Interleaved practice enhances grammar skill learning for similar and dissimilar tenses in Romance languages

Background

Interleaved practice (or interleaving), the strategy of alternating between categories or concepts during study or practice, can enhance second language grammar skills. It remains to be determined, however, whether that enhancement specifically involves identifying tenses, conjugating verbs, or both, and whether close similarity between tenses is essential.

Aims

This study investigated the language skills that interleaving can enhance and the extent to which that enhancement is limited to highly similar tenses.

Sample

Participants were college students (Experiment 1, 92 participants; Experiment 2, 109 participants) and adult learners (Experiment 3, 104 participants; Experiment 4, 88 participants).

Methods

In each experiment, participants completed two weekly learning sessions and a one-week delayed criterial test. In the blocked group, participants learned one tense per session. In the interleaved group, participants alternated between two tenses during each session. The criterial test assessed: verb conjugation skills (all experiments), tense identification ability for specific usage scenarios (Experiments 1–3), and the capacity to identify the language of a sentence written in a specific tense (Experiment 4).

Results

Interleaving improved verb conjugation skills in all experiments, tense identification ability in Experiments 1 and 3, and language identification skills in Experiment 4. Benefits of interleaving were observed across tenses varying in usage, meaning, and suffixes.

Conclusions

Interleaving enhances multiple language skills, including verb conjugation, tense identification, and language identification. Those benefits are not limited to highly similar tenses. Accordingly, these results challenge assumptions about interleaving and underscore its potential as an effective approach for improving language learning.