Written Production Task Research Articles

Individual Verb Differences in Chinese Learners’Acquisition of English Non-alternating Unaccusatives

Individual verb differences in L2 acquisition of English unaccusatives have been neglected by previous studies. This study focuses on such differences by investigating Chinese learners through the combined use of a written production task, an acceptability judgment task, interviews and a textbook corpus survey. It finds that there are significant individual verb differences in Chinese learners’ acquisition of English non-alternating unaccusatives. It suggests that the differences are mainly caused by varied lexical frequencies and teachers’ explicit instructions.

Structural changes in Spanish in the United States: Differential object marking in Spanish heritage speakers across generations

This study investigated changes with Differential Object Marking (DOM)—the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects—observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second generation immigrants in the United States. Previous studies of these speakers found that they omit the obligatory use of a with animate, specific direct objects in oral production (Montrul, 2004; Montrul and Bowles, 2009). The present study assessed the potential effects of quantity and quality of input on the degree of DOM erosion by controlling for age of onset of bilingualism and by establishing whether this phenomenon would also be subject to attrition in the first generation of immigrants. A total of 64 young adult heritage speakers, 23 adult immigrants from Mexico, and 40 native speakers from Mexico matched in age and SES were tested with a written/auditory comprehension and a written production task. Main findings indicated that native speakers from Mexico performed largely at ceiling in both tasks, whereas the three immigrant groups, including the first generation immigrants, omitted obligatory a in written production and made errors in comprehension. These findings suggest that structural changes with DOM in US Spanish occur at the representational level in some individuals are due to both insufficient input in middle childhood and different parental input in adolescence and early adulthood, in addition to potential transfer from English.

Spanish future of probability: teaching and learning

This project investigates how the acquisition of the future of probability in Spanish can be facilitated through classroom instruction, taking into consideration what L1 English and L1 French learners of L2 Spanish bring to the process of acquisition of this linguistic feature and how language instructors may need to manipulate the input to facilitate learning. We designed an experiment which measures different outcomes of form focused and meaning based instructional methods compared to the one currently used at the University of Ottawa in the Spanish program. We have developed grammaticality judgment and limited written production tasks. We also consider long-term effects of the instruction based on the results of the delayed posttest. Our preliminary results suggest that there is an advantage of meaning based instruction over the form focused one on both tests. At the same time, both instructional methods have had more positive effect on the learner acquisition compared to the results of the control group in both explicit and implicit knowledge. As expected, French L1 learners have a slight benefit over the English L1 learners due to the positive transfer from their L1 into L2 Spanish.

Measuring Student Learning in an Online French Course

This paper reports the results of the assessment of Elementary French I Online, the first course to be offered under the Language Online project at Carnegie Mellon University. The purpose of the assessment was to determine if there were significant differences in achievement, satisfaction, and time spent on the course between the students in the online course and those in a conventional (offline) course. Multiple measures were taken of student background, including language and technology experience, and individual differences in learning styles. Students were compared on measures of grammatical knowledge, written production, oral production, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension; in addition, measures of satisfaction and time spent learning French were determined through course evaluations and interviews. The only statistically significant difference on the learning measures occurred in the written production task in which the online students outperformed the offline students; however, results should be carefully interpreted due to the sample size and use of intact classes. Student satisfaction was generally positive, but students in the online course voiced some frustrations. Students in the online course also reported spending less time studying French than did their counterparts in the conventional course.

Error Analysis of Present Simple Tense in the Interlanguage of Adult Arab English Language Learners

The present study analyses errors on present simple tense among adult Arab English language learners. It focuses on the error on 3sg –s (the third person singular present tense agreement morpheme –s). The learners are undergraduate adult Arabic speakers learning English as a foreign language. The study gathered data from two types of instruments: a grammaticality judgment task (GJT comprising both grammatical and ungrammatical items and an elicited written production task (EWPT). Both tasks were designed to test the learners’ underlying knowledge of present simple tense morphology in the Interlanguage (ILG) of adult Arab English language learners. The GJT comprised 12 grammatically/correctly inflected items, 6 omission items (OI) and 6 wrongly/incorrectly inflected items (WI). The findings suggest that adult Arab English language learners seem to have difficulty mastering the use of the 3sg –s due to first language (L1) interference. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for English as a foreign language classroom teaching practice as well as for second language teachers and researchers. The most frequent error types produced by the Learners are omission, phonological similarity, incorrect suffixation and substitution.

The Effect of Intensive and Extensive Focus on Form on EFL Learners’ Written Accuracy

A number of Second Language Acquisition researchers argue that since focus on form facilitates second language development, therefore special attention to focus on form in the case of adult learners seems to be necessary. This area of research has been one of the hotly-debated issues in SLA literature. The main purpose of the present quasi-experimental study is to investigate the effects of intensive and extensive focus on form instructions on EFL learners' written accuracy. For the purpose of the study 40 learners of English at pre-intermediate level were chosen randomly as the participants of the study and assigned into two groups of experimental which received different types of instruction for 2 months. A narrative task and written production focused and unfocused tasks were employed to collect data from the participants. The collected written data was quantified in terms of the accuracy measure introduced by Ellis (2008).T-test was employed as the statistical means of analysis. The results of the study revealed significant differences between the performances of two groups in terms of the accuracy in focused written production task. The study carries significant implications for second language teachers, SLA researchers as well as task designers.

Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax proper: Interrogative subject–verb inversion in heritage Spanish

This study examines the potential effects of crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of subject–verb inversion in Spanish matrix and embedded wh-questions among Spanish heritage language learners living in the United States. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written production task administered to 17 US-born heritage speakers indicate crosslinguistic influence effects. The effects are more evident with embedded interrogatives than with matrix questions. A follow-up study with the heritage speakers also shows less inversion behavior with embedded questions in oral production but higher performance levels than in written production. The findings are discussed in relation to interface vulnerability approaches and current debates on the selective nature of crosslinguistic influence in L2 and bilingual development.

The diffusion of impositional innovations in the Estonian object-marking system

This study aims to specify to what extent the variation introduced in the Estonian object-marking system by Russian-dominant Estonian L2 speakers is spreading to the native usage of Estonian. 669 secondary school students completed a written production task and a grammaticality judgment task on object marking. The results indicate that the object-marking variation is contact-induced and that the group of fluent bilinguals acts as a bridge for impositional innovations to enter and to be accepted by native speakers. The findings also suggest that multiple causal forces influence the diffusion of innovations. While any single causal factor may drive diffusion if it is strong enough, the process is greatly facilitated when different causal factors contribute to the same direction. In this case, fairly weak contact is sufficient to induce diffusion.

Impact des contraintes linguistiques et cognitives sur l’acquisition de l’accord en genre de l’adjectif en français écrit

The aim of this research is to show the impact of linguistic (the feminine inflexion was audible or not) and cognitive (the complexity of the task in which the agreement is realized) factors about the acquisition and the use of adjectival gender inflexions in written French. In this perspective, we compared the production of the mark of the agreement in three tasks not mobilizing the same levels of linguistic treatment: transcribe sentences under dictation, recall sentences presented orally, and produce two sentences ending with an adjective from a syntactical priming. The results show that the systematic application of the adjectival agreement in gender is not totally mastered at the end of primary. Besides, the use of the adjectival gender inflexions is more difficult when the written inflexion is mute. Finally, the children forgot more the gender inflexion in written production task than in a dictate or recall task. These results are interpreted within the framework of a functional approach of language production.

Transfer, hybridization and analogy in L2 usage: the case of Estonian object marking

The article presents the results of a quantitative study of Estonian object marking by L2 speakers with Russian as their L1 ( N = 91). A written production task was used to obtain the data. This task consisted of a coherent Estonian text where the informants needed to fill the blanks left for the direct objects. The data revealed large-scale variability: informants did not only transfer Russian features to Estonian L2. There was also evidence for analogical extension of productive patterns of Estonian object case assignment and compromise forms. This indicates that direct transfer of L1 patterns is just one and not the major source of L2 innovations. Apart from this, L2 productive patterns, universal cognitive preferences and analogical extension of error patterns are in part responsible for the non-standard forms found. The article argues that all these phenomena rely on analogy in the broadest sense, and therefore it is to be assumed that analogy is the main mechanism behind contact-induced phenomena in L2 usage and that copying, replication and pivot-matching are all specific manifestations of the same analogical mechanism.

Gender Assignment and Agreement in L2 Spanish: The Effects of Morphological Marking, Animacy, and Gender

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between second language (L2) Spanish gender assignment and agreement and specific noun categories by distinguishing the effects of noun morphology (overt, non-overt, or deceptive), noun class (semantic or non-semantic), and gender (masculine or feminine). Specifically, assuming the correct acquisition of gender assignment, how do noun morphology, class and gender affect correct gender agreement when using the same type of noun? One hundred and seven English-speaking learners of Spanish at three proficiency levels completed an assignment and agreement written production task, in which they were first asked the gender of a noun (assignment), and then to provide an agreeing adjective in a meaningful context (agreement). Results showed that the probability of producing correct agreement given correct assignment was significantly higher with semantic than with non-semantic nouns, with overt rather than non-overt and/or deceptive nouns, and with masculine rather than feminine nouns. The discussion provides insights concerning how animacy (semantic gender) overrides morphology when establishing correct gender agreement in L2 Spanish.

Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers

Child and adult Spanish heritage speakers have been shown to display erosion and loss of the tense-aspect and mood system in oral production. In particular, while they retain the preterit—imperfect difference in the past, the meanings and forms are often confused. Subjunctive morphology, on the other hand, is even more affected (Silva-Corvalán, 1994, 2003). Two related studies were conducted to examine the extent of incomplete knowledge of tense-aspect and mood morphology in 65 adult Spanish heritage speakers raised in the USA and a comparison group of 23 fully competent adult native speakers. Study 1 tested the preterit—imperfect contrast with different predicates; Study 2 focused on the present indicative—subjunctive contrast in different subordinate clauses. Both studies used elicited oral and written production tasks to test morphological accuracy and a sentence conjunction judgment task to tap semantic interpretations. The overall results showed significant differences between the native speakers and the heritage speakers, confirming that heritage speakers make errors with grammatical aspect and mood morphology. Accuracy on grammatical aspect, however, is higher than accuracy on subjunctive morphology in oral and written production and interpretation. This result is compatible with the Regression Hypothesis (Jakobson, 1941), which relates order of acquisition to order of language loss, and with the Interfaces Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006), which takes into account the complexity of certain linguistic interfaces.

The mental processing of L2 English lexical compounds

A number of SLA studies in the past decade (e.g. Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000) have attempted to answer the question of whether the Dual-Mechanism Model can be extended to L2 English processing. These studies have found that the clear regular-irregular dissociation in compounds observed for L1 users is not the case for L2 users, who tend to include regular plurals in compounds to varying degrees. The present study reports on further efforts to investigate this issue with Turkish learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Turkey. An elicited written production task, similar to that used by Murphy (2000), was administered to high and low proficiency L1 Turkish users of EFL and native English speakers. The results, it is claimed, indicate that both the L1 controls and the L2 participants dissociate between regular and irregular nouns within English compounds. However, in contrast to most previous studies, the L2 dissociation was found to be stronger at higher levels of L2 proficiency, which speaks for a developmental restructuring in L2 inflectional processing that could be explained under a weak version of the Dual-Mechanism Model.

Task Effects on EFL Learners' Production of Suggestions: A Focus on Elicited Phone Messages and Emails

Scholars in the field of interlanguage pragmatics have examined second language learners’ development of pragmatics by means of employing different data collection instruments. Findings from this research have showed the existence of task effects, although the need to further investigate this area has been claimed by widening the types of instruments being employed as well as the context in which they are used. Accordingly, the present study aims at examining the task effects of two production instruments (phone messages and email tasks) on the learners’ use of suggestions in a foreign language setting. The participants included 81 Spanish university learners who were required to make suggestions in the oral and written production tasks. These tasks were elaborated on purpose for this study, and all situations i) varied according to the sociopragmatic factor of status; ii) were set atthe University setting, as a familiar context to the participants; and iii) asked learners to perform suggestions in the role of students. Learners’ performance when making suggestions in the phone messages and email tasks was compared. The results revealed statistically significant differences, which support the fact that the production task in which learners are engaged in influences their use of suggestions. Moreover, the findings also showed that participants employed a higher number of appropriate suggestions in the written task than in the oral task. These findings are discussed and pedagogical implications highlighted.

Verb morphology in second language versus third language acquisition

This paper reports an experimental study on L2 vs. L3 Spanish morphological representation. A total of 19 Spanish learners (10 Chinese native speakers who are upper intermediate to advanced L2 English users as well as 9 English native speakers who do not speak a prior language without overt morphology) participated in the study. A written production task using Spanish nonce verbs was used to elicit regular and irregular forms of Spanish past participles. The study revealed differences between native and non-native Spanish speakers but ones that are still compatible with an approach which posits a dual mechanism for morphological processing. In addition, no principal difference between the L2 and the L3 Spanish learners was identified. A follow-up experiment on L2 English was therefore carried out testing 26 native speakers of Chinese and 17 native speakers of English using a written production task eliciting English regular and irregular past tense forms for both real verbs and nonce verbs. The findings suggested that native and non-native English speakers’ performances pattern similarly. It seems that L2 English plays a crucial role in Chinese speakers’ L3 Spanish morphological representation and in their similar performance to the L1 English-L2 Spanish speakers.

Optionality in non-native grammars: L2 acquisition of German constructions with absent expletives

This paper investigates the knowledge of constructions with absent expletives by advanced and high-proficiency non-native speakers of German whose first language is Polish. German grammar is known to license null subjects due to the strength of AGRP but not to identify them. Therefore only expletive subjects can be absent in German, except for Topic-drop and, crucially, the expletive subjects have to be absent in certain cases due to the Projection Principle. The knowledge of this phenomenon by second language (L2) learners has been investigated by two methods, elicited written production task and grammaticality judgment tests. High-level non-native speakers of German differ significantly from native speakers in both types of tasks. The differences are clearly not the result of transfer. The results reported here reveal permanent optionality in L2 grammars suggesting a deficit in the grammatical representations of L2 learners.

Age and Third Language Production: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of subject pronouns in third language (L3) production. Participants were 90 Basque–Spanish bilingual students, learning English as a third language in a formal setting in the Basque Country. All the participants, who had received the same amount of exposure to English, were divided into three groups according to their age, and were asked to perform an oral and a written production task, after four, six and eight years of instruction in English, to examine their behaviour in relation to subject pronoun usage. The study yields different results in both production tests. In the case of the oral task, our data provide support for a positive relationship between subject pronoun usage and the number of utterances produced. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be any steady connection between subject omissions and the mean number of words used by the different groups. Concerning the written production task, age seems to be positively related to subject pronoun usage. Furthermore, there is no significant difference in the behaviour of subject pronouns in the periods under study. The fact can be associated with language complexity, which reaches higher levels longitudinally.

Do Learners Notice Enhanced Forms while Interacting with the L2?: An Online and Offline Study of the Role of Written Input Enhancement in L2 Reading

The benefits of enhanced written input, premised on the roles of attention and awareness (notic- ing) in second/foreign language (L2) learning, have produced mixed results in SLA literature. One plausible explanation may be offline data elicitation procedures typically used to measure the impact (or lack thereof) of enhancement. Employing a more robust online research design to address this issue, think-aloud protocols were gathered to establish that first-year college-level participants (38) indeed noticed targeted linguistic forms (Spanish formal imperatives) while reading an enhanced or unenhanced text. Their performances on immedi- ate and delayed recognition and written production tasks were subsequently submitted to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results indicated no significant benefits of written input enhancement over unen- hanced written input for (1) the amount of reported noticing of Spanish formal imperatives, (2) readers' com- prehension, or (3) readers' intake. Theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications are discussed.

Attention, Awareness, and Foreign Language Behavior

This study qualitatively and quantitatively addressed the role of awareness in relation to Schmidt's noticing hypothesis in second language acquisition (1990, 1993, 1994, 1995). It analyzed both the think-aloud protocols produced by 28 beginning adult L2 learners of Spanish (selected carefully from a pool of 85 people on the basis of relevant criteria) completing a problem-solving task and their immediate performances on 2 post-exposure assessment tasks, a recognition and written production task. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of learners' performances suggest the following conclusions: (a) Different levels of awareness lead to differences in processing, (b) more awareness contributes to more recognition and accurate written production of noticed forms, and (c) the findings provide empirical support for the facilitative effects of awareness on foreign language behavior.

A STUDY OF THE ROLE OF AWARENESS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR

This study is a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the effects of awareness, or the lack thereof, on 32 adult second or foreign language (L2) learners' subsequent intake and written production of targeted Spanish morphological forms. Think-aloud protocol data, gathered while learners completed a problem-solving task (a crossword puzzle) and postexposure assessment tasks (a multiple-choice recognition task and a written production task), were used to measure awareness or the lack thereof, and morphological learning was assessed by learners' performances on the two postexposure tasks. From a theoretical perspective, no dissociation between awareness and further processing of targeted forms was found in this study, the results of which are compatible with the claim that awareness plays a crucial role in subsequent processing of L2 data (e.g., Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995). From a methodological perspective, the data collection procedure clearly underscores the need for studies that investigate the roles of attention and awareness in second language acquisition (SLA) to gather as much data as possible from different sources that reveal participants' internal processes. By attempting to ascertain what learners really attend to or are aware of, or both, while exposed to or interacting with L2 data, such information can also address the methodological issue of how representative learners' performances in experimental groups really are in studies conducted under an attentional framework in SLA.