Reactivity and type of verbal report in SLA research methodology - Expanding the scope of investigation

The present study addresses the reactivity of two types of verbal protocols in SLA research. It expands on the work of Leow and Morgan-Short (2004), who found nonmetalinguistic verbalization during a second-language reading task to be nonreactive for beginning learners' text comprehension, intake, and production of the targeted morphological form. The present study investigated the reactivity of both metalinguistic and nonmetalinguistic protocols, using a syntactic structure and advanced language learners of Spanish. Results indicated that neither type of verbalization significantly affected text comprehension or written production of old or new exemplars of the targeted structure when compared to a control group, although metalinguistic verbalization appeared to cause a significant decrease in text comprehension over nonmetalinguistic verbalization. Furthermore, both types of verbalization significantly increased the amount of time on task.