syntactic priming Essay

McDonough, K., Mackey, A. (2008). Syntactic priming and ESL question development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(1), 31-47.

In the study targeting L2 learning effects of syntactic priming, Mcdonough & Mackey (2008) sought to investigate what role syntactic priming plays in the development of ESL questions. This study is based on previous studies that investigated learner’s responses to interactional feedback in the form of repetition of recasts and reformulation of previous utterances in which equally take place right after feedback is given. Mcdonough & Mackey’s previous study, in addition, incorporated a learner’s making of a new utterance via the syntactic structure they heard in a recast. This engaged the construction of a unique utterance, instead of a reformulation or repetition of a recast. After looking at various findings, immediate repetitions of recasts were not proven to be associated with ESL question development. For this reason, Mcdonough & Mackey (2008) suggested narrowing this study to primed production to distinguish if a correlation of ESL question advances exists even when unaccompanied by any interactional feedback. As a result, this study focuses on primed production occurring in an interactive context with different “stages” that will be elucidated and does not include having native English speakers provide learners with recasts of any sort.
To address these types of findings, Mcdonough & Mackey (2008) selected 37 native speaking Thai women and 9 native speaking men that were undergraduate students from 6 different programs: education( n=20), agro-industry (n=14), humanities (n=6), business administration (n=3), economics (n=2) and engineering (n=1). The interlocutors used in the study were undergraduate juniors and seniors who were majoring in English. Evidence of syntactic priming might not always be clear which is why the treatment activities created contexts purposely for syntactic priming to take place. As this study flourished from preceding literature that used interaction research, communicative tasks that were used previously were incorporated into the study. It incorporated Pienemann and Johnston’s (1998,2007) notion of a “higher stage” when referring to ESL question development. Identifying a learner’s progress to a better stage was preferred as it demonstrates how advanced the reader is, thus also giving insight on whether a learner can attain particular forms. For instance, a higher stage would be when a participant produced “at least two linguistically and contextually unique questions”(p.36). The group of students undergoing the treatment were expected to produce more highly developed questions subsequent to the interlocutor’s developmentally superior questions, and this would have to occur more than any other question types. Therefore, syntactic priming was only recognized when participants produced these highly developed questions even though lower or same level questions were produced by the interlocutors. By doing this, the overall goal was to determine if there was a relationship between syntactic priming and ESL question formation. To elicit this, all participants but the control group were asked to:
1) Involve themselves in two 20- min sessions that elicited contexts for questions.
2) Produce two linguistically and contextually unique questions which were based on stages that were proven more developmentally advanced.

The stage 4 & 5 questions that were considered to be analyzed were as follows:
(a) Yes and no questions with an auxiliary
(b) Yes-no questions with the copula
(c) Wh-questions with the copula
(d) Wh-questions with auxiliaries
The results were looked at proportionally because of the variation of syntactic priming occurring in the study. Essentially, seeing that the mean proportion was .72, any participant scoring more than .72 was allocated to the higher stage priming group. The amounts of participants falling in the high

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