Incidental and Intentional Instruction on Discussion Techniques: Assessing Complexity Issue

Abstract

Although both incidental and intentional instructions provide a medium for acquiring the communicative language, they suffer from a number of oversimplifications. Whereas the majority of studies in these paradigms have addressed second language (L2) grammatical development, there has been a growing interest in the effect of these types of instruction on pragmatic development, conversation gambits, and speech acts. The purpose of the present paper is to compare these types of instruction in promoting learning of discussion techniques. Learner performance was analyzed on the basis of the mean occurrence of discussion techniques (giving opinions and presenting series of arguments) in implicitly and explicitly instructed group using independent t-test. The quality of leaner language produced in each group was further analyzed in terms of complexity measuring the complexity of utterances and length of the turns. The results were all in favor of intentional instruction.