What's in the input? An examination of Classroom input in Elementary and Intermediate Spanish courses

AbstractThis study explores the language that instructors of a second language (such as Spanish) provide their students. Given that input (i.e., communicative samples of the target language (TL)) is a fundamental concept to all theories of language acquisition, this study examines the quantity, the quality, and the frequency of the input that instructors provide in the classroom.This presentation reports on a study of instructors’ input (N=14). Participants included instructors at four different levels of Spanish (Elementary I and II and Intermediate I and II), from different native languages (native speakers (NS) of Spanish, and non-native (NNS) speakers), and include both female and male instructors. By recording, transcribing, and coding the speech samples from four class periods per language instructor (which accounted for more than 2700 minutes of instructor speech), this study looked at how much TL (Spanish), and how much English, instructors use in the classroom, the contexts in which they use English, the types of input modifications they make, as well as the frequency of verb types (person, number, tense, and mood).Ultimately, this research will make two important contributions. First, the results from this research will inform practitioners and materials developers as to the kinds of input learners need outside of class in order to complement what they receive in class. Second, it will serve as the first classroom-based instructors’ input corpus (database) for Spanish and will be made available to instructors and researchers and in second language acquisition.