An investigation into the effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of subject–verb agreement by Spanish-speaking second language learners of English

Abstract

Identifying what is difficult or easy to learn when learning a second language has received attention from researchers in the last decades. What seems to be of general agreement in this field of research is that certain language features are acquired faster and more accurately than other ones, due to a number of factors. A language feature that has been identified as problematic for L2 learners is English subject–verb agreement. Even the morpheme maker -s for subject–verb agreement is very frequent in the input, and it is subject of intensive instruction, its omission and overuse are very frequent in L2 learners.
The acquisition of morphology has been addressed by VanPatten’s Input Processing model (IP), based on how linguistics and cognitive processing interact during language comprehension and asserts that L2 problems with morphology may be connected to the way learners distribute attentional resources when processing input. According to IP learners will be more readily to use content words to determine sentential meaning than grammatical morphemes. L2 learners thus tend to overlook the use of the -s to express singularity and rely on the noun phrase to derive meaning.
The current thesis presents a study investigating the effects of processing instruction, an input-based type of grammar instruction informed by IP, on the acquisition of English subject–verb agreement compared with traditional instruction. While to date, numerous studies on PI have been conducted on a variety language features and on different languages, little research has investigated its effects on agreement. A grammaticality judgement task, a sentence completion task, an oral and a written discourse production tasks were used to measure learners’ gains after the interventions. The analysis of participants’ results showed similar positive effects of both treatments. However, results of the PI group in the production tasks suggest that PI may be more beneficial than TI. Even learners were not asked to produce the target form at any moment during the PI treatment, the new knowledge acquired was also available for production which may suggest that PI was successful on altering the way learners processed subject–verb agreement which in turn produced a change in their L2 developing system.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Roumyana Slabakova: orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-460X

ORCID for Laura Dominguez: orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-2469

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