The acquisition of L3 Spanish articles: What can be learned from a simple linear regression analysis?

Abstract

Despite being extremely frequent in Spanish, articles pose one of the biggest challenges for Polish L1/English L2 students who learn it as a L3, even among the most advanced learners. However, little attention has been paid to the influence of the task at hand, especially since certain registers and writing styles tend to make use of a higher number of noun phrases, thus increasing both the amount of article syntactical environments and the probability of an error to be made. The main purpose of this article is to investigate whether there is a statistically significant relation between the number or article-related errors and an increasing number of article environments. In order to do this, a simple linear regression analysis was run for both B1 and B2 groups separately, and finally the whole level (n = 72). The results of the t tests suggest a significant linear relationship between the number of article-related errors and article tokens, between article-related errors and noun tokens, and between article and noun tokens. The article provides some considerations on possible actions to be taken both for researching and teaching the Spanish article system to [–ART] L1 learners.