Download or read book Metalinguistic Knowledge and the Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive by Learners at Three Proficiency Levels written by Maite Correa and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most controversial topics in Applied Linguistics is the role of learners' metalinguistic knowledge (MK) in second language (L2) learning and teaching. There seems to be no agreement between those who propose that MK is essential for L2 learning and those who believe that it can even be detrimental for L2 acquisition. Additionally, the subjunctive has been reported to be one of the most difficult structures to master for L2 learners of Spanish. It has been suggested that the subjunctive is acquired fairly late in an acquisition hierarchy of Spanish grammar and that, as a consequence, learners must reach a stage where they can produce syntactically sophisticated utterances in order to be"ready"for acquisition. Taking an Information Processing (IP) approach to language learning as a framework, this dissertation investigates the relationship between MK and grammatical accuracy by learners of Spanish at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of proficiency. Their MK is assessed through a set of terminology and grammaticality judgment tasks. Their mastery of the Spanish subjunctive is evaluated through a set of receptive and productive tests involving different subordinate clauses. The three groups of participants are compared with respect to their MK and their mastery of the subjunctive, and it is examined whether MK correlates with mastery of the subjunctive. Findings include: 1) an improvement on both subjunctive accuracy and terminology knowledge across levels; 2) a positive correlation between English MK and Spanish MK; 3) a positive correlation between MK and accuracy in the use of the subjunctive; and 4) agreement between the learners' acquisition hierarchy within the subjunctive and teaching order of subjunctive substructures. The findings show that MK has a positive impact on the mastery of this"difficult"structure. They are also consistent with other experimental studies that suggest that explicit instruction has a positive impact on L2 learning. The late and uneven acquisition of the subjunctive demonstrated by the subjects in this study also suports the hypothesis that there are"many subjunctives"to learn and that learners will not acquire this structure until they are developmentally ready (third year of instruction).

Download or read book Language Dominance in Bilinguals written by Jeanine Treffers-Daller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from an international team of leading experts, this volume offers new ways to explore and measure language dominance.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition Morphosyntax and Semantics written by Tania Ionin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-11 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides innovative and comprehensive coverage of research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of morphosyntax, semantics, and the interface between the two. Organized by grammatical topic, the chapters are written by experts from formal and functional perspectives in the SLA of morphosyntax and semantics, providing in-depth yet accessible coverage of these areas. All chapters highlight the theoretical underpinnings of much work in SLA and their links to theoretical syntax and semantics; making comparisons to other populations, including child language acquirers, bilinguals, and heritage speakers (links to first language acquisition and bilingualism); dedicating a portion of each chapter to the research methods used to investigate the linguistic phenomenon in question (links to psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics); and, where relevant, including intervention studies on the phenomenon in question (links to applied linguistics). The volume will be indispensable to SLA researchers and students who work on any aspect of the SLA of morphosyntax or semantics. With its coverage of a variety of methodologies and comparisons to other populations (such as child language acquirers, early bilinguals, heritage speakers, and monolingual adults), the handbook is expected to also be of much interest to linguists who work in psycholinguistics, first language acquisition, and bilingualism.

Download or read book Instructors Views Towards the Second Language Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive written by John Warren William Powell and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of Spanish instructors' beliefs is a recent development and the body of work is small with little research conducted on their insights on the acquisition of any grammar form. Still, Spanish grammar includes the notoriously difficult subjunctive, a grammatical irrealis mood that is affixed to verbs. A national survey was conducted on Spanish professors and instructors (N=73) who teach at institutions randomly selected from a representative sample of American institutions of higher education. The survey was conducted to inquire on their beliefs regarding the most complex forms in Spanish, the causes of the subjunctive difficulty, and their preferred methods of teaching the form. The results first indicate that participants rated the subjunctive the most difficult grammar form. They attributed the cause of difficulty to be primarily interference from the first language and its abstractness. For instructing the subjunctive, participants generally supported form-oriented instruction with a metalanguage approach that focuses on forms. However, the participants disagreed greatly on whether meaning-focused instruction was valuable and dismissed drilling instruction of the subjunctive. Data from the participants provides a distribution of overextended tense, moods, and aspects in lieu of the Spanish subjunctive. However, instructors indicated that their students' competence of the subjunctive was higher than their performance and that comprehension was not necessarily reliant on correct usage of the subjunctive as it was for proficiency. Moreover, they provided qualitative data of effective methods and pedagogical challenges of the subjunctive. This study illuminates some of the contributing factors of subjunctive difficulty and preferred pedagogical approaches for teaching it. It also has implications that meaning may not be obstructed if students do not use subjunctive.

Download or read book Multilingualism and third language acquisition written by Jorge Pinto and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to present recent studies in the field of multilingualism and L3, bringing together contributions from an international group of specialists from Austria, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and United States. The main focuses of the articles are three: language acquisition, language learning and teaching. A collection of theoretical and empirical articles from scholars of multilingualism and language acquisition makes the book a significant resource as the papers present a wide perspective from main theories to current issues, reflecting new trends in the field. The authors focus on the heterogeneity and complexity that characterize third language acquisition, multilingual learning and teaching. As the issues addressed in this book intersect, it represents an asset and therefore the texts will be of great relevance for the scientific community. Part I presents different topics of L3 acquisition, such as syntax, phonology, working memory and selective attention, and lexicon. Part II comprises texts that show how the research on language acquisition informs pedagogical issues. For instance, the role of the knowledge of previous languages in the teaching of L3, the attitudes of multilingual teachers to plurilingual approaches, and the benefits of crosslinguistic pedagogy versus classroom monolingual bias. In sequence, Part III consists of texts on individual learning strategies, such as motivation and attitudes, crosslinguistic awareness, and students’ perceptions about teachers’ “plurilingual nonnativism”. All these chapters include several different languages in contact in an acquisition/learning context: Basque, English, French, German, Italian, Ladin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Heritage Languages written by Silvina Montrul and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An authoritative overview of research into heritage language acquisition, covering key terminological and empirical issues, theoretical approaches, and research methodologies.

Download or read book English in Europe written by Jasone Cenoz and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book emerges as a response to the increasing use of English as a lingua franca in the multilingual European context. It provides an up-to-date overview of the sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and educational aspects of research on third language acquisition by focusing on English as a third language.

Download or read book The Acquisition of the Subjunctive Mood by Intermediate level Learners of Spanish written by John Henry Kaufman and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the effect that the modality (volition, doubt, emotion, belief, knowledge, etc.) of matrix noun clauses has on the ability of intermediate (second-year) Spanish L2 students (n=56) to properly produce the subjunctive and indicative moods, the relative order in which students tend to most accurately produce the subjunctive in response to the modalities of volition, doubt, and emotion, and students' level of syntactic ability and mood development. Each participant took a test consisting of twenty questions containing various modalities intended to elicit either the subjunctive or indicative mood. Participants also filled out a questionnaire that was designed to ascertain the participants' level of formal and informal experience with Spanish. The results of this study show that a) when the subjunctive was the target response most participants favored the unmarked indicative mood significantly more than the marked subjunctive mood, b) students most accurately produced the subjunctive to the modality of volition (VL), followed by doubt (DT), and emotion (EM), which is consistent with Collentine's study, and c) students were able to process complex syntax when producing the unmarked indicative mood but not when they were prompted to produce the marked subjunctive mood. The results of this study show that pedagogical expectations regarding the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by second-year Spanish students may be unrealistic as these students were operating somewhere between the pre-syntactic and syntactic stages.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Heritage Languages written by Silvina Montrul and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heritage speakers are native speakers of a minority language they learn at home, but due to socio-political pressure from the majority language spoken in their community, their heritage language does not fully develop. In the last decade, the acquisition of heritage languages has become a central focus of study within linguistics and applied linguistics. This work centres on the grammatical development of the heritage language and the language learning trajectory of heritage speakers, synthesizing recent experimental research. The Acquisition of Heritage Languages offers a global perspective, with a wealth of examples from heritage languages around the world. Written in an accessible style, this authoritative and up-to-date text is essential reading for professionals, students, and researchers of all levels working in the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, education, language policies and language teaching.

Download or read book The Handbook of Language Teaching written by Michael H. Long and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary team of contributors, this Handbook is a wide-ranging and invaluable reference guide to language teaching. A comprehensive reference work on language teaching, which combines the latest research findings, coverage of core topics, and examples of teaching experience from a variety of languages and settings Provides a unique breadth of coverage, including: the psycholinguistic underpinnings of language learning; social, political, and educational contexts; program design; materials writing and course design; teaching and testing; teacher education; and assessment and evaluation Offers a balanced evaluation of the major positions and approaches, including examining the increasingly important social and political context of language teaching Written by an international and interdisciplinary group of authors from a dozen different countries; English is only one of the many languages used as examples throughout the volume

Download or read book L2 Learners Difficulties in the Interpretation of the Spanish Subjunctive written by Jeannette Sanchez-Naranjo and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines L2 learners' difficulties in the acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive. In particular, it investigates the interpretations English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish assign to the subjunctive in temporal, concessive, and conditional clauses, where mood choice involves the interaction of morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. In contrast to previous research that has given little attention to the difficulties L2 learners experience, this study hypothesizes they might be attributed to "input traps" resulting from L1 transfer of syntactic and semantic properties of the subjunctive adjuncts and misanalysis of the input due to the lack of integration of different types of information. This study tests this claim by comparing the grammars of English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish with those of native Spanish speakers. If L2 learners share similar patterns with L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave similarly, and exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave differently, difficulties should be attributed to L1 influence on the L2. On the other hand, if L2 learners exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where semantic or pragmatic features determine the use of the subjunctive, difficulties should be attributed to failures in form-meaning mappings. Data collection involved a Preference Task with three possible options: a sentence with the indicative, with the subjunctive, or no preference. Subjects were asked to select which of the three choices they preferred according to the context presented in the story. Twenty advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish and twenty native speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries, who served as the control group, took part in this study. Results indicate that subjunctive adjuncts present difficulties in L2 acquisition even for advanced L2 learners. Although they exhibit sensitivity to certain subjunctive features and contextual meanings, data reveal that convergence and non-convergence were primarily determined by L1 influence on L2. Crucially, those features absent from the L1 give rise to greater efforts and difficulties in L2 form-meaning mappings of mood selection.

Download or read book Heritage Speakers Online Processing of the Spanish Subjunctive written by Priscila Lopez-Beltran Forcada and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies assessing the grammatical knowledge of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language have largely focused on the Spanish subjunctive mood and have concluded, almost unanimously, that heritage speakers' knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is non-native-like and subject to incomplete acquisition. However, there is also evidence that while different, heritage speakers' linguistic knowledge is by no means deficient. The goal of the present dissertation is to achieve a holistic understanding of the nature of grammars of heritage speakers and to contribute to a theory of processing in heritage language contexts that has greater explanatory adequacy. To this end, this dissertation examines knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive in heritage speakers who live in a long- standing bilingual community in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in comparison to a group of Spanish-dominant bilinguals born in Mexico. The dissertation sets out to provide (1) an evidence-based characterization of heritage speakers by using a sociolinguistic questionnaire which, along with PCA, examined the language-experience related factors that best explain the variability in the processing of the subjunctive mood in this population; and (2) an examination of heritage speakers' and Spanish-dominant bilinguals' processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension and production by means of psycholinguistic experiments that integrated corpus data into their design. Results indicated that, both in comprehension and production, the current group of heritage speakers was sensitive to the lexical and structural conditioning of mood selection, and that the performance of heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals converged on the same results and trends. All participants showed nuanced knowledge of the morphosyntactic factors that modulate the conditioning of mood selection, as suggested by the fact that linguistic factors such as frequency and proficiency also modulated their sensitivity. In addition, based on the PCA conducted, the role of three sociolinguistic variables was examined: use of the heritage language, language entropy, and identification with the heritage language. As predicted, results indicated that sensitivity to the lexical and structural conditioning of mood selection was greater for heritage speakers who: (1) used the heritage language more often on average, (2) used the heritage language in more diverse contexts, and (3) felt more identified with the heritage language. The findings highlight that factors such as the community examined and the ecological validity of the materials used are crucial. In addition, they underscore the importance of triangulating both comprehension and production experimental data, and employing multiple explanatory variables for a more comprehensive approach to complex and highly variable systems such as heritage grammars.

Download or read book Syntactic Development of the Spanish Subjunctive in Second Language Acquisition written by Laurie A. Massery and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: If you ask students taking Spanish as a foreign language which grammar point they find most challenging, many of them will probably say the subjunctive. This may be because the more common use of the subjunctive in English is captured by non-subjunctive structures like infinitival or null CP [+indicative] structures. From a generative perspective, the present study investigates second language (L2) syntactic and semantic development of the Spanish subjunctive at the University level. The results of the study reveal that learners at all levels of instruction continued to transfer first language (L1) syntactic rules of English irrealis to L2 structures during acquisition. For this study, a total of 160 English-speaking learners studying Spanish as a second language were recruited. Magnitude Estimation (ME) was used to gage learners' syntactic intuitions about the Spanish subjunctive by requiring them to analyze a series of structures in L2. We found that in their judgment of the sentences, learners transferred the [+ optional] overt CP rule in English to Spanish. In addition to these syntactic analyses, we used a guided production task which measured learners' semantic performance as well. The data showed that learners were less successful at identifying epistemic modality (+/- reality, existence, etc.) in nominal clauses, as sentences using deontic modality (+/- obligation, desire, influence, etc.) received substantially higher scores. The data were also analyzed in terms of learnability and second language grammatical capabilities as well as in terms of implications for the L2 classroom. The pedagogical implications of this study include the need to capitalize on learners' ability to access functional categories in nominal clauses and make the [-optional] overt CP rule in Spanish more salient to learners.

Download or read book California English Language Development Standards written by Faye Ong and published by . This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research written by Sylviane Granger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 1199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of learner corpus research go back to the late 1980s when large electronic collections of written or spoken data started to be collected from foreign/second language learners, with a view to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition and developing tailor-made pedagogical tools. Engaging with the interdisciplinary nature of this fast-growing field, The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research explores the diverse and extensive applications of learner corpora, with 27 chapters written by internationally renowned experts. This comprehensive work is a vital resource for students, teachers and researchers, offering fresh perspectives and a unique overview of the field. With representative studies in each chapter which provide an essential guide on how to conduct learner corpus research in a wide range of areas, this work is a cutting-edge account of learner corpus collection, annotation, methodology, theory, analysis and applications.

Download or read book Implicit and Explicit Language Learning written by Cristina Sanz and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last several decades, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and psycholinguists have investigated the implicit and explicit continuum in language development and use from theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives. This book addresses these perspectives in an effort to build connections among them and to draw pedagogical implications when possible. The volume includes an examination of the psychological and neurological processes of implicit and explicit learning, what aspects of language learning can be affected by explicit learning, and the effects of bilingualism on the mental processing of language. Rigorous empirical research investigations probe specific aspects of acquiring morphosyntax and phonology, including early input, production, feedback, age, and study abroad. A final section explores the rich insights provided into language processing by bilingualism, including such major areas as aging, third language acquisition, and language separation.