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This study replicates VanPatten's research (1990) in order to determine whether learners of Spanish as a second language (L2) can simultaneously attend to meaning and form when processing input. My research furthers VanPatten's work through an investigation of more advanced students of Spanish L2. / The participants for this study were 60 advanced Spanish L2 students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. To investigate whether advanced L2 learners can focus on form while listening for meaning, participants were randomly assigned to complete one of four listening tasks: Task I (control task): listening to the passage for content only, Task II: listening to the passage for content and simultaneously noting the key lexical item, inflacion, Task III: listening to the passage for content and simultaneously noting the article la, and Task IV: listening for content and simultaneously noting the verb morpheme -n. Comprehension of the passage was assessed by a written recall protocol. / Results revealed that comprehension scores were higher among learners listening only for meaning than those of learners attending to meaning and one of the formal features. The findings of the present study are in agreement with VanPatten (1990). Learners' attention to form while listening for meaning appears to affect comprehension.

The case studies offered in this ethnography describe the learning experiences of 13 second and third grade students, six girls and seven boys, living in a medium-sizemidwestern town in the United States, who are taught Spanish as a foreign language once a week in 30 minute sessions during the 1995-6 school year. None of the children had any prior exposure to Spanish nor any additional exposure to Spanish outside the class I taught.The research investigates several areas of individual variety, including motivation, learning style, approach to vocabulary learning, classroom behavior, expectations, and listening and pronunciation skills.The study also investigates the impact of age and gender, as well as associations between the individuals' basic skills and L2 learning success.In addition, the study documents the teacher's experiences, observations, and insights during these classroom sessions. The researcher functioned as a participant-observer by teaching, recording, transcribing, and analyzing.The material for this study comes from hours of classroom teaching which were video- and audio-taped and from careful notes. The tapes and notes were transcribed and analyzed for patterns of learning behavior.A large number of observations resulted from this indepth study. One of the main findings of the study was that classroom management, emotional climate, and peer group influence are very closely interconnected. Learning was strongly related to cooperativeness and supportiveness in the two groups of girls but not seem to be so with the boys. There was no conclusive evidence that any one personality trait was more important than another in the long run. Overall scores on the CTBS were positively related to success in second language learning and were not negatively affected from one year to the next from the time taken out to study Spanish. There was no one area in the CTBS battery that could successfully predict foreign language aptitude; the best predictor seemed to be overall classroom success. Learning a foreign language was not particularly easy or automatic with this group; however, they did seem to have an aptitude and a willingness for repeating unfamiliar sounds. / Department of English

Research on morphological variability in second language (L2) acquisition has focused on the syntactic consequences of variability: that is, whether or not morphological variability entails underlying syntactic deficits. The interrelationship between morphological features in their own right has been largely ignored. This thesis addresses the representation of L2 features by investigating the use of default morphology---the outcome of systematic substitution errors employed by speakers of L2 Spanish. It is hypothesized that underspecified features act as defaults; by assumption, those features that are unmarked are underspecified. / Evidence to support this hypothesis comes from two sets of experiments conducted on intermediate- and advanced-proficiency L2 Spanish subjects (L1 English). The first set of experiments addresses verbal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on person, number, tense, and finiteness, and a comprehension task on person and number. The second set of experiments addresses gender and number in nominal morphology, and consists of a spontaneous production experiment on determiners, an elicited production experiment on clitics and adjectives, and a picture-selection task on the comprehension of clitics. Across tasks and across verbal and nominal domains, errors involve the systematic substitution of underspecified morphology. The observation that morphological variability extends to comprehension, and is qualitatively similar to the variability found in production, counters the suggestion that variability is strictly a product of mere performance limitations on production. Finally, the systematicity of substitution errors suggests that the natural classes of features such as gender, number, tense, and person are acquirable in an L2, regardless of whether or not these features have been instantiated in the native language.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / El método de enseñanza de uso común en el aula de hoy, el comunicativo, se ve frecuentemente con algunas ciertas incongruencias. Esto a veces llega a ser una fuente de frustración para el/la profesor/a que quiere transmitir el lenguaje de una manera efectiva, pero que lo ve difícil a causa de lo que parece, según muchos, una falta de información muy clara acerca de cómo y cuándo enseñar las formas gramaticales. Las investigaciones ofrecen puntos de vista muy opuestos: hay mucho debate acerca de si se debe enseñar la gramática en primer lugar; y si se enseña, ¿cómo se enseña para alcanzar el producto final de un grupo de estudiantes que usa la lengua con fluidez? ¿Existe alguna fórmula mágica, algún método eficaz para contestar estas preguntas a la satisfacción de los que requieren evaluar algo tan difícil de medir? En búsqueda de alguna respuesta concreta, aquí se va a investigar dos modelos comunicativos de la enseñanza de la gramática: uno que aparece frecuentemente en los libros de textos comunicativos, y uno de llegada más recién- el de la Instrucción Basada en el Procesamiento del Input (IBPI) de Bill VanPatten (1996, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). Las metas de esta investigación son dos. Primero, se va a demostrar las diferencias metodológicas entre la IBPI y la instrucción comunicativa estándar con lecciones explícitas. Además, se va a explorar la eficacia de estos dos métodos pedagógicos en la enseñanza de un punto gramatical con un estudio piloto de pequeña escala.

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This thesis consists of material for conversation in Spanish at the high school level.

This group of lessons is intended to help the child who does not speak Spanish to learn the language. The text is based on the interests of a child; in his dramatic attempts; in his love of the beautiful and the natural. It is not entirely complete, but the author hopes that it serves to give an idea how these materials can be used.