Impact of topic familiarity on written production of portuguese as a foreign language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34630/e-rei.vi11.5290Keywords:
task-based language teaching, topic familiarity, complexity, accuracy and fluency, learning Portuguese as a foreign language, cultureAbstract
Task-Based Language Teaching has gained increasing interest from researchers and teachers in the last decades. Although topic familiarity is a variable investigated in some works in the field of foreign language acquisition, there are not many studies on its impact on written production and no study was found in the field of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL). This study aims to investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the written production of Chinese learners of PFL. Twenty-two university learners with a low proficiency level participated in this study. Ten learners performed a familiar task with respect to learners’ culture (Chinese New Year) and twelve learners performed an unfamiliar task related to the target language culture (Christmas). Learners' written production was measures in terms of syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The results showed that learners’ production was more accurate, when they performed the less familiar task, specifically with regard to the accurate use of verb tenses per total number of verb tenses. The results are discussed in light of Skehan's (1998, 2009, 2015, 2018) Limited Attention Capacity Hypothesis. It is expected that this study can benefit researchers' understanding concerning the effects of topic familiarity on Portuguese language teaching and can help teachers in preparing tasks for developing communicative and intercultural competence of PLE learners.
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