Acquisition of intonation in Spanish/L2: interaction between the effects on explicit instruction and individuals variables

Abstract:

This article exposes the effects of the explicit instruction on total interrogative and affirmative statements in Spanish as L2. It also displays their possible interactions with individual variables, such as the attention capacity, the frequency of use and also the linguistic and teaching experience. It is a quantitative study which covers some linguistic tests of perception and the production of sentences, an attention network test and a questionnaire of historical and linguistic proficiency. The study had a convenience sample covering both an experimental group that received some explicit instructions about a target content in an intermediate period between the pre- and the post-test, and a control group that did not receive the instruction. The results have shown that there was no significant difference related to the instructional effect. Our hypothesis is that individual variables may have minimized the instruction role about intonation in the performance of these participants.

Keywords:
Explicit instruction; Individual differences; Intonation