The Acquisition of Tense–Aspect: Converging Evidence From Corpora and Telicity Ratings

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75534/1/j.1540-4781.2009.00895.x.pd

Investigating language corpora as a grammar development resource

The digital era has brought new concepts and transformations into language development and has given rise to technology-based approaches to learner autonomy. It has shifted the focus from deductive to inductive learning, where the concept of ‘noticing’ (Schmidt, 1990) language forms is promoted. Literature suggests that this type of student-centered self-discovery of lexico-grammatical patterns can be greatly aided by corpus linguistics methods, specifically ‘Data-Driven Learning’ (DDL) (Johns, 1986; Braun, 2005; O’Keeffe et al, 2007). It reports on the valuable potential of DDL for developing learners’ multi-literacies and cognitive strategies, particularly raising their awareness of lexico-grammatical patterning (O’Keeffe and Farr, 2003). However, insights from corpus-based studies have not been widely applied in teaching practices (Reppen, 2022; Zareva, 2017). It has also been proposed that DDL enhances accurate representation of language, raises cultural understanding, provides learners with the freedom to explore and discover the language, and fosters learner autonomy, thus making them more effective language learners (Flowerdew, 2015). This affordance led to the design of a longitudinal experimental study which aimed to provide useful skills and processes in the use of language corpora as a grammar development resource in the pre-intermediate EFL classroom in an Armenain context outside of higher education. The evaluation data included pre-, post-, progress-, delayed post-test data, and Learner Autonomy Profile (LAP) form, the statistical analysis of which revealed the beneficial impact of the computer-based inductive approach of DDL on the learners’ grammar competency, independent learning skills, as well as the contribution of cognitive strategies to proceduralization of knowledge. It also included semi-structured interview data, which uncovered the learners’ increased engagement in the learning process, the positive change in their attitudes towards their own learning, and the ways of demonstrating autonomous abilities in working with concordances. These data also brought to light some of the fears and challenges of using DDL, as well discussing its theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings aligned with psychological processes of learning. The findings will serve all the participants of this hugely important ELT sector - researchers, language educators and learners. They will gain insights as to what is necessary to tap learners’ implicit long-term knowledge, to prepare them both psychologically and practically for independence so that they can be armed with confidence, interest in discovering the language, knowledge about their own learning, and understanding of how to make use of their learning styles and strategies. Keywords: conventional/technology-enhanced EFL classroom, corpus linguistics, data-driven learning (DDL), inductive/deductive grammar learning, direct/indirect written feedback, explicit/implicit knowledge, language awareness, learner autonomy.N

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

How far can they go?: Non-native speakers of Spanish and wh- questions

The wh- island is a syntactic phenomenon that constitutes a constraint on wh- movement with implications for interpretation (the speaker must be aware of the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and of the effects of the [-QU] feature on the middle wh- word against extraction) and for production (the speaker needs to know the limited, short distance scope of the fronted wh- word in adjunct questions). In Spanish, each wh- word carries a referential value that affects its classification as an adjunct or an argument, hence affecting the extractability of each wh- word from a complex question containing a wh- island. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze how both the interpretation and production of questions that contain a wh- island are played out in the interlanguage of Second Language speakers of Spanish at the intermediate and near-native level. Through the inclusion of a control group of native speakers, it also looks into how current syntactic descriptions of the adult grammar of Spanish can accommodate experimental data. The interpretation experiment consisted of nine situations followed by a question containing a wh- island that subjects had to respond to. The results obtained suggest that non-native speakers of Spanish, although never fully converging, come closer to nativelike results as their proficiency advances. As for native speakers, the results show a need for the reinterpretation of the wh- island and of the adjunct/argument asymmetry based on the properties of each wh- word individually as well as on verb subcategorization effects. The production experiment consisted of a game-based elicited imitation task. In line with the results found for interpretation, there is a clear proficiency-related improvement among the non-native groups. What the production task shows, above all, is a much larger use of creativity in the question-forming strategies used by near-native and native speakers, whereas the intermediate group shows a significantly higher use of avoidance strategies that allow them to form the shortest, most semantically and syntactically simple questions possible. The combination of both experiments across all three language groups gives a detailed account of wh- islands and how typically disregarded lexical factors affect them. It also provides an explanation for group differences that is based on task- and cognitive demand-related distinctions rather than solely on potentially misleading accuracy scores

Analysis of the Correlation Between the Lexical Profile and Coh-Metrix 3.0 Text Easability and Readability Indices of the Korean CSAT From 1994–2022

The Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) is a highly competitive standardized assessment that graduating high-school seniors complete in the hope of getting a good score which will improve their chances of admission to a university of choice. The CSAT contains an English Section that has been described by scholars and educators alike as being far too difficult for the official English language curriculum to serve as sufficient preparation. The test’s lack of construct validity has been the basis for calls to revise the test to be better reflective of the school curriculum so that it can serve the evaluative purpose for which it is intended. Use of automated text evaluation methods with the software Coh-Metrix 3.0 in recent years has allowed scholars to quantify different dimensions of the text of the CSAT English Section, such as cohesion and syntactic complexity, that contribute to its reading difficulty. Older research conducted before the introduction of this software into the field used word frequency counts in large corpora such as the British National Corpus (BNC) as a measure of word familiarity or unfamiliarity, which was thought to directly contribute to difficulty because as the proportion of low-frequency words in a text increases against the proportion of high-frequency words, the word knowledge burden of the text increases in proportion. Since the introduction of automated software-based tools like Coh-Metrix 3.0 and Lexical Complexity Analyzer (LCA), these corpus-based research methods have largely fallen by the wayside. In this paper, I maintain that despite its lower sophistication, corpus-based lexical analysis can still produce uniquely meaningful findings because of the degree of manual control the researcher is afforded in calibrating the parameters of the text base and, most importantly, in selecting the ranges of word family frequency that are best tailored to a text rather than having the ranges or functions of frequency assigned automatically by software. This study reports correlations between the outputs of these two methodologies that both inform us about the validity of Coh-Metrix 3.0’s use in CSAT studies and quantify the strength of the role of word frequency in causing the excessive difficulty of the CSAT English Section

A study on digital-based argumentative writing in English of South Korean university students

In higher education in South Korea, English proficiency has been specifically emphasised by the government (Kang, 2015; Kang, 2018; Kim, 2017; Shim & Park, 2008; Williams, 2015). However, writing skills have had little attention in education settings, including higher education institutions (Kim, 2018; Shin, 2018; Park, 2020; Shin & Hyun, 2020; Yu, 2019), despite a series of educational reforms. Students in South Korean higher education are now facing practical and specific needs for argumentative writing in English (Shim, 2016; Shin, 2018). However, the overall context of English education does not fully reflect their real needs (Kim, 2018; Kwon, 2012; Kwak, 2017; Shim, 2016). South Korean universities require their students to reach a specific level at one of the English proficiency tests (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018; Shim, 2016), most of which include at least one argumentative writing task. Additionally, the certificate of English proficiency test is widely used as the basic skills reference for their career (Kim, 2018). In the meantime, writing proficiency has increasingly gained its own weight in English language tests (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018; Shin, 2018), adding to the burden on students to develop their writing proficiency (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018). Despite students’ need for improvement in English writing proficiency, including English argumentative writing, writing courses given by South Korean higher education institutions are still rare (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018; Shin, 2018; Yu, 2019) and often allow little room for reviewing tasks (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018; Shim, 2018), even though they commonly use a process-based approach. Furthermore, in immediate response to their needs, higher education institutions in both the public and private sectors have maintained narrow academic attention, focusing on test specific writing skills (Kim, 2018; Shin, 2018). All these situations have resulted in a lack of educational opportunities for students to receive theoretically and systematically well designed instruction in developing their argumentation skills (Shin, 2018). For South Korean students learning English as a foreign language (EFL), argumentative writing in English includes acquiring an understanding of and the skills for both critical thinking and English-specific conventions for the target genre of writing (Ahn & Park, 2019; Choi, 2008; Shim, 2016). To promote a fast and concrete understanding of argumentation in English, representative organisational structures are often used in instructional practices. While many of the courses for English argumentative writing in South Korea are limited to the delivery of instructions, or creating a rough claim-evidence link in a paragraph, this simple formula-based approach may have a limited influence on the level of argumentation that university students in South Korea are able to develop (Choi, 2008). To enhance students’ in-depth knowledge of and skills for making arguments in English, a systematic and effective instructional model is necessary, targeting argumentation development and investigated by rigorous research. However, with a traditionally narrow focus on writing in English education, studies on English writing itself, including argumentative writing, have been limited, despite the importance of this area. As a way of introducing systematically presented models into instruction in English argumentative writing, the Toulmin model can be an effective option. It suggests a detailed, sequenced, intensively explained process for the logical framework for writing in English. In this sense, it is necessary to explore how to modify and apply Toulmin’s components into the courses for English argumentative writing in South Korean higher education. In addition to the practical applicability of the Toulmin model, it is necessary to consider the common context in which writing courses in South Korean higher education institutions provide some phases for drafting and revision/editing, which are broadly anchored in the process-based writing approach. Considering the practical challenge caused by a lack of time for drafting in writing courses (Kim, 2018; Ma, 2018; Shim, 2018), online based classes can be a better option, enabling more flexibility in time and space. Even before the Covid-19 outbreak, diverse synchronous and asynchronous digital writing environments have been utilised in the field of higher education in South Korea to enhance students’ writing performance and also increase the connectivity between learners and teachers. However, the digital environments for English writing in South Korea are still based on a lack of rigour in terms of research evidence, which signals the need for more research into how best to develop digital writing platforms and incorporate necessary support for users. With the two main areas of English argumentative writing and digital learning environments for writing combined, this study explores the effectiveness of a digital-based argumentative writing course in South Korea, as well as the pedagogical implications. To investigate the effects of digital course development for instruction in English argumentative writing for university students in South Korea and derive insights in digital course design for English argumentative writing for university students in South Korea, this study used a sequential mixed-methods design: quantitative phase followed by qualitative phase for collection and analysis of data sets. The English argumentative writing course in this study applies the Toulmin model (1958; 2003) as a specific teaching strategy, with a cycle of drafting and exchanging feedback using the process-based writing approach. To provide the online group with a digital-based collaborative writing1 environment for feedback exchanges, the writing platform, Scholar, was used. In this study, 43 undergraduate students in South Korea participated in a writing course for one semester, 22 participants in a control group (offline course) and 21 participants in an intervention group (online course). They participated in pre- and post-writing tests, two sessions of interviews, and narrative writing for reflection. Also, ten university teaching staff and e-developers took part in one individual interview session each, to provide professional views on the online instructional design that is implemented in the English argumentative writing of this study. In terms of the effectiveness of the online writing course for developing argumentation skills in English, the findings from the quantitative analysis show both online and offline courses had a positive impact on improvement and retention. Although the statistical results present no indication that the online class had higher learning gains than the offline group by any significant difference, this result is supported by the findings from the qualitative analysis, which indicates that the online group performed better in terms of the quality and the quantity of peer feedback. In addition, the findings from the qualitative analysis suggest that the writing course in this study helped students to develop their knowledge and sensitivity in argumentation in English, and the online course facilitated enhanced engagement in feedback tasks. Moreover, despite recognising the value of face-to-face interaction for English argumentative writing, the qualitative findings suggest that the anonymity and convenience of the online writing course in this study encouraged participation in feedback. Finally, the findings from teaching staff and e-developer interviews reveal generally positive perceptions of and evaluations of the usefulness and applicability of the Toulmin model for English argumentation development, and the collaborative writing environment of Scholar. ( 1. In this study, the term, ‘collaborative writing,’ means individual student’s essay writing supported by external feedback, including peer and teacher feedback, not co-authorship in writing one shared essay together.

THE EFFECT OF SEMANTIC NEIGHBORHOOD DENSITY ON VOCABULARY LEARNING IN SPANISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND SPANISH AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE

This dissertation reviews the results from an online survey created to identify and compare how second language (L2) learners and heritage language (HL) learners of Spanish, enrolled in beginning-level coursework at the college level, acquired and built vocabulary. A total of 451 participants completed the survey. The purpose of the online survey was to serve as a baseline for pedagogical purposes, since it provided information about participants’ language profiles and the way they build vocabulary based on sematic relatedness. Overall, the findings from the survey showed that HL and L2 learners differ in the way they build semantic neighborhoods and, in their meaning-making processes. HL participants produced a higher number of Spanish semantic associations for the provided Spanish categories, whereas L2 learners produced a higher number of English semantic associations for both the Spanish and English categories. Additionally, HL learners left more responses blank in both the Spanish and English categories. The findings support the idea that tailored vocabulary pedagogical practices and interventions will benefit and enhance students’ vocabulary development and learning in the Spanish language classroom

Students and teachers perceptions about motivation to learn english among students of a technical institution of tertiary education in Concepción, Chile

Tesis (Magíster en la enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjera)This study shows what a group of teachers and students see as the factors that relate to students’ lack of motivation in English classes at one of the largest professional institutes in the Bio-Bio Region, Chile, offering both professional and technical degrees. The main concern is to examine the perceptions of different students of basic and intermediate English courses towards learning English, and whether they consider it relevant for their career, further studies and life, in general. Using a mixed method type of research, this study looks at different elements in the curriculum that might interfere with the students’ levels of motivation. Teachers were also surveyed to have a different approach on the study. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that students tend to focus on the events they need to solve sooner, and although English learning is deemed as very important for them, it is not a priority for their curriculum until the last year(s) of their studies. It is suggested to analyze what happens in other technical institutions of higher studies to find a common ground of students ‘level of motivation and commitment to learn English.Este estudio evidencia lo que un grupo de profesores y estudiantes ven como los factores que se relacionan con la falta de motivación en las clases de inglés por parte de los estudiantes de uno de las institutos profesionales más grandes en la región del Bio-Bío que ofrece carreras tanto técnicas como profesionales. La preocupación principal es examinar la percepción de diferentes estudiantes en los cursos de inglés en niveles básicos e intermedios, con respecto a si consideran el inglés como un aporte a sus carreras, estudios posteriores, o en general a sus vidas. A través de un estudio de enfoque mixto, esta investigación sondea los posibles elementos dentro del curriculum que pueden interferir con el nivel de motivación de los estudiantes. Los profesores también fueron encuestados para obtener una visión más completa en este estudio. Sobre la base de los resultados de esta investigación, se puede concluir que los estudiantes ponen mayor énfasis en los eventos más cercanos de su currículum y, aunque reconocen la importancia de aprender inglés, esto no se ve como una prioridad hasta los últimos años de su carrera. Se sugiere analizar que acontece en otras instituciones técnicas de estudios superiores, para afianzar esta investigación