O PROCESSAMENTO DO INPUT POR PARTE DOS APRENDIZES DE INGLÊS COMO L2 ? O PAPEL DA SALIÊNCIA MORFOLÓGICA E DOS ADVÉRBIOS TEMPORAIS NA COMPREENSÃO DA REFERÊNCIA DE TEMPO

by MARTINS FIGHERA, ADRIANA CLAUDIA

This dissertation aimed at verifying the relationship between form and meaning inthe oral and written input perception in both less proficient and more proficient Brazilianlearners of English as a Second Language (ESL). In order to do so, the role played by twoindependent variables ? adverbial and morphological salience in the processing of the inputin the SL ? was evaluated. The corpus was build out of a total of 38 subjects, all adultswith ages from 18 to 40 years old, from which 36 are Brazilian learners of ESL, studentsfrom a language school in Santa Maria, RS, and 2 of them are native speakers of English,taking into consideration that the 36 learners were divided into two experimental groupsless proficient and more proficient learners ? considering results obtained in a proficiencytest, while the native speakers belonged to the control group. The collecting of datainvolved the use of two instruments, a Grammatical Judgment Test and a Recall Test. Thedata analysis was done through the verification of the number of correct responses anderrors made by the 36 participants from both groups of learners in the two levels ofproficiency. The results, in sum, indicate that the presence of the time adverb in the testsentence made it easy for the subjects to process the sentences presented in the input,especially for the students in the less proficient level of learning. In addition, it waspossible to verify that, in general, the presence of the morphological salience in the testsentences seems not to be relevant for a higher score of correct responses within theobtained results. Besides, it was observed that in both tests the less proficient learnersobtained lower scores of correct responses if compared to the other students that wereparticipating in the same experiment, the ones with a higher level of proficiency. Finally, itwas evidenced that the difference between the percentages of correct responses obtained bythe participants in each of the proficiency levels was greater in the Grammatical JudgmentTest than in the Recall Test, which confirmed the prediction that learners normally possessgreater difficulty in developing tasks that involve production skills than in performingtasks that involve language reception