Understanding the factors constraining pronominal acquisition in Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This paper comments on Maripaz García’s paper (Pronouns: Students’ worst enemy in the foreign language classroom) . Classroom experience and previous empirical studies show that SFL learners produce certain ‘classic’ errors with a set of grammatical properties (e.g., the ser/estar distinction, the preterit/imperfect distinction, the use of the subjunctive, gender agreement, Subjet-Verb agreement, etc). But Garcia’s corpus-based study reports a finding that has been overlooked in previous studies conducted within an Error Analysis (EA) framework: EFL learners produce more errors with pronouns than with any other grammatical category.
The commentary in this paper adds value to García’s findings on pronouns and frames her descriptive findings within formal studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language (SL2). Over the past decades, these studies have shown that pronominal subjects are persistently problematic, even at end states of development. Our commentary also discusses the role of L1 transfer and classroom instruction on the acquisition of pronominals in SFL/SL2, with a view to presenting a critical and useful background for future researchers on the factors that constrain pronominal acquisition in SFL/SL2.