In usage-based approaches to instructed second language acquisition (ISLA), teachers often find it challenging to find the right balance between developing communicative competence and fostering linguistic accuracy. Especially at advanced levels where learners sometimes pay less attention to increasing their linguistic repertoire as they are able to communicate successfully using more basic structures. One way to facilitate the learning of more advanced structures without sacrificing the development of communicative competence is to work with a "meaningful focus on form" (FonF) (Long, 1991). In addition, it is important to consider the influence of individual differences when assessing the learning of new grammatical structures. The present work has investigated, by means of a pretest-posttest design, the effectiveness of a meaningful FonF intervention to foster the acquisition of the Spanish imperfect subjunctive. In addition, it investigated how grit (Duckworth et al., 2007) and grammatical aptitude (Dörnyei & Ryan, 2015) might have mediated this learning process. The participants were divided into two groups, an intervention group that received meaningful FonF instruction and a control group that was taught with the traditional methodology. The participants' grit was measured using an L2-grit scale (Alamer, 2021) and their grammatical aptitude was measured with the LLAMA F test (Maera, 2005). Additionally, in both the pretest and posttest, they had to complete a receptive (Adrada-Rafael, 2017) and a productive (Baralt, 2010) subjunctive task that elicited their knowledge of this structure. Significant learning effects were found for the meaningful FonF methodology at both the receptive (t(9) = 4.91, p <0.001, 95% CI [1.94, 5.26]) and productive levels (t(9) = 3.81, p = 0.004, 95% CI [1.54, 6.06]). Furthermore, compared to the traditional teaching methodology, meaningful FonF had significantly larger learning effects at the receptive level (t(19) = -2.68, p = 0.015, 95% CI [-5.42, -0.69]). No strong correlations were found between the individual differences investigated and the learning of the imperfect subjunctive. It is concluded that introducing a meaningful FonF in Spanish classes can facilitate the learning of new structures, especially at more advanced levels, as it emphasises the connection between the form of the language and its meaning.
References
Adrada-Rafael, S. (2017). Processing the Spanish imperfect subjunctive: Depth of processing under different instructional conditions. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(2), 477-508.
Alamer, A. (2021). Grit and language learning: construct validation of L2-Grit scale and its relation to later vocabulary knowledge. Educational Psychology, 41(5), 544–562.
Baralt, M. L. (2010). Task complexity, the Cognition Hypothesis, and interaction in CMC and FTF environments. Georgetown University.
Dörnyei Z., & Ryan, S. (2015). The psychology of the language learner revisited (Ser. Second language acquisition research series). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101.
Long, M. (1991). Focus on form: A design feature in language teaching methodology. In Foreign language research in cross-cultural perspective (p. 39). John Benjamins.
Meara, P. (2005). LLAMA language aptitude tests: The manual. Swansea: Lognostics.
