Individual Differences And Feedback Effects In The Acquisition Of Past Tense Verbs In Spanish As A Foreign Language

This article presents a study that aimed to observe the effects of the feedback in the teaching of Spanish as a second language and its correlations with individual differences in learners' working memory and attention capacities. Participants were divided into two groups and had a period of formal instruction on the uses of past in Spanish, with each group receiving a different type of feedback (implicit or explicit). Respectively, preceded and proceeded the instruction, pretest and posttest, which included three linguistic tasks: judgment of grammaticality, phrasal comprehension, and phrasal production. There were performed tests to measure the attention and working memory capacities too. The results: the group that received explicit feedback increased their scores in the posttest in all tasks, and the group that received implicit feedback only increased the means of judgment of grammaticality and production. They showed correlations between the individual differences and feedback effects, mainly between working memory capacity and participants' performance.