Simplification of Input: Topic Reinstatements and their Effects on L2 Learners' Recognition and Recall

An experiment was designed to investigate how different types of topic reinstatements affected second language learners' recognition and recall of sentence topics in lectures. The variant reinstatement structures tested were repetition of the noun topic, rhetorical questions, synonyms, conditional clauses, and simple noun reiteration. The research question was whether syntactic simplicity or elaboration and redundancy would be more effective in promoting retention of the topic. Findings indicated that the redundant repeated noun was significantly better recognized than the simple noun, and was better recalled than the conditional or synonym. Learners with relatively low English proficiency tended to have poorer recall ability on the syntactically more complex structures.