Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
The findings of the current study extend the line of research in Zyzik and Azevedo (2009) and provide new insights into L2 learners’ difficulties with word class contrasts. The incidence of faulty L2-L1 equivalents suggests that word class information is not automatically transferred from the L1, and moreover, that words can exist in the L2 lexicon for some time without specification of their category membership. The think-aloud data also yielded some unexpected findings, including learners’ preference for attending to gender when no agreement relationship was possible, often at the expense of more reliable cues to word class. Furthermore, the analysis of learners’ word class confusions indicates that a majority of such errors are due to problems in identifying the syntactic slot rather than classifying the lexical items in question.
Clearly, further research is necessary to explore some outstanding issues, especially how explicit knowledge mediates the acquisition of word classes in SLA. This is an important question given the routine assumption that the categorisation of words into form classes takes place via implicit learning. A follow-up study might test the effectiveness of a pedagogical intervention to raise L2 learners’ awareness of these categories in the target language. The treatment should be designed to focus learners’ attention on word class contrasts and the relevant syntactic and morphological cues in the target language. Crucially, the focus should not be on labeling words correctly as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc., but rather on noticing the reliable morphological markers of certain word classes (e.g. all Spanish words ending in —dad and are nouns) and the distributional regularities of the language. Relevant contrasts between the LI and L2 might also raise learners’ awareness of word classes, especially when the LI equivalent has dual category membership (e.g. work is a noun or a verb).
Finally, the choice of elicitation task is worthy of further consideration. Note that the forced-choice task used in this study only approximates the acquisition problem because learners were asked to choose from known or partially known words. In order to replicate the acquisition problem, researchers might control for prior vocabulary knowledge by using nonsense words (cf. Lee & Wolf, 1997), by creating artificial language stimuli (cf. Mintz, 2002), or by tracking learners’ knowledge of words longitudinally (cf. Schmitt, 1998; Schtnitt & Meara, 1997). Another promising direction would be to investigate how word class knowledge develops in sync with grammatical ability; this is an important question if we assume that the problem of figuring out word class is closely related to, or dependent on, the development of syntactic knowledge in general.With years of experience in making delicate Discount Louis Vuitton Handbags , we are waiting to provide the crowning touch to your style. Just feel free to shop Louis Vuitton handbags M93122 in brown here.
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