Spanish & Portuguese | Acquisition of Spanish L2
S515 | 3863 | Lee

Professor James Lee
Email: leejames
MW 4:00 - 5:15 3cr.  section #
Ballantine Hall 305

La adquisición del español como segundo idioma
The Acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language

This course provides an introduction to the wealth of empirical research
focusing on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Being
introductory, the course is organized around four topics: morpheme
acquisition studies, grammatical development, aspects of input processing,
and the application of linguistic theory to research on second language
learning.  The question that guides the course is, How does a nonnative
linguistic system develop?  A second guiding question is, How has the field
of second language acquisition developed and evolved over the years?  We
will use the Spanish data base to situate acquisition research in an
historical context.


There will be an exam after each of the four topics, each worth 20% of the
final grade.  There will be a semester-long project worth 20% of the final
grade.  The project consists of developing a critical bibliography on some
aspect of the acquisition of Spanish.  Students will be allowed to focus on
related topics such as: the acquisition of Spanish as a native language,
the acquisition of Spanish by child bilinguals, the acquisition of Spanish
by adult bilinguals, or the acquisition of Spanish in natural
(nonclassroom) environments.