<p>The aim of the present study is to examine how the development of <i>syntactic complexity</i> and <i>accuracy</i> in spoken Spanish L2 is related to two parameters, <i>motivation</i> and <i>aptitude</i>, in which <i>individual differences</i> are often claimed to correlate with successful second language learning (Dörnyei and Skehan 2003). The study shows how an understanding of the relationship between progression in second language proficiency and motivation is gained through the study of longitudinal data and the assessment of motivation in discourse. The development of syntactic complexity and accuracy in oral performance has been chosen as main indicators of <i>proficiency level</i>. <i>Correlations</i> have been computed between proficiency levels, <i>development coefficients</i>, quantitative outcomes of aptitude tests and quantified assessment of motivation. The study is based on longitudinal data consisting of recorded interviews and conversations in Spanish in Swedish upper secondary school. </p><p>The results from the progression analysis show that the whole group develops syntactic complexity, and that individual learners concentrate on either syntactic complexity or accuracy in their development. </p><p>Discourse analytical methods have been applied to the in-depth interviews in order to identify motivational types expressed by the learner and the strength of each type. These have been represented in terms of values on a self-determination scale, the extreme points of which are '<i>intrinsic</i>' vs. '<i>extrinsic</i>' motivation. An aptitude test (<i>Lat03</i>, Meara 2005) has also been administered to the participants and analysed . </p><p>Correlations (Spearman) have been further calculated between the relevant parameters. The results indicate that self-determined, intrinsic motivation correlates with progression. Analytic aptitude, however, does not predict progression to the same extent as intrinsic motivation seems to do at this level. </p>

The aim of the present study is to examine how the development of syntactic complexity and accuracy in spoken Spanish L2 is related to two parameters, motivation and aptitude, in which individual differences are often claimed to correlate with successful second language learning (Dörnyei and Skehan 2003). The study shows how an understanding of the relationship between progression in second language proficiency and motivation is gained through the study of longitudinal data and the assessment of motivation in discourse. The development of syntactic complexity and accuracy in oral performance has been chosen as main indicators of proficiency level. Correlations have been computed between proficiency levels, development coefficients, quantitative outcomes of aptitude tests and quantified assessment of motivation. The study is based on longitudinal data consisting of recorded interviews and conversations in Spanish in Swedish upper secondary school. The results from the progression analysis show that the whole group develops syntactic complexity, and that individual learners concentrate on either syntactic complexity or accuracy in their development. Discourse analytical methods have been applied to the in-depth interviews in order to identify motivational types expressed by the learner and the strength of each type. These have been represented in terms of values on a self-determination scale, the extreme points of which are 'intrinsic' vs. 'extrinsic' motivation. An aptitude test (Lat03, Meara 2005) has also been administered to the participants and analysed . Correlations (Spearman) have been further calculated between the relevant parameters. The results indicate that self-determined, intrinsic motivation correlates with progression. Analytic aptitude, however, does not predict progression to the same extent as intrinsic motivation seems to do at this level.

The main aims of the thesis are: to explore the development of Swedish university students’ vocabulary knowledge, size and depth and vocabulary use (i.e. lexical richness) in their written output, to examine the relationship between these, their relationship to examination grades, and to investigate how these relationships develop over time. The results showed that over one year of university studies stronger links between the two dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, size and depth are established. No relationship was found between informants’ vocabulary size and lexical richness. However, a modest relationship was found between depth and the lexical richness of student essays. Furthermore, there was a modest relationship between vocabulary knowledge and academic performance. A weaker significant, relationship was found between lexical richness of student essays and academic performance as reflected in the course grade. However, the study did not show evidence of a relationship between lexical richness and essay grade, which seems to indicate that lexical richness, is not an essential criterion in teachers’ assessment of essays. In regard to the development of the informant’s vocabulary knowledge, there was a significant growth in their productive size and depth of vocabulary knowledge after both one and two terms. The informants’ receptive size was found to only develop over two terms of study. Moreover, they produced lexically richer essays in their second term than in their first term of study. The results of the study are discussed in light of the effect of similar learning experience at university and the onset vocabulary ability of the informants. Moreover, the findings are discussed from the perspective of pedagogical implications and vocabulary assessment.

Los estudios sobre riqueza léxica con participantes suecos tienen, en su gran mayoría, la L2 inglés como lengua objeto. A día de hoy, no se conocen investigaciones que tengan como lengua objeto el español. Respecto a los participantes, suelen ser estudiantes con un nivel de competencia alto. El presente estudio se centra en la L3 español y estudiantes de nivel bajo e intermedio. En concreto, las muestras de lengua analizadas son narrativas escritas por 180 estudiantes suecos de bachillerato, elicitadas a través de una serie de viñetas. De acuerdo con las dos preguntas de investigación, este trabajo tiene como objetivo principal arrojar luz sobre la relación entre diversidad léxica y competencia léxica y morfosintáctica en la L3 español. En segundo lugar, se comparan varias medidas de diversidad léxica en busca de una medida apta para discriminar de una manera fiable entre diferentes niveles de competencia en la lengua meta. Los datos demuestran un efecto tangible del nivel de competencia sobre la diversidad léxica, aunque de las comparaciones que resultan ser estadísticamente significativas se manifiesta una fuerte influencia del factor edad. Respecto a las medidas, el Índice de Guiraud y el indicador Carroll son las únicas que discriminan significativamente entre los participantes más jóvenes, y también resultan idóneas a discriminar en dos comparaciones del grupo más mayor. Por consiguiente, se consideran las medidas más fiables entre las que se han utilizado en el estudio. Sin embargo, los resultados estadísticos de las dos medidas coinciden a tal punto que se puede afirmar que se trata de dos versiones de la misma medida, aunque muestran valores numéricos diferentes. / Research on lexical richness with Swedish subjects have mostly English as a target language. At the present time, we cannot find investigations having Spanish as a target language. Subjects are usually university students with high proficiency. This study focuses on Spanish as a third language and students with low/intermediate proficiency. Language samples consist of 180 narratives written by Swedish high-school students with a low/intermediate average proficiency in Spanish. The samples have been elicited by means of pictures. According to the two research questions, the main aim of the present study is investigating the relationship between lexical diversity and lexical and morphosyntactic proficiency in Spanish as a third language. Secondly, we compare several measures of lexical diversity searching for results that can reliably discriminate between different proficiency levels in Spanish. The data show a clear effect of proficiency on lexical diversity, even though statistically significant comparisons also point out the influence of the age factor. Regarding the measures, Guiraud’s Index and Carroll’s indicator are the only ones that significantly discriminate among younger participants. They have also proved to be suitable for discriminating comparisons within the older participants’ group. Nevertheless, the statistical results of these two measures correspond to such a high degree that we can consider them as two versions of the same measure, even if they provide different numerical values.

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No. of bitstreams: 1 toledo_ldl_me_sjrp.pdf: 2270514 bytes, checksum: 564ee2f75603507e914c127ed1286837 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-09-01 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / O projeto Teletandem Brasil (TELLES, 2006) é um projeto pedagógico e de pesquisa, que se apresenta como uma opção de prática telecolaborativa (O‟DOWD, 2013), e tem como um de seus objetivos proporcionar a aprendizagem de línguas estrangeiras e a aproximação de pessoas que estão distantes geograficamente dentro das instituições de ensino usando, principalmente, ferramentas de videoconferência. O projeto Teletandem tem hoje diferentes modalidades, conforme as oportunidades e necessidades das universidades envolvidas. Nesse contexto, investigamos o uso de vocabulário rico (MALVERN; RICHARDS, 2012) na produção oral de dois aprendizes brasileiros de inglês como língua estrangeira que participaram das sessões de teletandem (TTD) na modalidade institucional integrada (ARANHA; CAVALARI, 2014) em parceria com aprendizes norte-americanos de português. Nosso objetivo é caracterizar as sessões orais de teletandem (SOT) em relação ao uso de vocabulário rico (VR), e descobrir quais características do cenário de aprendizagem (FOUCHER, 2010) mostram-se mais relevantes ao uso de VR nas SOTs. Nosso estudo se caracteriza como uma pesquisa de métodos mistos (DÖRNYEI, 2007), e nosso principal instrumento de coleta de dados é um programa de computador usado para registrar as interações em áudio e vídeo, o Evaer®. Para proceder à análise quantitativa dos dados, transcrevemos as sete SOTs de dois interagentes e submetemos os textos ao programa computacional RANGE, que traça o LFP, ou perfil lexical (LAUFER; NATION, 1995) dos interagentes. O perfil lexical é uma medida de qualidade da linguagem que mostra o percentual de utilização de VR, bem como percentual utilizado de vocabulário básico e intermediário. Os resultados nos apontaram as SOTs que se destacaram quanto à utilização de VR, bem como as ocorrências específicas. Esses dados foram usados na análise qualitativa, em que identificamos as características do cenário de aprendizagem (CA) que se mostraram mais relevantes à produção oral de VR. Para a análise qualitativa, examinamos cada ocorrência de VR e identificamos o tipo de discurso do CA que era predominante no momento de sua ocorrência. Nossos resultados mostraram que as características do CA que foram mais relevantes ao uso de VR foram aquelas relacionadas ao tipo de discurso predominante na SOT, mais especificamente quando havia direcionamento através da tarefa em língua estrangeira. / Teletandem Brasil (TELLES, 2006) is a pedagogical and research project that is an option in telecollaborative practice (O'Dowd, 2013). One of its objectives is to provide foreign language learning, and the approximation of people who are geographically distant within the educational institutions, using mainly videoconferencing tools. The Teletandem project has different modalities, according to the opportunities and needs of the universities involved. In this context, we investigated the use of rich vocabulary (MALVERN; RICHARDS, 2012) in the oral production of two Brazilian learners of English as a foreign language who participated in the teletandem (TTD) sessions in the integrated institutional modality (ARANHA; CAVALARI, 2014). The Brazilians were working in partnership with North American learners of Portuguese. Our goal with this study is to characterize oral teletandem sessions (OTS) regarding the use of rich vocabulary (RV), and to discover which characteristics of the learning scenario (FOUCHER, 2010) are more relevant to the use of RV in the OTS. Our study is characterized as a mixed methods research (DÖRNYEI, 2007), and our main data collection tool is a computer program used to record the audio and video interactions: Evaer®. In order to quantitatively analyze data, we transcribed the seven OTS of the two students and submitted the texts to the computer program RANGE, which shows the lexical frequency profile (LFP) (LAUFER; NATION, 1995) of the students. The LFP is a measure of language quality that shows the percentage of RV use as well as the percentage of basic and intermediate vocabulary used. The results showed us the OTS that stood out regarding the use of RV, as well as the specific occurrences. These data were used in the qualitative analysis, in which we identified the characteristics of the learning scenario (LS) that were most relevant to oral RV production. For the qualitative analysis, we examined each occurrence of RV and identified the type of discourse of the LS that was predominant at the time of its occurrence. Our results showed that the characteristics of the LS that were most relevant to the use of RV were those related to the type of discourse that was predominant in the OTS, more specifically when the students were carrying out a task in the foreign language. / CAPES: 33004153069P-5