The Effects of Comparative Explicit Instruction on Gender Marking of Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns

Learners acquiring a second language can receive input about the L2 grammar in a natural environment, and/or through explicit instruction (EI). The latter is quite common among adult L2 learners, but how necessary or useful EI is, is still an open debate. As argued by Henry, Culman, and VanPatten (2009) “not all EI is the same, not all structures are the same, and the interaction of EI, structure, and processing problems may yield different results in different studies”. Explicit instruction has been argued to be particularly beneficial for grammatical phenomena where learners continue to perform non-target like (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2013; and more). The current research investigates the effects of explicit instruction on a linguistic phenomenon that has been shown to be problematic also for more advanced learners, namely gender marking on possessive pronouns and adjectives. Specifically, we compare instruction in the L2 only to a comparative approach where instruction is provided in both the L1 and L2.

In this thesis, chapter one focuses on existing literature and past studies relevant to the current research, such as the generative approach to second language acquisition (SLA), L1 transfer in SLA, and theories about explicit instruction and comparative explicit instruction. Chapter two explains the focus of the research, with an outline of the topic of this study, an explanation of how possessive adjectives and pronouns work in English, and how their counterparts work in Spanish and Italian, and a presentation of previous research on this topic. Chapter three presents the research questions, methods, tasks, and participant descriptions. The results of each test are presented in chapter four, with an explanation of the two types of instructions the groups received, as well as the analysis of the final results. Finally, the conclusion is followed by the appendix with the tasks and a complete bibliography of works cited.