Complements of causative predicates such as "hacer" in Spanish present a problem for analyses of mood that are based on semantic or pragmatic notions of assertion. The problem results from the fact that information expressed by these complements is presented both as true and new, and yet the complement verb appears in the subjunctive…

This essay contributes to the research on the emergence of tense/aspect morphology by reviewing the results and task conditions of studies supporting either the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) or the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) for second language (L2) learners of Spanish. The AH has found that past marking emerges based on inherent aspectual…

This study examines the effects of processing instruction (PI) alone versus PI and output (O) on the acquisition of three conjunctional and infinitival phrases in Spanish. Seventy intermediate and advanced-intermediate high school participants received: 1) PI on three consecutive days (PI + PI + PI); 2) PI for two days and meaning-based output…

The present study examines the nature of the Spanish rhotics experimentally, investigating the possibilities that the trill is best understood as deriving from an underlying geminate or that the tap and trill may be separate phonemes. In order to explore these two theories, a behavioral task was designed exploiting the absence of native words in…

In the present study, we examine the roles of 1) explicit information about language provided to learners prior to treatment and 2) aptitude (specifically grammatical sensitivity) within Processing Instruction. Forty-two learners of Spanish in their third-semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information (EI)…

Isleno Spanish speakers maintain few contexts firmly in the subjunctive (for example, adverbial clauses with the conjunctions "para que" and "antes que" and nominal clauses with "querer"), with most other semantic or syntactic categories optionally licensing the subjunctive. This study will outline the obligatory and optional uses of present and…

Linguistic research has shown that Spanish speakers mark clauses with the subjunctive when they consider the information value of those clauses to be low. Despite widespread agreement among linguists, however, the information-value approach to the subjunctive is largely ignored in textbooks and workbooks. This article explains how the…

The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of the so-called "Spanglish" phenomenon and its linguistic repertoires (code-switching utterances). We propose that it is necessary to link all different forms of analysis in order to verify hypotheses regarding the relationship among social, linguistic, and cognitive processes behind…

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

The current debate in second language acquisition and heritage language learning is no longer about whether communicative language teaching should include a focus on form, but rather "how" and "when" this is most effective. The proposals for Spanish for heritage language learners (HLLs) courses show a marked preference for an integrated approach…

This article presents a qualitative study demonstrating how teachers who are non-native speakers (NNS) of the target language and who have learned the target language in a similar environment as their students can use their past learning experiences as pedagogical tools in their classes. An analysis of transcripts from classrooms with NNS and…

This article focuses on the teaching of pragmatics in the Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom and examines the role of grammar as a communicative resource. It also aims to highlight the importance of teaching pragmatics from beginning levels of language instruction, with the spotlight on speech acts at the discourse level. After the concept of…

Previous work in the field of interlanguage pragmatics suggests that learners of a second or foreign language benefit from metapragmatic instruction (e.g., Felix-Brasdefer 2008a; Kasper and Rose 2002; Koike and Pearson 2005). The most common approach taken in studies on instruction is to focus on a speech act and to develop a lesson that acts as a…

This study explores how grammar instruction is conceptualized and applied in published Spanish materials. It sought to answer the following questions: What are the approaches to grammar instruction in current, college-level, beginning Spanish textbooks? How do they reflect current perspectives on grammar teaching? Six widely adopted Spanish…

The teaching of the Spanish noun gender system to students is based on a set of generalizations that the last phoneme, or sound, of a noun is an excellent predictor of the gender of that noun (Bull 1965). These generalized norms have been refined over the years and can be found in most textbooks. The norms are taught to students who then apply…