The effect of task-based peer interaction and pre-task instruction on young EFL learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of past tense: An intervention study

The present study explores whether a focused task-based peer interaction pedagogical intervention leads to increased explicit and implicit knowledge of past simple tense among young learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and whether adding pre-task explicit grammar instruction or explicit interactional instruction or both has any impact on the results. Four groups of 6th grade EFL learners aged 11–12 years participated in an 8-week pedagogical intervention (50 minutes per week) while a fifth control group only participated in the testing sessions (n = 36). Groups were divided according to the intervention received: grammar+interaction strategy (n = 26), grammar (n = 26), interaction strategy (n = 24) and task-only (n = 24). The four groups who underwent treatment also participated in past tense focused task-based peer interaction in the second part of the weekly intervention session. All groups completed a bi-modal untimed grammaticality judgement task (GJT) (explicit knowledge) and a self-paced reading task (SPR) (implicit knowledge) before and after the intervention. Results show that the use of pre-task instruction of both linguistic and interactional type together with focused peer-interaction tasks contributes to the children’s explicit learning of past tense. Children’s implicit knowledge of past tense did not show any significant development in any of the intervention types. Findings are discussed in relation to the pedagogical intervention carried out and the development of implicit and explicit knowledge.