Date of Completion
2020
Thesis Type
College of Arts and Science Honors
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Guillermo Rodriguez
Keywords
russian, second language acquisition, language learning, linguistics, flipped classroom, morphology
Abstract
The Elementary Russian curriculum at UVM is a flipped classroom, a relatively new approach to communicative language teaching, in which explicit grammar and vocabulary work is conducted at home and class time is reserved for communication between peers and the instructor. In this thesis, we measured the interactions between teaching methodology, learner cognitive capacity, and language proficiency in the acquisition of Russian as a second language (L2). As a means to investigate proficiency, we tested students’ knowledge of the complex Russian conjugation pattern for present tense. Participants completed cognitive tests measuring working memory (WM) capacity, attention, multi-tasking capacity, and fluid intelligence. These variables were correlated with the proficiency results, which revealed significant relationships between WM and attention capacity. In the present study, WM and attention predict a learner’s performance in the production of Russian verbal morphology.
Recommended Citation
Esser, Katie M., "To Flip or Not to Flip?: Individual Cognitive Differences and L2 Russian Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in a Flipped Classroom" (2020). UVM College of Arts and Sciences College Honors Theses. 79.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/castheses/79