UC Davis

This dissertation project aims to investigate (1) how three different L2 Spanish instructorstreat vocabulary in their beginner Spanish course (SPA 1) depending on their teaching experience, and (2) how an instructor treats vocabulary in a beginner Spanish course during the three academic quarters of his first year of teaching at the university level. Concretely, their classroom talk was analyzed with a focus on the (1) input provided by the instructor, output generated by the students, and the number of student interactions in the classroom, and (2) lexical frequency and word repetition in the input. The aim of the study is to get a better understanding of how different instructors’ input and overall classroom management may affect incidental vocabulary learning and how such input may change over time as an instructor gains more teaching experience throughout one academic year. Results from this research will hopefully provide relevant insights into how to better train new instructors and how to better connect instructors to vocabulary research in ways to avoid the current disconnect between the scientific literature on the subject and what instructors do in their classrooms.