The linguistic and emotional impact of running dictation on migrant children and adolescents

The present study explores the linguistic and emotional effects of running dictation, an underexplored Focus-on-Form (FonF) grammar teaching intervention, on migrant children and adolescents in Greek reception classes who acquire Greek as L2. The teaching protocol targeted the obligatory use of the definite article after the demonstrative pronouns aftos and ekinos, and the universal quantifier olos, the omission of which is frequent in L2 Greek. A pre-/post-test design was employed to test the effectiveness of the intervention. The control group participated only in the pre- and post-test. The intervention group received a teaching intervention on the target phenomenon. The latter group also completed an emotional ratings questionnaire after the end of the intervention. The results revealed that the intervention group exhibited significant learning gains from pre- to post-test and assigned higher ratings to positive than negative emotions. Crucially, the learning gains were not predicted by the emotional ratings.