What effect does short term Study Abroad (SA) have on learners’ vocabulary knowledge?

This thesis describes a study which tracks longitudinal changes in vocabularyknowledge during a short-term Study Abroad (SA) experience. A test ofproductive vocabulary knowledge, Lex30 (Meara & Fitzpatrick, 2000),requiring the production of word association responses, is used to elicit vocabulary from 38 Japanese L1 learners of English at four test times at equal intervals before and after an SA experience. The study starts by investigating whether there are changes in both the total number of words and in the number of less frequently occurring words produced by SA participants. Three additional ways of measuring the development of lexical knowledge over time are then proposed. The first examines changes in the ability of participants of different proficiency levels in producing collocates in response to Lex30 cue words. The second tracks changes in spelling accuracy to measure if improvements take place over time. The third analysis uses an online measuring instrument (Wmatrix; Rayson, 2009) to explore if there are any changes in the mastery of specific semantic domains. The results show that there is significant growth in the productive use of less frequent vocabulary knowledge during the SA period. There is also an increase in collocation production with lower proficiency participants and evidence of some improvement in the way certain vocabulary items are spelled. The tendency for SA learners to produce more words from semantic groups related to SA experiences is also demonstrated. Post-SA tests show that while some knowledge attrition occurs it does not decline to pre-SA levels. The studyshows how short-term SA programmes can be evaluated using a word association test, contributing to a better understanding of how vocabularydevelops during intensive language learning experiences. It also demonstrates the gradual shift of productive vocabulary knowledge from partial word knowledge to a more complete state of productive mastery

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Exploring Written Artefacts

This collection, presented to Michael Friedrich in honour of his academic career at of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, traces key concepts that scholars associated with the Centre have developed and refined for the systematic study of manuscript cultures. At the same time, the contributions showcase the possibilities of expanding the traditional subject of ‘manuscripts’ to the larger perspective of ‘written artefacts’

Education and Social Work handbook

2005 handbook for the faculty of Education and Social Wor

Translating the constitution of the republic of South Africa into the official indigenous languages: a review with reference to the Tshivenda version

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is the supreme law of South Africa. It provides the legal foundation for the existence of the Republic and outlines the rights and duties of all citizens. The study identified and reviewed the translation strategies used by translators in the translation of the English version of the constitution into the Tshivenḓa version. The study used a mixed methods approach, that is, qualitative and quantitative. Taking into consideration that the study is exploratory in nature, the chosen method for data collection was a self-administered questionnaire. Data obtained from the questionnaires served as inputs to MS Excel Office 2016 and validated Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 26. The study was based on two theoretical approaches, i.e. the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). The software tool used to analyse the English-Tshivenḓa Parallel Corpus is ParaConcU Version 269. Dictionaries and terminology lists were used to cross-reference the meaning of the terms that were extracted from the English-Tshivenḓa Parallel Corpus. The study revealed that the translators relied much on translating by paraphrasing and using loan words. Although they tried to use other strategies, they did not use them successfully. The target text is full of inconsistent usages of terminology, which affects the rendering of the source text messages. Readers of the Tshivenḓa version of the Constitution encounter difficulties due to a lack of similarity, language errors, a lack of terminology, poor editing, and inconsistency. In addition, the Tshivenḓa version of the Constitution is not easily accessible. The study further revealed that many African language translators lacked training to the extent that they struggled with scientific or specialised terminology. Resources were also minimal or non-existent in some African languages leading to some translations being incomprehensible. The study contributes to the legal, translation and interpretation fields in many ways. It helps language practitioners, including translators, interpreters, terminologists, etc., in executing their duties. It is valuable to the Vhavenḓa citizens towards enhancing their understanding of their constitutional rights.African Language

Using a word knowledge framework to research vocabulary

The study of vocabulary acquisition is not exactly a new area, but previous research and hypothesizing has failed to produce a coherent overall theory which adequately describes it. This is partly because of the complexity of the subject. One method of reducing the complexity is to work with the individual components of vocabulary knowledge, in an attempt to understand the whole by first better understanding the parts. The word knowledge listing proposed by Nation (1990) is adopted in this thesis as a framework from which to study vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces the word knowledge framework. Chapter 2 provides a literature review which summarizes the research concerning each of the eight types of word knowledge. Chapter 3 reports on a study which attempts to quantify native and non-native intuitions of word frequency. Chapter 4 describes how a procedure for weighting word association responses was developed. Chapter 5 does the same for a measure of collocational knowledge. Chapter 6 applies the word knowledge research paradigm to the evaluation of the vocabulary items on the TOEFL test. Chapter 7 reports on a longitudinal study of four non-native subjects which tracked their incremental acquisition of spelling, association, collocation, grammar, and meaning knowledge for eleven words over one year. Chapter 8 examines the data from the longitudinal study to see if the various kinds of word knowledge are learned in a developmental sequence. Chapter 9 concludes the thesis by giving the author's opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the reported course of research