More Important Than Rank-Order Frequency
The frequency data reported in Table 3 demonstrate that, for these L2 learners, inflectional morphology (gender, person, and number marking) is a cue that takes precedence over other grammatical cues. Learners often ignored sentence structure and focused exclusively on whether the target item agreed with another item. Some of the cases of perceived agreement, particularly gender agreement, were unanticipated. For example, some participants tried to establish agreement between the object of a preposition and the sentential subject (item 10), or between coordinated nouns (item 14). Crucially, these were not isolated cases: a large majority of participants focused on gender when reading items 10 and 14. It seems that these learners were focused exclusively on the surface features of the words, and thus, a potential gender distinction. In the case of trabajo/trabaja, the problem is exacerbated because the words differ only in the final vowel. However, in the case of carinosa/carino, the contrast in surface morphology is clearly marked. In both cases, by focusing on gender, learners were in essence distracted from the real task of noticing a word class contrast.
Zyzik and Azevedo (2009) suggested that the explicit instructional focus on gender agreement in L2 Spanish classrooms may contribute to learners’ difficulty with word classes because —a and — o endings are not exclusive to nouns and adjectives. In other words and endings are ambiguous with respect to word class, unlike derivational suffixes such as -don and -dad. The think-aloud data confirm that many learners attended to gender agreement at the expense of other cues to word class. The unexpected focus on gender as a cue begs the question of how LI English speakers conceptualise gender and what effect explicit instruction might have on their beliefs. Since classroom learners are routinely taught, from the first weeks of study, to ‘make things agree’, it could be that some learners extend this principle in unanticipated directions.
With regard to external cues, such as intuition, familiarity, or explicit rules, the data show that use of explicit rules was infrequent (3%) and limited to a few items, in particular item 18 (miente/mentir). Familiarity effects were apparent throughout the data set, but most notably on items 20 (importa/importante) and 27 (fuerte/fuerza). This finding clarifies an issue raised in Zyzik and Azevedo (2009) regarding the potential impact of word frequency. In that study, there was an inconsistent relationship between word frequency and learners’ performance on the FCT (i.e. learners often picked the less frequent of the two forms). The data presented here from the think-aloud protocols suggest that prior experience with a particular form (familiarity) is more important than rank-order frequency as determined by corpus analysis. Since the primary sources of input for these L2 learners are classroom talk and textbook-based readings, it is possible that the frequency of certain items is skewed, which might explain learners’ preference for certain forms.
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