Cognitive and metacognitive processes in grammatical subject-verb agreement problem solving of college ESL students

For a long period of time, grammar instruction has been a great issue that even today continues to frustrate teachers whose efforts to teach correct grammar usage conflict with the expectations of the general public toward the same. It has been said that even educators cannot agree on the importance of grammar instruction. Yet, regardless of the aforementioned statements, the focus of this research was placed on the students and not the teachers nor the teaching process. In particular, this study was intended to explore a difficulty students have when performing grammatical exercises where the production of agreement between the subject and the verb of a sentence is required. Despite the simplicity of the grammatical rules, students face great challenges when applying them because behind these simple descriptive rules lies a complex set of psycholinguistic issues which need to be understood.;It is for this essential reason that the purpose for this study was to provide a description of the cognitive and metacognitive processes fourth year college level ESL students engage in as they produce subject-verb agreement when performing grammar exercises. The purpose of this study had been established in order to gain a better understanding of these mental processes and to understand the strategies students employ as they perform this grammatical task.;Findings from this research indicate that the participants in the study engage in similar processes when performing subject-verb agreement exercises and also when judging their performance on the task. Even though they proceed to identify the subject and the verb in a sentence in order to determine their grammatical number and, therefore, produce agreement between these words, it was found that when there were mismatches in agreement, they were due to a significant cognitive obstacle. This obstacle consisted in not being able to accurately identify the subject in the sentences. The conclusions reached attributed these mismatches in agreement to a linguistic phenomenon known as attraction errors.