The Contrast Theory of negative input

Abstract

Beliefs about whether or not children receive corrective input for grammatical errors depend crucially on how one defines the concept of correction. Arguably, previous conceptualizations do not provide a viable basis for empirical research (Gold, 1967; Brown & Hanlon, 1970; Hirsh-Pasek, Treiman & Schneiderman, 1984). Within the Contrast Theory of negative input, an alternative definition of negative evidence is offered, based on the idea that the unique discourse structure created in the juxtaposition of child error and adult correct form can reveal to the child the contrast, or conflict, between the two forms, and hence provide a basis for rejecting the erroneous form. A within-subjects experimental design was implemented for 36 children (mean age 5;0), in order to compare the immediate effects of negative evidence with those of positive input, on the acquisition of six novel irregular past tense forms. Children reproduced the correct irregular model more often, and persisted with fewer errors, following negative evidence rather than positive input.

Differential Effects of Prompts and Recasts in Form-Focused Instruction

“…showed that corrective recasting, which includes a recast preceded by a repetition of the learner's error and intonational stress added to both repetition and recast to emphasize the incorrect and correct forms, is also more effective than no feedback+ Ohta~2000! showed that four adult learners who produced private speech with moderate to high frequency while wearing lapel microphones in a formoriented foreign language classroom tended to repeat recasts, regardless of whether they were the intended recipients of the recasts~cf+ Nabei & Swain, 2002!+ For a comprehensive review of recast studies, see Nicholas, Lightbown, and Spada~2001!+ Based on my own observation studies of immersion classrooms~e+g+, Lyster, 1998bLyster, , 2002b have argued that recasting-as defined in the L1 literature~e+g+, Marcus, 1993;Saxton, 1997! and as observed in immersion classrooms i+e+, an implicit targetlike reformulation of a learner's utterance!-is not the most effective way of providing young L2 learners with negative evidence in classrooms where the primary focus is on subject matter, especially in comparison with other feedback options+ My analyses of immersion classroom discourse suggested that recasts are, for the most part, embedded in meaningfocused negotiation and are thus ideal for facilitating the delivery of complex subject matter, because they provide supportive, scaffolded help, which serves to move the lesson ahead when the target forms in question are beyond the students' current production abilities+ Recasts used in this way compete with many other demands on attention during content-based instruction and appear to be ambiguous, because they share discourse functions with a similar proportion of teacher repetitions of well-formed utterances~Lyster, 1998b!…”

Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form

“…Doughty (1998) Saxton's (1997, p. 155) Saxton (1997) demonstrated in an experiment which manipulated the input to children acquiring irregular past tense forms that the children were able to recover from overgeneralized hypotheses when given recasts oferrors better than when provided positive input models in advance oftheir errors. This advantage for recasts over models has also been found for Ll English learners ofl,2 Spanish adjective placenrnt (Ortega & Long, 1997 …”

Learning Japanese Case: Overextensions and the Effects of Feedback

“…As in the case of the positive evidence, the immediate effect of the negative evidence in Saxton's (1997) sense was not observed for accusative case-marking. However, both positive evidence and the negative evidence had a certain effect on the children's utterances.…”

“…Adult: He shot the fish! According to Saxton (1997), the negative evidence provided immediately after the child's error highlights the contrast between the child's error and the correct form. His experimental study demonstrates that English-speaking children can learn the irregular past tense form of novel verbs when negative evidence is given.…”