Prompted and unprompted self-repairs of Filipino students of Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

The present dissertation, which contributes to the dearth of research on the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language by Filipinos, is a pseudolongitudinal study of their Spanish interlanguage (IL) whose two-fold objective is to provide a descriptive analysis of their developing IL based on errors produced in their speech as influenced by language proficiency levels and crosslinguistic similarity of their other known languages, and to identify the thresholds of their IL based on the prompted and unprompted self-repair of these errors. Participants of the study were four groups of students learning Spanish in a Philippine university who have had 432 hours, 1,008 hours, 1,872 hours, and 2,160 hours of formal instruction in Spanish, respectively. They were recorded in their own classroom contexts and individually in order to build two complementing oral corpora for the analysis of their speech. For the gathering of monologic data elicitation procedures from the research project El desarrollo del repertorio lingüístico en hablantes no nativos de castellano y catalán (Tolchinsky & Perera, 2006), which form part of the larger research project Developing Literacy in Different Contexts and Different Languages (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002) was adopted. All 20 recorded classroom sessions and 40 monologic texts were transcribed according to the conventions of a transcription program. Errors were categorized according to their formal linguistic levels (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2010), while prompted and unprompted self-repairs were identified as a result of classifying teacher feedback based on an adapted taxonomy of recasts and prompts (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). To respond to the objectives the following were analyzed: (a) the distribution of error types and subtypes in relation to the targetlanguage (TL) proficiency, (b) the frequency of attempts to self-repair these errors with and without the prompting of the teacher, (c) the rate of success of prompted and unprompted self-repairs in relation to TL proficiency, and (d) the effect of crosslinguistic similarity of previously learned languages and their corresponding proficiency levels on error production. Results showed that morphosyntactic errors were produced the most, followed by lexicalsemantic errors, and lastly, by phonetic-phonological errors, with each proficiency group producing such errors quite differently (e.g., omission of determiners is largely a characteristic of a beginner). Results likewise showed that while TL proficiency has a negative effect on the production of errors, it has no effect on the distribution of error types nor in the recognition of these errors. Teachers and students alike verbally recognized approximately 20% of the errors; teachers called out lexical-semantic errors the most, while students most independently recognized and successfully self-repair morphosyntactic errors. Of the recognized errors, about 60% of teacher-prompted errors and roughly 80% of independently recognized errors were successfully repaired. Albeit inconclusive, TL proficiency may have a positive effect on success in self-repair. By contrast, SL proficiency was observed to have a positive effect on the production of transfer errors, however, in the case of the multilingual learner, transfer mostly comes from the more objectively similar language and not from the language that he perceives to be more similar to the TL. The implications of these findings for future research and language pedagogy are outlined in the final chapter, which concludes the present dissertation.