Input flooding and the acquisition of the Spanish verbs ser and estar for beginning -level adult learners
Abstract
The role and relative importance of learners' attention, awareness, and noticing are issues that have been debated in studies involving second language acquisition. Previous studies have presented data to support the idea that learners do in fact benefit from focusing their attention on the formal features of the L2 while attending to the message conveyed as well (Doughty 1991; Doughty and Williams 1998a,; Leow 2001; Long 1990; Norris and Ortega 2001; Schmidt 1990, 1993; Sharwood Smith 1991, 1993; White 1998; Wong 2001). Schmidt (1990, 1993, 1995) claimed that no L2 learning takes place without noticing, awareness at the point of intake. In order to increase learners' possibilities of noticing, instructional techniques have been developed with the goal of making the input more salient. One of these techniques of input enhancement is input flooding, in which learners are bombarded by an artificially increased number of the target form, while maintaining a communicative focus. The present study examines the effect of textual input flooding and the acquisition of the Spanish copulative verbs, ser and estar. Twenty-five subjects divided into two groups met three times in ten days. During each 50-minute session, subjects read two texts of approximately 350 words, answered content-oriented questions and participated in activities in which they expressed opinions about the texts. Treatment group texts contained a total of 286 instances of the target forms. The control group's texts contained 85 instances. Analysis of test scores on an immediate and a delayed posttest showed no significant difference between the two groups in their use of ser and estar. Both groups improved equally from pretest to posttest 1. Data from posttest 2 show a tendency for significance as the treatment group's mean score was higher than that of the control group. The findings are interpreted in terms of the difficulty of the rule for using the target forms, the explicitness of the treatment, and the subjects' current level of development.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hammond, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Language arts
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