Colloquium: Silvia Pisabaaro: "Developing sociolinguistic competence through explicit instruction: future in L2 Spanish"

Future-time expression provides an interesting test-case for the acquisition of variation in Spanish since numerous forms are used in this temporal context, including the morphological future iré, periphrastic future voy a ir, and present indicative voy.  Although recent work has considered to what extent learners use and select the aforementioned forms in variable contexts (Gudmestad  & Geeslin, 2013; Kanwit, 2017; Solon & Kanwit, 2013), research in this vein has not included pedagogical interventions, despite recent calls for instruction on sociolinguistic variation (Geeslin with Long, 2014; Gutiérrez & Fairclough, 2009).

The present study investigates the development of sociolinguistic competence (Canale & Swain, 1980) of two Spanish classes through an explicit intervention in which students received instruction regarding general trends in overall rates of use of future-time forms and the effects of independent variables on such use (i.e., geographic region, temporal distance, and the presence of temporal adverbs).