Effects of Explicit Instruction on Intransitive and Transitive Verbs in Second Language English: with a Special Focus on Non-Instructed Verbs

Abstract

　　The present study investigates whether adult Japanese learners of English (JLEs) are able to use intransitive and transitive verbs in appropriate structures after a series of instructional sessions, and whether the effect of instruction can be observed with verbs which are not part of instruction. Second language learners have been reported to make errors concerning the structure of verbs. For instance, they tend to overpassivize some intransitive verbs (Hirakawa 1995, Zobl 1989) or use transitive verbs in the intransitive structure (Kondo 2014). In this study, we examine whether explicit instruction can be effective for JLEs to avoid the errors aforementioned, not only with verbs which are explained in instruction but also with those which are not. The results show that in general, the participants improved on their uses of intransitive and transitive verbs after receiving instruction, and interestingly the improvement was observed with both instructed and non-instructed verbs.