Avoidance Behavior in Adult Second Language Acquisition1

A study was designed to ascertain whether syntactic avoidance behavior could be demonstrated for two groups of ESL learners—native speakers of Arabic and native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese—in accordance with contrastive analysis (CA) difficulty predictions. The study also investigated the predictability of learners' avoiding the use of various structures. Subjects participated in tasks designed to elicit passive, present progressive, infinitive complement, and direct object pronoun structures. An avoidance pattern was found, in accordance with CA difficulty predictions, which could not be attributed to differences between the groups' comprehension of the target structures. Furthermore, when the frequency of use of the target structures was correlated with various affective measures, the following pattern emerged: for those structures which a particular group avoided, several of the affective variables correlated with use in the predicted direction; for those structures which a particular group did not avoid, the affective variables did not correlate significantly with use. The findings suggest that while CA is a fairly good predictor of avoidance there is an intersection of linguistic and psychological variables in determining learner behavior in a second language in that structures which otherwise would be avoided are likely to be produced depending on the affective state of the learner.