Complexiteit en Instructie: De invloed van complexiteit op het leereffect van verschillende typen instructie

There are many ways to teach grammatical structures. In this research, two types of instruction have been investigated. One was rule instruction: the rules were explained to the learners. The other was input enhancement: the learners were given correct examples in which the relevant elements were made salient by bold print and italics.The structures differed in complexity. There were a simple, a complex and a very complex structure. The complexity was determined using De Graaff s (1997) definition. The aim was to find out whether a grammatical structure can be too complex to be acquired as a result of instruction.Rule instruction turned out to have a learning effect for all structures. It leads to some explicit knowledge, but probably also to implicit knowledge. Input enhancement only had a learning effect for the simple structure. It probably, only leads to implicit knowledge: explicit knowledge could not be observed.DeGraaff s definition of complexity turned out to be insufficiently specified. It does not distinguish between formal and functional complexity. Furthermore, within formal complexity, syntactic properties of words and word order features should be distinguished.