Abstract

The main goal of this investigation was to determine if there is a more effective approach among focus on forms, focus on meaning, or focus on form for teaching the direct object pronouns to beginning students of Spanish. It will be beneficial to discover which of these three widely-used approaches can best help students to acquire correct pronoun use, and may aid instructors of Spanish in the teaching of these pronouns. In order to compare these approaches, three sections of a beginning Spanish course received instruction in one of the three approaches. The participants of this study were 51 beginning level students who had had 3 years of Spanish instruction at the high school level and were native speakers of English. The study follows a pretest/posttest design. Results find positive results for form-focused instruction over purely meaning-focused instruction for teaching the Spanish direct object pronouns with regards to sentence completion tasks. A main implication of this study is that focus on meaning instruction is not sufficient to help beginning learners improve their production of Spanish direct object pronouns. While results show a more positive impact for focus on form instruction over the more traditional focus on forms approach, additional research comparing these two methods is suggested. It is also important to note that beginning level learners show overall low levels of accuracy with direct object pronouns in Spanish.

Highlights

  • Recent research on the effects of instruction in second language acquisition (SLA) has included numerous studies on attention to form in the language classroom

  • These studies have demonstrated a need for second language (L2) learners to have attention to form in order to develop more target-like L2 grammars

  • The communicative approach stems from the belief that language learners will acquire their L2 grammar by using language as a tool to complete communicative tasks as they would in a real-world setting

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Summary

Introduction

Recent research on the effects of instruction in second language acquisition (SLA) has included numerous studies on attention to form in the language classroom These studies have demonstrated a need for second language (L2) learners to have attention to form in order to develop more target-like L2 grammars. In order to accomplish this, learners need to simultaneously focus on the meaning of the language and its linguistic form in both the input they are receiving and in the output that they are producing. Is it possible that learners can gain linguistic information and incorporate it into their L2 grammar during this interaction? Is it possible that learners can gain linguistic information and incorporate it into their L2 grammar during this interaction? Or do learners need more explicit direction to assist them in attending to linguistic form while in the context of a meaning-based task

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