Can Concept-Based Language Instruction Change Beginning Learners’ Aspectual Development?: Preliminary Experimental Evidence that Novice Learners Taught Boundedness Are Less Influenced by Lexical Aspect

Concept-Based Language Instruction (C-BLI) is rooted in Vygotskian sociocultural theories (SCT) of learning and modeled after Systemic Theoretical Instruction. Investigations of C-BLI have reported positive instructional outcomes such as increased conceptual awareness and control for a variety of targeted concepts in a variety of languages, including aspect in Spanish. This study followed suit, by exposing novice Spanish learners (n = 26) to the concept of viewpoint aspect as a matter of boundedness. It also directly tested the learners’ ability to form nonprototypical associations between preterite-imperfect morphology and lexical aspectual categories, which is the kind of learner development most of interest to scholars working in semantic theoretical perspectives outside of SCT such as the Aspect Hypothesis (AH). Comparisons with corpus data (n = 75) suggested that the C-BLI learners were able to use the Spanish preterite and imperfect non-prototypically, more like advanced learners than novices. The results suggest that C-BLI can facilitate aspectual development applied to disassociating viewpoint aspect from lexical aspect. It is argued that C-BLI and other approaches rooted in SCT principles could be enriched by engaging with new ways of examining learner development, and thereby perhaps garner the interest of scholars working outside of SCT. It is further argued that research on the AH could be enriched by considering data that elucidates effects of specific instructional approaches.