A transversal study on the way of acquisition of the interrogative in english in a group of students in the second cycle of compulsory secondary education (ESO). Educational implications

Abstract

This paper starts with a general revision on some of the most important aspects and findings in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) from both a psycholinguistic and a didactic perspective. We will refer to the dichotomies cognition / automation, induction / deduction and acquisition / learning, together with the role of the interrogative in the spoken language throughout the main influential currents. We will also study the relationship between the concepts of transitional constructions and interlanguage and the stages of development of interrogatives in conversation. After that, we will comment on the relationship between the interrogatives and the narrative text. Later, we will go on with the analysis and description of the verbal production of interrogatives on the part of a group of students of English as a Foreign Language. Our study is based on a corpus of 69 questions produced by 63 students in the second cycle of Secondary Education. Our analysis corroborates some of the current hypotheses on the acquisition of interrogatives: a) the use of formulas on the part of our students, and b) the coherence of their process of acquisition of the interrogative with the natural stages in the development of this structure. To finish, we will try to set some educational implications for the teaching of interrogatives in Secondary Education.