The Effects of Guided Induction Completed Individually and in Groups on the Development of Negation in Palestinian Arabic an Analysis of Accuracy, Processing, and Rule Structure

The effectiveness of different instructional interventions and the various ways such interventions promote L2 learning and processing has been the topic of recent research in the subfield of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA). Previous research on the effects of guided inductive instruction (GI) in the second language classroom has left various lacunae to be addressed, such as the effect(s) of linguistic complexity, proficiency level, modality of instruction, and the target language (Ranta, 2022). A plethora of studies in the current literature compares the efficacy of GI to deductive instruction as students work individually in computer-assisted language learning contexts (CALL) revealing varied results (Cerezo et al., 2016; Zhuang, 2017; Leow et al. 2019; Baalousha and Malovrh, 2023). Recent research has also examined the effect of GI treatments in contexts of group interaction in brick-and-mortar classrooms (Toth et al., 2013; Toth et al., 2020). With the increased presence of technology in the language classroom, it has become essential to test the full potential of CALL. One way to do this is by investigating whether adding a social construct to a CALL experiment by having students work together during parts of the experiment would lead to superior learning gains compared to when they work individually. The present study extends the existing body of GI research by exploring a novel structure: complex negation in Palestinian Arabic (PA). It examines the potential effects of a GI treatment conducted in a fully online environment by second semester learners of Arabic working individually (n = 15) and compares that to learners working in pairs (n = 12) during the rule-induction stage. Using a self-paced reading task embedded in E-prime software, this study investigates the effect of rule completeness and rule accuracy on learners’ immediate and delayed accuracy scores, normalized verb reading times, picture response times and time on task immediately and after 4 weeks. Results indicate that the type of GI treatment did not impact students’ processing behavior in terms of response times and reading times. However, it did have a significant effect on their immediate learning gains (p < .05), their retention over the period of four weeks (p < .001), and their time on task (p = .015), with an edge for the GI group completed individually without a social component during the rule induction stage. These findings are in line with previous research that found positive effects for GI treatment completed in a fully online context without the need for social interaction (Cerezo et al., 2016; Zhuang, 2017; Baalousha and Malovrh, 2023). This dissertation also found that treatment type did not impact the information structure that learners developed as a result of each experimental condition, and that even though written rules did indeed provide meaningful insights about learners’ explicit knowledge, this information structure did not impact their learning gains nor processing behavior. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that a GI experimental design that utilizes the constructs of structured input, explicit instruction, guiding prompts, and reactive feedback elicits the best outcome in terms of accuracy and efficiency of learning complex grammatical structures when completed in a fully online environment without the need for a social interaction component.