Pan, Rodriguez-Flores, Kaku, & Lai (2024) Interleaving Enhances Romance Language Grammar Learning

This study investigated the potential of interleaved practice—a strategy of alternating between categories or concepts—to enhance second language grammar skills, particularly verb conjugation and tense identification involving two common Romance languages, Spanish and French. College students (Experiments 1 and 2) and adult learners (Experiments 3 and 4) participated in two weekly learning sessions, followed by a one-week delayed criterial test. The interleaved group alternated between two tenses per session, while the blocked group learned one tense per session. Results indicated that interleaving improved verb conjugation skills across all experiments, enhanced tense identification in Experiments 1 and 3, and boosted language identification skills in Experiment 4. Notably, interleaving proved beneficial across tenses differing in usage, meaning, and suffixes, suggesting its effectiveness is not restricted to closely related tenses. These findings highlight interleaving as a versatile and powerful strategy for language learning, with benefits extending beyond the confines of similar grammatical structures.