Running head: CASE STUDY WRITE-UP:SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 1

Case Study Write-Up

Raven R G Redmond-Johnson

University of Southern Mississippi

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Abstract

This case-study explored some good practices for second language acquisition. The subject is a

17-year old native English-speaking female. She attends a public high-school, and the researcher

is her instructor. This is her first year taking a foreign language, and she is considered an

advanced language learner. She is observed in different aspects of the classroom, and the

meaning that is deduced from such observations are recorded in this write-up. The write-up

includes a learner profile with more information about the learner, the observations made during

the case study, activities used to gather data in the setting where the student was analyzed, an

introduction to the pedagogical implications of the study, the implications that this case study has

on the field of second language acquisition at large, and a conclusion.

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Profile of the Learner

My participant is a 17-year old high school student of the researcher, whom we will call

Marie, with a love for learning. She is a person I would describe as one with a knack for

language learning. She is being raised by a single-mom who has a bachelor’s degree and teaches

for a living. After high school, she plans to go to college and major in criminal justice to prepare

her for a future career as a lawyer. She is intensely interested in the Spanish language, as she sees

the potential benefits to her future career. She finds opportunities to practice the language and

uses it in innovative ways.

In my observation of Marie, she reinforced many things that I already knew about

language acquisition, as well as taught me some new things. In observation log one, I noticed

many things. Upon entrance into the class, Marie gets into Spanish-mode. She often greets me in

Spanish and addresses me by my Spanish title. Research shows that effective language learners

look for opportunities outside of the learning context to practice language. According to

Naiman’s et al. five characteristics of good language learners, “Good language learners actively

involve themselves in the language learning task (Allwright & Hanks, 2009),” p. 83. Her

extracurricular activities include cheerleading, and she often does her leg stretches while

counting in Spanish. She also communicates with other fellow cheerleaders who take Spanish

class in Spanish. They often exchange greetings and bits of phrases that they have learned.

This is Marie’s first year taking Spanish and her first encounter with any foreign

language. She excels in many of her other courses, including advanced courses, so it was no

surprise to me that she caught on to Spanish. Although good performance in other subjects is not

always proportional to good performance in other subjects, Marie demonstrates that certain skills
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are transferable and useful for second language acquisition. Her learning style is a mixture of all

types. She listens well and responds accurately to directions, learns well visually, and does well

with kinesthetics. She is eager to learn about Hispanic language and culture and exhibits no

negative attitudes toward the differences in culture. She seems to appreciate culture that is

different from her own.

Observations

Because Marie is a minor, all of her observations took place in the public school setting

but in different aspects of the classroom. Some of her activities were oral; others were written.

Some were individual; others were in groups or partnerships (pairs). Marie seemed to transform

from the role of student to the role of teacher. She taught me many things during her

observations about language acquisition and the type of learner that acquires a second language

successfully. I will discuss some of the most valuable points below.

Marie taught me that it is no myth that there are some qualities that successful language

learners have that separate them from those who say language just isn’t their “thing.” Our

textbook, authored by Brown (2014), mentions a few of such factors that attribute to successful

second language acquisition, particularly affective factors. Says Brown of affective factors and

their connection to second language acquisition, “Is there a connection here with L2 learning?

Yes, if language is inextricably woven into the fabric of virtually every aspect of human

behavior. And yes, if language is so pervasive a phenomenon in our humanity that it cannot be

separated from “who I am” as a human being” (p.143). Marie proved this to be true over and

over throughout her observation period. Her personality obviously attributed to her knack for

language learning. It made her a pleasure to work with, as well.

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Marie’s case study shows that a good communicator influences her interlocutor. She had

a positive influence every time that she worked with a partner.

According to Gabrys-Barker and Bielska (2013), “...it may be assumed that willingness to

communicate in FL [foreign language] is strongly dependent on people and context in

which communication takes place...If a person has a positive image of one’s competence

in a given language, s/he will be more willing to communicate in this particular language,

which determines the type of situation” (p. 2098).

Marie does exactly that. She gives her peers confidence through her exuding confidence.

Anyone that works in a group or in pairs with her does well or responds well to her feedback.

They tend to copy her enthusiasm by means of tone and facial expression. This is no new

discovery. Research shows that interlocutors tend to imitate each other, even unbeknownst to the

imitator, in conversation. Andrews (2006) says on this topic, “Language conformity is more

important to adolescents than to adults” (p.45). This is true even in learning a second language,

as I have observed from Marie and her interlocutors, as well as many others.

Marie has taught me that self-motivated learners are superior learners. Even more

superior learners are those with a pull from both sides.

Brown (2014) says, “Maslow (1970) claimed that intrinsic motivation is clearly superior

to extrinsic...Bruner (1966b), praising the “autonomy of self-reward,” claimed that one of

the most effective ways to help students to think and learn is to free them from the

control of rewards and punishments...A stockpile of research strongly favors intrinsic

orientations, especially for ​long-term​ retention” (p. 160-161).

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Marie is already a straight-A student. As such, she values heightened performance in all subjects,

including foreign language. She has high regard for new and useful information, like learning a

new language, because that is simply the type of student and person that she is. She has

personally chosen a career as an attorney that will require her to communicate with the masses

and that will not necessarily limit her to those who share her culture and native tongue. Her

choice of career serves as both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation because this is a decision that

she has made for her future, and knowing Spanish will benefit her financially in this career.

From observing Marie, I can clearly see that second language learners need to be

risk-takers who consider what they say beforehand and base their expressions on previously

stored knowledge. While she is willing to experiment with her second language, she is not too

careless in her usage of it. Brown explains, “Yet another style is an individual’s tendency to be

comfortable making quick or gambling (impulsive) decisions versus a tendency to make slower,

more calculated (reflective) decisions...educational research reveals that children who are

conceptually reflective tend to make fewer errors in reading than impulsive children” (p.119).

Throughout her log, it is obvious from terms that the researcher included like “she thought about

it for a moment and then responded.” Her actions are often contemplative, and she can be seen

carefully mulling over her answers about language. As a result, when she needs such information

later on, she can often answer automatically without being overly pensive.

Marie is also a prime example of the benefits of explicit grammar instruction in

preparation of a person for real-life communication. Her growth in the language in just a year

surpasses the growth of those who have been immersed in the language environment for years

without prior training. In this age, many teachers use websites to teach their students foreign
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language. They usually require the listener to listen to comprehensible input and to produce

output, singing a song or imitating the script of a movie. It puts the learner in a communicative

context in that they must picture themselves where the actor is or pretend to be the artist of the

song in front of an audience. The pedagogy isn’t very strong because there isn’t any explicit

instruction. It simply encourages the learner to pick up vocabulary and other grammar points

through exposure. Resources like this are only useful once the student has already been exposed

to specific and discrete grammar points. I have found that each year that I teach Spanish, I

become more acquainted with errors that my students are likely to make in future classes. As

Folse (2016) brings out in Chapter two, we should go over the discrete parts of the language (i.e.

tense, parts of speech, labels, etc.) and their functions. The task is to get the learner to see how

the different parts of speech to work together as a unit. If we pay attention to the kinds of errors

that students makes, we can begin to understand why they make such errors and address these

confidently. However, only after going over the specifics of grammar is this and other benefits

possible. My painstaking attention to explicit grammar instruction has helped to mold her into an

advanced language learner.

Marie reinforced the importance of feedback in second language instruction. At times, it

was necessary for me to provide negative feedback immediately. At other times, it was more

beneficial to wait and then repeat her mistake to make it more salient at the end. She also taught

me about errors versus mistakes This could help me to decide what type of feedback I should

provide. If she made a mistake, I would simply make the mistake more perceptual by drawing

attention to it and prompting uptake. If she failed to show comprehension, I then knew to take

further steps. If she made an error, I would need to provide metalinguistic information and
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perhaps a correction if the supplementary information did not prove useful. I could then provide

an opportunity where she could demonstrate his understanding of the information that I provided.

This case study is also concerned with the education of the educator and how this

education affects the quality of the education given to students. According to Svalberg (2015),

teachers’ education, the ways that they learn, greatly influence the ways that they teach.

Dissonance can be used in positive ways because it causes teachers to think and to use a similar

method with their students. Marie made this teaching method come alive for me. This method

dictates that educators present students with evidence contrary to their current knowledge, in

imitation of their training where they were required to reason on information that was contrary to

fact. This is said to create a type of dissonance called cognitive conflict. This type of dissonance

is said to build teachers’ complex grammatical knowledge, and teachers are essential puns in the

teaching process because of their role as learners first. I often played devil’s advocate to get her

to think critically and to consider different options. She could then weigh out how each option

affected language. Sometimes, I would discover new pointers by doing such exercises with her

and the rest of my class.

In my classes, I extend much attention to learning vocabulary. Every two weeks, Marie

gets new vocabulary words, which will be used in context with grammar point, like the previous

set. I realize that vocabulary is a major constituent of language. Marie’s almost impeccable

memory and control of Spanish vocabulary is a major contribution to her success in

communication in the language and her optimum performance in the class. Grammar can often

be disposed when lexicon is used correctly, when it comes to communicative meaning. In other
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words, a native speaker or any interlocutor may be able to deduce meaning from an utterance

with grammatical errors, but this is not always so with lexical errors.

According to Gass (2014), “Another take on the importance of the L2 lexicon is that, of

all error types, learners consider vocabulary errors the most serious. Additionally, large

corpora of errors consistently indicate that lexical errors are the most common among L2

learners…For example, Lyster (1998) found that 80 percent of learners’ lexical errors

received corrective feedback, in comparison with 70 percent for phonological, and 56

percent for grammatical, errors. Likewise, Ellis et a. (2001a) found that, of the errors

corrected by the teachers, almost 40 percent targeted vocabulary” (p. 194-195).

This being said, lexical errors are a major threat to communication. Attention to vocabulary

acquisition definitely aids in language acquisition.

I always give a pretest to determine previous knowledge or to uncover knowledge that

the L2er did not know was relevant. This is directly related to knowing learners’ entry behaviors.

Meaningful learning can be encouraged if one can help the L2er to see how knowledge he

already has can help him to easily acquire new knowledge. This is useful in my classroom in

instances where I have established knowledge based on similarity to the native language and then

built on that knowledge subsequently. When Marie class was first introduced to Spanish

infinitives, I reminded her that the same way English infinitives had a special mark, namely the

word “to”, Spanish infinitives also have special marks, namely the endings -ar, -er, and -ir. In a

later chapter on conjugation, she was able to correctly distinguish an infinitive from a conjugated

verb and form conjugations by correctly completing the first step: removing the ending from the
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infinitive. If she had not had previous knowledge about what such endings were, conjugation

would have been a much harder task.

Case Study Activities

Activity One- ​This activity require Marie to work in a pair with a friend. The activity was

entitled ​¿Qué prefieres?. ​Students, including Marie were assigned partners. The activity dealt

with the type of food that students preferred over another type of food. The purpose of this

activity was to use the verb ​preferir ​in conjugated form correctly and to practice the name of

dinner foods. In addition, the food was to be used without definite articles, so it caused Marie to

begin pondering over what types of verbs required the nouns to be used with the definite article

and which did not. One partner asked about which of two foods was preferred; the other partner

replied by choosing a particular food. This was also related to past knowledge in that Marie had

​ fterward, I reviewed to be
to recall another way to ask about preferences using the verb ​gustar. A

sure that Marie got the main points.

Activity Two: ​ This activity encouraged the student to use her vocabulary to talk about ways to

maintain their health. The grammar point was using ​para+infinitive,​ which the student would

discuss more in depth later, and using two verbs in the same sentence. This was also a partner

activity to encourage peer revision. According to Philp, Adams, and Iwashita, “We describe as

peer interaction any communicative activity carried out between learners, where there is minimal

or no participation from the teacher...It is collaborative in the sense of participants working

together toward a common goal” (p. 2-3).

Person A, Marie’s partner, chose activities that she participated in daily from an already

formulated list. So, Person A’s answers were limited. Person B, which role Marie filled,
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suggested three things that Person A could do to have a healthier lifestyle, so she had more room

for creativity. Not only did Marie stray from the list when answering, but she used a technique to

give her peer confidence: She answered back in their shared native language, English, to assure

her partner that she had performed her role correctly and that she understood. Marie asked

additional questions to ensure that she was orally completing the activity correctly.

Activities Three: ​This was a written activity. It tested Marie’s knowledge of topics previously

covered. It also tested her ability to multi-task with a wide range of topics and her retention rate

of such explicitly taught topics. The first section tested vocabulary, which was mostly dinner

food items and healthy activities, by providing a word box and pictures to label. The second

section tested Marie’s knowledge of adjective and noun agreement and phrasal semantics. She

had to indicate which adjective matched the noun in gender and number and tell what the phrase

meant afterward. The following activity placed adjectives in context by having Marie to

complete sentences describing people, sometimes of differing gender and varying from singular

to multiples, with the correct form of an adjective. Marie had to also know lexical semantics in

order to choose the adjective that fit. The next section dealt with the verb ​ser. ​It tested her

explicit knowledge of the uses of the verb and the varying conjugations according to the subject

pronoun. Yet another section tested Marie’s ability to make suggestions and talk about

preferences in her second language. This section tested her knowledge of using more than one

verb and knowing if the noun needed an article or not. The last section was on culture. As usual,

she missed none of these. Her overall performance on this written exam labeled her an advanced

language learner.
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Activity Four: ​Marie completed this activity with a partner. One person played the role of

Person A, and the other played the role of Person B. Students talked to their partners with

varying subjects about where the people were going. Sometimes, Person A was an agent in the

subject; sometimes, he was not. Then, Person B had to determine how to respond with the

correct form of ​ir ​according to the subject, suggesting a place where the activity could be

completed and using ​para + infinitive. ​It gave Marie a chance to practice places where certain

activities took place, grammatical structure of ​in order to + verb​, and the infinitive ​ir.

Activity Five: ​ The last activity was a class activity. They played charades with adjectives.

Marie acted as the primary person at first, taking the lead and acting out the adjectives and

urging her classmates to guess what adjective it was. They had to use the correct form of the verb

ser a​ nd the correct gender of the adjective when the subject changed. Once the students got used

to the game, they stopped thinking so hard about the form and got more involved in the game.

They began to answer automatically.

Introduction

Some of the main points of this case study are brought out in the next subheading,

Pedagogical Implications. In lieu of writing a book on everything that was discovered, only a

few points were selected. First, students should be treated as capable agents in their language

acquisition process. Second, students should be encouraged to speak the language in or out of the

learning context. Third, students must be explicitly taught, rather than left at chance to learn a

language. Finally, we must allow students to ask questions outside of a planned lesson; this

makes the lesson more spontaneous and allows for a mutual learning experience.
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Pedagogical Implications

This case study has implications for the field of second language acquisition at large.

Sometimes, we must give our students leadership roles in order to contribute to their prosperity

in foreign language learning. This is part of setting the bar, having high expectations of students,

so that they will become self-fulfilling prophecies. I admittedly put Marie on a sort of pedestal in

the classroom, but it made her classmates more competitive with and willing to learn from her. It

also motivated her to live up to my expectations. She was constantly striving to be better and to

rectify her errors. Had I not been an educator who noticeably admired her abilities and her

efforts, she might not have cared as much.

We should forever encourage students to stay in character. When we greet them outside

of the instructional context, we should do so in the second language that they are attempting to

acquire. By doing this, we will be taking advantage of the more natural communicative settings.

Even when students attempt to speak to us in the native language about things that they have

learned to discuss in their second language, we should urge them to use such knowledge by

continuing to communicate in the second language. According to Ellis (1994), “...in real-life

situations outside the classroom, a somewhat different role relationship arises (‘mentor’ and

‘apprentice’). Thus, even ‘informal learning’ inside the classroom may differ from what is found

in natural settings” (p.228). We must take advantage of any real natural setting where students

can communicate in the true communicative element.

Explicit instruction cannot be stressed enough. It is simply indispensable. We cannot

simply expose our students to grammar forms in context and language patterns and expect them

to be productive. Implicit instruction is useful, but only once grammar points have been
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introduced. Students progress much more rapidly once they learn and then practice rather than

with the converse. After just one school year of explicit instruction, Marie surpasses many other

language learners who have not had her training and who have been attempting second language

acquisition much longer. One cannot reach a certain level of competency with implicit

instruction alone.

Teaching is also a learning process, and with many topics, we will build new knowledge

simultaneously with our students. This case study made me reflect on my future as an ESL

teacher in comparison with my current career as a Spanish teacher. I often have undue anxiety

over how I will handle unexpected questions. English is my native language, and I take so many

aspects of it for granted. Then, when I think about my current career as a Spanish instructor; it all

seems so easy in comparison. I can anticipate and answer any question I’m asked, and I never

stress about what I will be asked. Marie helped me in this regard because she often asked

questions that I was not prepared for, but I was confident in my abilities, and so I was able to

explore possibilities even when I was unsure. My native language seems overwhelming and

much more complex in comparison. This is often the case with educators who teach their native

language to speakers of other languages. We have to study much harder, dig much deeper

because the questions that we encounter, we have often never thought about ourselves.

There is no preparation better than experience. Books can assist, but until you use that

knowledge in the classroom, it is simply fleeting. Therefore should make our teaching relevant to

our students. This is why it is important to get to know them, as I did Marie. I learned about her

future career choice, what she plans to major in when she attends college, how she performed in

other classes, and her learning styles at the start of the school semester. I attempted to take a
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similar interest in each of my students. Some had more enthusiasm than others, but I attempted to

build on what they brought to the table. We want to let students know how new information

relates to what they already know. If we focus on the student and how we can help them, we will

be better prepared when we are in the proverbial hot seat.

Conclusion

In summation, Marie has helped me to grow as an educator. She has taught me many

important lessons, such as how to anticipate common problems in second language learning. I

have learned to be both a student and a teacher concurrently. I now know how to build student

relationships as a language teacher, in general, and how to adjust my teaching methods to my

students based on learning styles and student motivation for learning a second language. I have

learned the basic teaching strategies for second language instruction through trial and error with

students like Marie. She has taught me to let students have some sort of autonomy in their

language learning process. Students like Marie are few and far between. I am elated to have had

this opportunity to study her in what is truly her element. She taught me new skills and new

information useful to me as a graduate student and as a language instructor. My experiences with

her in the classroom have refined me as a second language instructor.

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References

Adams, R, Iwashita, N., & Philp, J. (2014). ​Peer interaction and second language

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Allwright, D. & Hanks, J. (2009). ​The developing language learner: An introduction to

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Andrews, L. (2006). ​Language exploration and awareness: A resource book for teachers.

Third edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Brown, H. D. (2014). ​Principles of language learning and teaching.​ 6th edition. White

Plains, NY: Pearson.

​ xford, NY:Oxford
Ellis, Rod. (1994). ​The study of second language acquisition. O

University Press.

Folse, K.S. (2009). ​Keys to teaching grammar to English language learners: A practical

​ econd edition.​ ​Ann Arbor, MI: University to Michigan Press.

handbook. S

Gass, S. M. with Behney, J. & Plonsky, L. (2013). ​Second language acquisition: An introductory

course​. 4th edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gabrys-Barker, D. & Bielska, J. (2013). ​The affective dimension in second language

​ onawanda, NY: Multilingual Matters.

acquisition. T

Svalberg, A. M.-L. (2015). Understanding the Complex Processes in Developing Student

Teachers’ Knowledge About Grammar. ​The Modern Language Journal, 99(​ 3), pp. 529-545.

doi: 10.1111/modl.12241
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