Challenging prepositions: the effectiveness of interrelating rules for teaching por and para in Spanish as a second language
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study hypothesizes that showing learners the general concepts that interrelate the meanings of the Spanish prepositions por and para (IR) results in more accurate performance than presenting the meanings as individual, unrelated items (UR). IR is more linguistically accurate than UR because it clarifies that prepositions are polysemous, with related meanings, and not homonymous, with unrelated meanings. IR also highlights the internal organization of the meanings, which psychological research has shown to facilitate recall. Moreover, IR helps learners to better understand the rationale behind the uses of por and para, thereby facilitating the application of classroom material to novel contexts. A quasi-experimental study was carried out with three second-year university Spanish classes in Canada. The learners were tested before the treatment, immediately afterwards, and again four weeks later. The results indicate that IR was not significantly different from UR in terms of accuracy of performance, certainty levels, number of errors made in free writing, self-ratings of knowledge and confidence, nor in the learners' evaluation of the treatment. However, IR seemed to show a larger substantial gain and longer durability for comprehension. IR also led to a faster increase in the learners' certainty levels about their answers, and the IR learners were more accurate in assessing the correctness of their answers. The lack of statistical significance may be due to the learners' unfamiliarity with the IR approach, which presents the rules as flexible rather than discrete and focuses on the process of arriving at the answer rather than on the answer itself. The unfamiliarity of IR, coupled with the short duration of the treatment (45 minutes), may have made learners more hesitant, thus negating any potential benefits. Nonetheless, the findings, as they stand, indicate that IR and UR are equally effective in improving learner performance on por and para. It is possible that as long as there is instruction that calls learners' attention to form-meaning connections, the exact operationalization of this instruction is not relevant for acquisition. The choice of instructional method may thus come down to the preferences of the learners and of the teacher.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".