The acquisition of infinitive and gerund as complements in ESL by Mexican undergraduates

Abstract

Metalinguistic awareness has been assessed primarily throughout metalinguistic knowledge and grammaticality judgment tests. Then, very limited research has been conducted on the attempt to understand how metalinguistic awareness may be developed among adolescents or young adults in verbal group reflection tasks. The present study aims to explore the performance of university students when they reflect on gerund and infinitive complements in English as L2 while they complete consciousness-raising grammar tasks with the intention to develop their metalinguistic awareness. The study links a sociocultural framework with semi-structured stimulated recall interviews on the development of metalinguistic awareness, as both help participants reflect on usage patterns and generalizations of underlying linguistic structures through verbal interaction. The evaluated data consisted of the scores of each task and the speech analysis of the participants. The results reveal that having students identify the underlying rules of gerund and infinitive complements will indirectly contribute to their acquisition. The conclusions pointed to students paying attention to specific features of the language to be fully aware of the form of the linguistic patterns.