Date of Graduation

2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

EdD

College

College of Education and Human Services

Department

Curriculum & Instruction/Literacy Studies

Committee Chair

Joy F Saab

Committee Co-Chair

Sam Stack

Committee Member

Maria Amores

Committee Member

Erin Leatherman

Committee Member

James Rye

Abstract

This quantitative study completed at an American university in Spring 2014 in intermediate Spanish classes measured if two individual cultural speeches (ICS tasks) had an effect not only on second language (L2) students' accuracy in Spanish during the oral presentation, but also their cultural content knowledge when answering the culture section of the final exam. The ICS task was presented in Spanish, orally without reading, so that students had the opportunity to speak Spanish and share cultural content knowledge with their classmates. The ICS task design was supported by The Robinson Cognition Hypothesis (2007), Ellis (2009) and Skehan and Foster's (1997) findings. The sample was composed of 57 Spanish 204 students of three different instructors. Each instructor had an experimental group that performed the ICS tasks and a control group that followed the regular program. One-way ANOVA and Mann-Whitney tests were the statistical methods used to analyze the dependent variable accuracy with three measures: global accuracy, verb accuracy and articles accuracy and the dependent variable cultural content knowledge in all control and experimental groups after the independent variable ICS task was applied. Because the variable accuracy has three measures, a MANOVA test was run to protect against error inflation. The result revealed that the ICS task had statistical significance in global accuracy (p value = 0.032) evaluated by error free sentences. The specific accuracy of verbs was significant (p value = 0.006) and evaluated according to appropriateness verb and conjugation. Cultural Content knowledge, as measured by the cultural questions of the final exam, was statistically significant (p-value = 0.019). However, the specific accuracy related to the use of articles evaluated according to gender and number agreement was not significant (p = 0.271). These results demonstrated that performing two ICS tasks increases the number of error-free sentences and improves verb accuracy and cultural knowledge as measured in an oral presentation and cultural questions in the final exam.

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