Typing vs handwriting to acquire irregular english verbs by young spanish speakers

Abstract

This study aimed to explore whether handwriting and typing methods are effective to acquire irregular English verbs by young Spanish speakers by examining recall correctness of infinitive, simple past, and past participles of ten irregular verbs. This study comes from students’ need of using new strategies to recall vocabulary, especially irregular English verbs, and enhancing the accurate writing. Three research questions guided this study: 1) Is typing effective to acquire irregular English verbs by young Spanish speakers? 2) Is handwriting effective to acquire irregular English verbs by young Spanish speakers? 3) Is handwriting more effective than typing for young Spanish speakers to acquire irregular English verbs? This study involved 18 students from tenth level C at Escuela de Educación Básica Fiscal Riobamba. The data were collected through a recognition task, a distractor task, and a recall task for handwriting and typing using ten irregular verbs that were randomly selected in advance, but verbs with shared orthography as some nouns (e.g., cost) were discarded. The findings provided empirical evidence that handwriting and typing methods seem to be equally effective to acquire irregular English verbs by young Spanish speakers. Moreover, handwriting does not seem to be more effective than typing to acquire irregular English verbs by young Spanish speakers. The results are discussed in terms of their relation to previous empirical research and their implications for the use of handwriting and typing to increase vocabulary development to create effective communication. It is recommended to increase and enhance the use of both types of writing, handwriting as much as typing to develop the acquisition of new English words, not only verbs but adjectives and nouns. A diversity of activities for handwriting and typing in a real context will increase the acquisition of new words, these activities could be planned to be applied in regular classes.