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Different theories of SLA offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. We examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners 'his/her'in English. Learners' oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to developmental stages; a parallel framework was developed to classify learners' performance on a metalinguistic task. Two classes of French-speaking children in an intensive ESL programme in Quebec participated in the study. Both received instruction which can be characterised as communication-oriented. In addition, the Rule class was given metalinguistic information about the possessive determiner agreement rule and participated in a series of cooperative learning activities which provided practice in articulating and applying the rule. The Comparison class received no special treatment with respect to possessive determiners. We found that there was considerable correspondence between oral and metalinguistic task performance for the Comparison class. In contrast, the instructional intervention appeared to alter the relationship between performance on the two tasks in the Rule class. These findings are considered from the perspective of five hypothetical positions posited to exist between oral production and metalinguistic task performance.
