Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing: Toward the development of metalinguistic competences for Portuguese adult learners of English María del Carmen Arau Ribeiro Tese para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Letras (3º ciclo de estudos) Orientador: Prof. Doutor Paulo Osório Co-orientador: Prof. Doutor S. Walter Best Covilhã, Junho de 2011 Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing To my family, who played the loveliest music while I worked so that we could sooner resume our adventures together. ii Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to thank those who made this thesis possible. I owe my deepest gratitude to Paulo Osório, my supervisor at the Universidade da Beira Interior, who recognized the value of my prior studies in the United States and was willing to risk working with me in a language that is not his own. His expertise and efficiency in all things academic as well as his timely guidance through Portuguese linguistics have been invaluable. My incursion as a student into Portuguese academia is also the result of unfailing encouragement from Luísa Maria Queiroz de Campos and Walter Best since 1993, when they proposed my CV to the Scientific Council of the Instituto Politécnico da Guarda. Attesting to this fruitful professional relationship of nearly two decades, Walter accepted the position of co-supervisor on this project, for which I could not be more appreciative. His attention to detail and editing talents abound and I am fortunate to have benefited from his skills. I am also grateful to the Scientific Council of the Universidade da Beira Interior for the opportunity exceptionally granted to write this doctoral thesis in English, my primary language and that of most of the primary research sources. The Instituto Politécnico da Guarda (IPG), the Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão (ESTG), and the Departamento de Línguas e Culturas (DLC) were most generous in granting a semester off, from September 2010 to February 2011, contributing significantly to the timely conclusion of this thesis. Jorge Mendes, the President of the IPG, constantly encouraged me to make time to further my own career in my demanding professional agenda, for which I am thankful. Clara Silveira, ESTG Director, thoughtfully scheduled meetings with me, as President of the Pedagogical Council, around my own writing and research calendar during this time. I am also most thankful to both Paula Neves and, again, Walter Best, who both taught my classes during this absence, and to Ana Margarida Fonseca, constant collaborator, who has provided invaluable assistance with translations from and to Portuguese. The students of the Pharmacy Technician degree of the IPG Escola Superior de Saúde receive special recognition for having unwittingly contributed to the corpus of this study. I thank their degree coordinators, especially Fátima Roque, for constant support and advice concerning their specific academic and professional interests over the three years of data collection. To all my students throughout the years, in California, Madrid, Oporto, and Guarda, I offer my most humble and heartfelt appreciation for the truly rewarding experience of having learned with them throughout year upon year of lessons in English language and culture. Finally, I can only extol the virtues of my family and friends, near and far, an ocean of joy in my life. Their compassion, intelligence, and loving nature are a special blessing; they have my undying love and affection, which I try to express to them each and every day. iii Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing Preface While learning Portuguese, becoming professionally experienced in higher education, and starting a family were my initial priorities as a new resident in Portugal, nearly two decades later, I find myself taking the final steps toward completing a Doctoral Thesis which has given me immense pleasure. Teaching, deeply rooted in me, has taken me many places and opened many doors. Concurrent to graduate studies, I was invited to continue to work for the State of California based on a summer internship carried out at the Chancellor‘s Office of the California Community Colleges, dedicated to gathering experience for an honors thesis entitled The Selective Society: An Inquiry into the English Language/Civics Provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, where my work assessing and negotiating conditions for Amnesty students of English with the Immigration and Naturalization Services drew the attention of the California Department of Education, responsible for all English language education, public and private, for immigrants in the state. This felicitous combination of my further education and the opportunity to work with top language education professionals on educational standards and consulting marked my drive and gave me the opportunity to learn closely from Autumn Keltner and Sylvia Ramirez, dedicated teachers and consultants for improving language education and workplace success for immigrants in California. Conclusion of my graduate studies led me to Madrid, to discover part of my family history, and then to Portugal due to my personal life. Following a year in Oporto, the Guarda Polytechnic Institute marked my embarkment on this teaching voyage in higher education in Portugal. Learning Portuguese as an adult while teaching English remains a dedicated adventure. Living in a number of countries has enriched me culturally and linguistically. Perhaps most importantly, working in an environment that is different from the one in which you were raised obliges you to constantly reassess your behavior, attitudes, and abilities and has contributed significantly to my choices at the time of selecting a thesis. My interest in the interlanguage of my Portuguese students of English derives from my personal love of language. From the days when my grandfather would challenge me to find the original French expression of sayings also used in English and reading the intentionally creative spelling of my grandmother, who fought for phonetic orthography in English at UCLA during the Depression, I have cared about how language works and enjoy trying to understand exactly how students today are using words and structures. Both perspectives, of the user and of the target language itself, are relevant to me. Writing this thesis coincided with a reality pointed out by Tagnin and Fromm (2009), which states that most language teachers tend to keep samples of their students‘ writing for posterior analysis; this additional corpus-based motivation has allowed me the unique opportunity to actually put portfolios to use in their afterlife for a relevant purpose. Theoretically, the review of the literature is extensive, necessarily covering the acquisition of a first language and its influences on that of a second, examining the changing iv Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing view of language learners and their efforts to communicate, the advances in perspectives on their errors and the advent of the concept of interlanguage, almost half a century ago. Because the learner corpus is text-bound, writing is also explored as a skill to be learned as are the metacognitive and metalinguistic approaches in using an interlanguage, as well as the English for Specific Purposes context of the participants in this study from the Pharmacy Technician degree of the School of Health of the Guarda Polytechnic Institute (Escola Superior da Saúde do Instituto Politécnico da Guarda) in Portugal. Methodologically, my technical skills with numerical data helped me to create the syntax to solve most statistical issues through Excel, coupled with an intensive and timely course of advanced SPSS at the IPG that broadened the possibilities for generating interesting and relevant correlations, among other descriptive data. Ultimately, examination of apparent errors, as expressions of learner interlanguage, may provide a better understanding of the metalinguistic competences at work in young adult Portuguese learners of English using the dynamic construct that is language. v Insights from Interlanguage as Revealed in Writing Abstract Based on a written corpus by 69 Portuguese learners of English, this study was designed to discover insights into the metalinguistic competences of young adult L2 users over three different sessions of a 30-hour a Technical English for Pharmacists at the School of Health of the Guarda Polytechnic Institute in Portugal. The longitudinal study effectively covered a total of 138 texts submitted as an initial and final report by each learner, written in conditions similar to those of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). For the initial report, a portrait emerges of the written interlanguage of Portuguese science students after their K-12 course of study, with errors distributed among syntactic (43%), lexical (36%), and style and spelling (21%) sources. The written interlanguage analyzed consisted of 28,069 words, constituting 1,311 T-units, which revealed a total of 4,143 errors. The difference from the initial to the final report revealed an overall improvement of 6% less errors, from the pattern of 43-36-21% pattern for syntactic-lexical-style & spelling errors to 47-37-16%, after the 30-hour course. This was accompanied by a 42% growth in the number of words produced, and a corresponding increase of 17% in the number of T-units as well as a 23% rise in their mean length (MLT-U). These changes were further explored to determine that, of the three groups studied, one first and two second year groups, with average ages of 19 and 20.13 respectively, reveal age to be a significant factor for improvements, particularly in both the number of words and T-units. Error analysis determined an overall error recurrence of 45% syntactic, 37% lexical, and 18% due to style and spelling; further analysis found that, in six of the ten subclassifications, representing 57% of the written corpus, errors due to collocation, pronouns, Portuguese-influenced lexical choices, style, such as repetition and punctuation, and spelling showed patent improvement over the 30-hour course.