Reinforcement of Grammatical Structures through Explicit Instruction in Palenquero Creole

A Pilot Study

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5900752
AutoresEstilita María Cassiani Obeso (Pennsylvania State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen6
Número1
Páginas41
Fecha de publicación2021-03-04
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages6010041
OpenAlexW3133800023
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas47

The Afro-Hispanic creole, Palenquero, has been spoken (together with Spanish) in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, for centuries. Until recently, Palenquero was endangered due to prejudice, but language revitalization efforts are underway, and younger speakers are learning Palenquero, but with little reinforcement out of school. The school instruction involves no grammatical explanations, almost no student production, or critical feedback. Adult speakers usually do not address younger speakers in Palenquero, thus leaving school-acquired forms suspended without reinforcement. This represents a unique scenario of heritage acquisition of a language with no bidirectional communication between younger and adult speakers. The present study focuses on the use of preverbal particles and prenominal plural marker by heritage speakers of Palenquero before and after explicit instruction. Communication activities explicitly presented the prenominal plural ma and preverbal particles, such as zero morpheme (simple present), asé (habitual), ta (progressive), a (perfective/simple past) and tan (future). Participants performed better at the post-test and results suggest that explicit explanation of grammatical rules, practice, repetition, and corrective feedback improved the usage of ma and tan. This result lines up with previous studies that posit the amount of time and exposure that learners need in order to acquire complex morphology

Cognitive psychology · Creole language · Heritage language · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Morpheme · Pedagogy · Plural · Reinforcement · Repetition (rhetorical device · Second-language acquisition · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Psychology · Social Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation