Longitudinal study on teaching reduction to second language learners

We tested four groups of intermediate Dutch learners of French. The participants of three experimental groups followed 10 lessons of 30 minutes each. Two experimental groups received the same explicit instruction about reduced forms after which one group only practiced the comprehension of reduced forms (the Explicit Instruction Comprehension group; hereafter EIComp), while the other group practiced the production of reduced forms (the Explicit Instruction Production group; hereafter EIProd). The third experimental group was also exposed to reduced forms but only received grammar instruction (the Grammatical Instruction group; hereafter GramI). The last group, the control group (hereafter Control), did not follow any lessons. The participants’ ability to comprehend reduced forms in context was tested at four different moments with four different cloze tests (hereafter, T0, T1, T2, T3): before, during, and after the lessons, as well as three months after the lessons had ended. At the end of the last test (T3), we verified whether the participants knew the words they had heard during all four tests (test labelled Expressions in the folders and documents). At the start of the study, we first assessed the participants with a pre-test. The pre-test consisted of a verbal working memory test in Dutch, followed by a self-paced reading task, two grammar exercises, and one audio and one audio-visual comprehension tasks in French. The word document Files description.docx presents a timeline of the unfolding of the experiment, and details the content of each folder and file. The consent forms templates, and the audio files for the cloze tests and pre-test, as well as their content are to be found under MATERIALS. RAW DATA contains the raw output files. DATA is the data we used for our statistical analyses. All data files are accompanied by a word document named 'variables' which explains the names of the variables and their type.