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CONTEXT OF LEARNING IN THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH SECOND LANGUAGE PHONOLOGY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2004

Manuel Díaz-Campos
Manuel Díaz-Campos
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Abstract

Studies in SLA have debated the importance of context of learning in the process of developing linguistic skills in a second language (L2). The present paper examines whether study abroad, as it provides opportunities for authentic L2 context, facilitates the acquisition of Spanish phonology. The corpus of this investigation is composed of speech samples from 46 students of Spanish: 26 studying abroad in Spain and 20 in a regular classroom environment in the United States. The students read a paragraph with 60 target words including segments such as word-initial stops (i.e., [p t k]),Throughout the article a phonetic representation of all sounds following the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is presented. Phonetic (instead of phonological) representations avoid making assumptions about underlying L2 representations. intervocalic fricatives (i.e., [ ]), word-final laterals (i.e., [l]), and palatal nasals (i.e., ). The findings reveal the following patterns for both regular classroom and study abroad students across time: (a) similar gain in the case of voiced initial stops and word-final laterals, (b) lack of gain in the case of intervocalic fricatives, and (c) high levels of accuracy in the case of the palatal nasal in the pretest. Concerning the external data, the following factor groups predicted phonological gain among all learners: years of formal language instruction, reported use of Spanish before the semester, reported use of Spanish outside the classroom during the semester (days), reported use of Spanish outside the classroom during the semester (hours), gender, entrance Oral Proficiency Interview, exit Oral Proficiency Interview, and level at which formal instruction began.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 249 - 273
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to Joseph Collentine, Barbara F. Freed, and Norman Segalowitz for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. I also would like to express my thanks to the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their careful reading and useful insights. I would like to thank Nicole Lazar for her comments and help in running a preliminary statistical analysis of the data. Randall Halter of Concordia University in Montreal was instrumental in providing technical support for digitizing the read-aloud materials. I appreciate Randall's work very much. I would also like to thank James Lee, Kimberly Geeslin, and Richard File for reading a previous version of this paper and providing me with comments. Last but not least, I want to thank the Council on International Education Exchange for providing the funds to Freed to coordinate the teamwork regarding language gain in different contexts of learning. All errors are my own.

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