O PROCESSAMENTO DO INPUT POR PARTE DOS APRENDIZES DE INGLÊS COMO L2 O PAPEL DA SALIÊNCIA MORFOLÓGICA E DOS ADVÉRBIOS TEMPORAIS NA COMPREENSÃO DA REFERÊNCIA DE TEMPO

Abstract

This dissertation aimed at verifying the relationship between form and meaning in the oral and written input perception in both less proficient and more proficient Brazilian learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). In order to do so, the role played by two independent variables adverbial and morphological salience in the processing of the input in the SL was evaluated. The corpus was build out of a total of 38 subjects, all adults with ages from 18 to 40 years old, from which 36 are Brazilian learners of ESL, students from a language school in Santa Maria, RS, and 2 of them are native speakers of English, taking into consideration that the 36 learners were divided into two experimental groups less proficient and more proficient learners considering results obtained in a proficiency test, while the native speakers belonged to the control group. The collecting of data involved the use of two instruments, a Grammatical Judgment Test and a Recall Test. The data analysis was done through the verification of the number of correct responses and errors made by the 36 participants from both groups of learners in the two levels of proficiency. The results, in sum, indicate that the presence of the time adverb in the test sentence made it easy for the subjects to process the sentences presented in the input, especially for the students in the less proficient level of learning. In addition, it was possible to verify that, in general, the presence of the morphological salience in the test sentences seems not to be relevant for a higher score of correct responses within the obtained results. Besides, it was observed that in both tests the less proficient learners obtained lower scores of correct responses if compared to the other students that were participating in the same experiment, the ones with a higher level of proficiency. Finally, it was evidenced that the difference between the percentages of correct responses obtained by the participants in each of the proficiency levels was greater in the Grammatical Judgment Test than in the Recall Test, which confirmed the prediction that learners normally possess greater difficulty in developing tasks that involve production skills than in performing tasks that involve language reception