Two Heads May Not Be Better than One in Writing to Learn Spanish as a Second Language

This study investigated two approaches to writing to learn Spanish as a second language. Eight undergraduate students were exposed to task-based language learning and a traditional approach in a counter-balanced manner to learn Spanish verbs from writing stories. While the participants made significant improvements in morphosyntactic accuracy over time, their performance with regard to syntactic complexity was deteriorated. When the two approaches were compared, no significant differences were found in accurate use of Spanish reflexive verbs or complexity of the stories. Although the number of language-related episodes and accurate use of reflexive verbs were positively related, the correlation did not reach a significant level. Due to the nature of this small-scale study, generalizability of these results is limited.