in-depth understanding of grammar, and they seem generally incapable of reasoning about grammatical problems. Some scholars have argued that an in-depth understanding of grammar requires making connections between concepts from traditional grammar and underlying metaconcepts from linguistic theory. In the current study, we evaluate an intervention aiming to do this, following up on a previous study that found a significant effect for such an approach in university students of Dutch Language and Literature (d = 0.62). In the current study, 119 Dutch secondary school students’ grammatical reasonings (N=684) were evaluated by language teachers, teacher educators and linguists pre and post intervention using comparative judgement. Results indicate that the intervention significantly boosted the students’ ability to reason grammatically (d = 0.46), and that many students can reason based on linguistic metaconcepts. The study also shows that reasoning based on explicit underlying linguistic metaconcepts and on explicit concepts from traditional grammar is more favored by teachers and (educational) linguists than reasoning without explicit (meta)concepts. However, some students show signs of incomplete acquisition of the metaconcepts. The paper discusses explanations for this incomplete acquisition.
