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  • Essay / Second Language Acquisition: Monika Bellucci

    In the first interview, Bellucci was thirty-six years old, living in Italy, but often traveling to England to begin her acting career here at twenty-eight . Despite a reduction in errors, Bellucci seems to have little developed the English article system between the years 2000 and 2005, the percentage of errors having decreased slightly, from 30% to 21%. This could be the result of an instrumental orientation in which Bellucci focuses on mastering the L2 for professional reasons. Integrative learners are predicted to perform better than instrumental learners because they have a positive disposition toward the L2 community. At that time in Bellucci's life, that may not have been his motivation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayIn Appendix 1, Bellucci makes a mistake with the definite article where she uses it in place of the preposition “ to”. It also omits the indefinite article twice. For one of these errors, Bellucci makes two attempts to produce the indefinite article "one" and one of these attempts is off-target. Figure 2 shows that this does not support the hypothesis that Bellucci would make more errors with the definite article, just as she would make more errors with indefinite articles. Returning to Shoebottom's (2017) research on the differences between Italian and English articles, Bellucci speaks here of an “Italian film” and a “big situation”. In Italian, they would have singular masculine and feminine articles and the interlanguage of the speaker could cause this error, preserving the characteristics of the L1. In Appendix 2, Bellucci omits the definite article three times and the indefinite article “a” once out of six obligatory contexts. This supports the hypothesis that Bellucci would make more errors with the definite article than with indefinite articles due to acquiring the indefinite article first. Over the years 2005-2015, Bellucci's language skills improved significantly, making no errors in 2010 and 2015. This corresponds with Myles' (2005) study showing that L2 development is related to the degree of exposure to utterances in the target language. Over time, it appears that the more frequently Bellucci traveled to England, as evidenced by the increasing number of English films in which she appeared, the more her grammatical knowledge improved. Immersing oneself in the L2 and receiving active and quality input is reflected in its systematic development. Aptitude might be to blame, as Bellucci seems to have a knack for English grammar. In order to fully study the order of acquisition hypothesis, one would need to examine more examples of Bellucci's speeches from before 2000. Indeed, she makes no article errors. In the two recent interviews, it is difficult to understand whether Bellucci is following the natural L1 order of acquiring items from two clips. To support this hypothesis, Bellucci would make more errors with definite articles before 2000. Using the same speaker to empirically study a factor related to social context, I would hypothesize that Bellucci's mastery of English grammar was greatly improved when she frequently traveled to England to appear in films. Bellucci was twenty-eight when she first appeared in an English film and one could imagine that she faced social pressures to speak English, playing many English characters. She has starred alongside famous English actors in films aimed at English-speaking audiences. So Bellucci was probably motivated to be all..