Publication Date
2021
Document Type
Dissertation/Thesis
First Advisor
Lichtman, Karen
Degree Name
M.A. (Master of Arts)
Legacy Department
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Abstract
High school students learning Spanish often struggle with the acquisition of the past tense. Spanish requires differentiation between aspects (preterite and imperfect) of the past tense; a linguistic contrast that does not exist in English. While this has been researched for years in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the increasing availability of technology offers a new angle from which to explore students’ ability to master this concept. In the 2020-2021 school year, the presence of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) forced schools to overhaul and adapt the learning environment during a pandemic in which a fully traditional in-person model was not a feasible option. The Hononegah High School district adopted a hybrid environment in which students split their class time with equal time learning in person and remotely from home. This change in environment offered the opportunity to compare data on the success of past tense aspect acquisition of students in a traditional learning environment with the hybrid environment.In this study, data from a recognition quiz, oral production narrative task, and an in-class writing narrative task were studied in order to compare overall accuracy between in-person and hybrid groups. Results from the tasks were used to attempt to determine how the difference in instructional delivery affects the acquisition and production of the Spanish past tense. More detailed analysis was conducted on the 2020-2021 students’ use of preterite and imperfect forms, as student responses were unavailable from the 2019-2020 group. Previous research has shown that students prefer the present and preterite tenses in production tasks, but this was not the case for the 2020-2021 students. Students in the hybrid classroom environment performed with a similar level of accuracy as students in the traditional setting on all tasks, except for the oral production task, on which the in-person students performed better.
Recommended Citation
Weldon, Erin Christine Paulli, "Acquisition of The Spanish Preterite and Imperfect By Non-Native Students in A Traditional Classroom Vs. A Hybrid Setting" (2021). Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations. 7772.
https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/allgraduate-thesesdissertations/7772
Extent
65 pages
Language
eng
Publisher
Northern Illinois University
Rights Statement
In Copyright
Rights Statement 2
NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.
Media Type
Text
