The Present/Past Distinction in Spanish: Implications of a Revised Syllabus

to accommodate students with special needs has risen greatly in the language teaching profession in recent years.' This development is particularly true in the area of Spanish simply because it is the second most widely spoken language in the United States. For the past three years, Indiana University (Bloomington) has been offering special sections of first-year Spanish in which materials designed to fit the needs of the forensics major have been employed. In these special sections, the goal is to facilitate Spanish communication within frames of reference that the students will probably be required to employ on the job. This goal is similar to those of functional/notional syllabi. The text selected for the course-Spanish for Law Enforcement Officers (Silver Spring, MD: Institute of Modern Languages, 1972)-was designed to teach students quickly to talk about topics such as robberies, traffic accidents, fire emergencies, etc. In order to do this, a number of verb tenses had to be introduced much sooner than they normally are in first semester classes. To simplify the task somewhat, only the singular person-number markers were presented, but by the third week of the course, present indicative, preterite, and formal commands in the singular had been introduced. After having taught one of these sections, my curiosity as to the effectiveness of this approach was aroused. I therefore decided to investigate the effect of speed and order of presentation on students' acquisition of the present/past distinction. The distinction chosen for study is one that these students make regularly in their native language, English. However, Corder's 1975 study, like many other investigations of