The impact of different methods of instruction of L2 Spanish determiners and the role of language transfer

This study examines the acquisition of L2 knowledge (Spanish determiners) by four groups of adolescents as (L2) Spanish learners, taking into consideration two types of instruction: implicit and explicit. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the type of instruction (implicit vs. explicit) on language transfer L1 English-L2 Spanish. The groups in this study were part of two different courses at a High School level in the United States during a winter trimester. Two groups were of higher proficiency and the other two, of lower proficiency. Groups with the same proficiency were instructed with both, implicit and explicit methods. We focus on contrasting the results of both proficiency groups and their specific methods of instruction. Forty-five adolescent (L2) learners of Spanish carried out six written tasks (Timed Grammaticality Judgment Test, Untimed Grammaticality Judgment Test, L2 Achievement task, Truth-Value Judgment Task, Picture-Sentence Matching Task and Sentence-Picture Acceptability Judgment Task) before and immediately after the implicit and explicit methods of instruction were complete. The research conducted in this thesis contains five questions, whose answers were addressed through the statistical analysis of the raw scores obtained in the different mentioned tasks. The research results show that the methods of instruction were significant taking into consideration the proficiency of the students. The higher proficiency group had higher scores than the lower proficiency group on all the measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, developing significantly more explicit knowledge representations of the forms tested than the lower proficiency group. In relation to transfer effects, results show that the explicit method can help the higher proficiency group to more resemble native speakers.