Morphological awareness in L2 Spanish: What is learned incidentally and what requires explicit teaching?

The development of morphological awareness positively impacts vocabulary learning, inferencing skills or reading comprehension. However, it is currently given very little attention in Spanish as a Second Language textbooks, due to the prevailing belief that derivational morphological knowledge can be developed without any explicit teaching. This idea has been repeatedly contested in the literature, and the present study aims to add to this ongoing discussion by specifying the aspects of morphological knowledge that would benefit the most from explicit pedagogical treatment. Four tasks were designed, which tapped into relational and distributional knowledge, both at the receptive and productive level. Students enrolled in three successive SSL course levels completed the tasks, as did one group of beginners who completed them twice: before and after a four-session long morphological training. Results indicate that participating in that training was advantageous in most tasks, but particularly so for the one that required distributional productive skills. Pedagogical implications of these results are further discussed.