Pixel International Conferences

This session will outline a research study designed to document the contribution of children’s literature in Spanish to the development of the grammatical competence of thirty students enrolled in one of two sections of an elementary-level Spanish course at a small four-year college in the southeastern United States. The study was completed in three consecutive phases. In the first phase of the study, students first learned the formation and uses of the preterit and imperfect tenses in Spanish via the course textbook and then practiced these concepts in class. The goal of this phase was to provide students with an overall conceptual understanding of the construction and purposes of these verb tenses. In the second phase of the study, students read El cuento de Ferdinando el toro (The Story of Ferdinand the Bull) (Leaf, 1936), a book replete with example sentences containing verbs in each of these tenses. The goal of this phase was to deepen student’s metagrammatical awareness concerning these two past tenses in Spanish while also strengthening students’ knowledge concerning the formation of verbs in these tenses and the functions the tenses express, Students read and discussed the main themes in the book and then completed charts which helped build their conceptual understanding of the formation and uses of both verb tenses; the PACE Model (Adair-Hauck & Donato, 2002) was used as a framework to design these activities. Following these activities, students participated in the third phase of the study in which they completed a questionnaire which asked them to document their awareness and knowledge of the uses of each past tense along their perspectives concerning the relevancy of the book to their understanding of both the forms and functions on both tenses. Preliminary findings suggest that the book facilitated students’ emerging understanding of both tenses in that the book reinforced their knowledge of the formation of each tense while also allowing them to utilize contextual clues from the text to determine potential uses of each tense.