The Influence of Personality Traits and Language Learning Strategies toward Students’ Speaking Ability at Language Development Center of UIN SUSKA Riau.

The main purpose of this research was to find out the influence of student’s personality traits and language learning strategy toward their speaking ability at the second level students of Language Development Center of UIN SUSKA Riau. This research was a Correlational Research which consisted of three variables; two independent variables, which were students’ personality traits and language learning strategy, and one dependent variable which was the students’ speaking ability. The respondents of the research were 124 students of psychology faculty of UIN SUSKA Riau. The sampling technique used in this research was total sampling technique. The instruments used to obtain the data were two questionnaires to measure students’ personality traits and language learning strategy and an interview to measure their speaking ability. The data presented were extroversion which was the most dominant personality trait and metacognitive which was found to be the most dominant strategy used by the students. Besides, the students’ speaking ability was in medium level. After analysing the data by using simple regression, the finding showed that conscientiousness and metacognitive had a major influence toward speaking ability. It also indicated that there was a significant influence of students’ personality traits and language learning strategy toward their speaking ability, in which F= 5.734, p=0.004<0.05. Then the percentage of the influence of students’ personality traits and language learning strategy was R 2 =0.087 (8.7% ). Therefore, an alternative hypothesis was accepted and the null hypothesis was rejected

An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications

The five-factor model of personality is a hierarchical organization of personality traits in terms of five basic dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience. Research using both natural language adjectives and theoretically based personality questionnaires supports the comprehensiveness of the model and its applicability across observers and cultures. This article summarizes the history of the model and its supporting evidence; discusses conceptions of the nature of the factors; and outlines an agenda for theorizing about the origins and operation of the factors. We argue that the model should prove useful both for individual assessment and for the elucidation of a number of topics of interest to personality psychologists

A corpus-based error analysis of Korean learner English: from a cognitive linguistic perspective to the L2 mental lexicon

This thesis investigates lexical errors in a learner corpus that consists of essays written by Korean learners of English. Taking a cognitive linguistic perspective, it first presents the L2 lexical development model as a conceptual framework. Then, based on this framework, it proposes a new error taxonomy in which errors from the four lexical domains in the L2 mental lexicon can be categorised as either interlingual or intralingual errors. In order to identify whether the taxonomy is well-grounded, this thesis selects four error features, one from each of the four lexical domains: collocational errors of dimensional adjectives in the semantic domain; over-passivisation errors of non-alternating unaccusative verbs in the syntactic domain; derivational morphological errors in the morphological domain; spelling errors in the phonological/orthographic domain. The results, obtained through corpus-based error analysis, suggest that there is evidence of both interlingual and intralingual influences on the four error features from the four lexical domains. Based on the findings, this study provides pedagogical implications for English classrooms in Korea and recommends that the findings should be used to improve teaching materials and to raise awareness of the influences on the lexical errors

WRITTEN CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK: EFFECTS OF FOCUSED AND UNFOCUSED GRAMMAR CORRECTION ON THE CASE ACQUISITION IN L2 GERMAN

Thirty-three students of fourth semester German at the University Kansas participated in the study which sought to investigate whether focused written corrective feedback (WCF) promoted the acquisition of the German case morphology over the course of a semester. Participants received teacher WCF on five two-draft essay assignments under three treatment conditions: Group (1) received focused WCF on German case errors; group (2) received unfocused WCF on a variety of German grammar errors; and group (3) did not receive WCF on specific grammar errors. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found that the focused group improved significantly in the accuracy of case forms while the unfocused and the control group did not make any apparent progress. The results indicate that focused WCF was effective in improving case accuracy in subjects' writings in German as a foreign language (GFL) context. WCF did not negatively affect writing fluency or students' attitude toward writing

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

Learning Chinese characters: a comparative study of the learning strategies of western students and Eastern Asian students in Taiwan

2012 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Vocabulary acquisition is central to learning Chinese as second or foreign language. Little research has been conducted on vocabulary learning strategies in this area. Even less study has been conducted whether students from different native language background would apply vocabulary learning strategies differently. The present study was designed to address this gap. The major concern of this study was to explore whether students from Western alphabetic countries and students from Eastern Asian countries would apply different vocabulary learning strategies in Chinese vocabulary acquisition. All the participants are international students who currently reside in Taiwan and attending the same American School located in Taipei, Taiwan. Learning Chinese is mandatory in the school. An on line survey instrument was used to collect data from the students. Descriptive statistics were used. An independent samples t-test was used to assess whether students of different native language background showed significant differences in the application of vocabulary learning strategies. No significant difference was found, however, suggestions regarding curricula design in learning Chinese vocabularies were made based on the tentative findings of this study

Aspects of the Syntax, Production and Pragmatics of code-switching - with special reference to Cantonese-English

This dissertation argues for the position that code-switching utterances are constrained by the same set of mechanisms as those which govern monolingual utterances. While this thesis is in line with more recent code-switching theories (e.g. Belazi et al. 1994, MacSwan 1997, Mahootian 1993), this dissertation differs from those works in making two specific claims: Firstly, functional categories and lexical categories exhibit different syntactic behaviour in code-switching. Secondly, codeswitching is subject to the same principles not only in syntax, but also in production and pragmatics. Chapter 2 presents a critical review of constraints and processing models previously proposed in the literature. It is suggested that in view of the vast variety of data, no existing model is completely adequate. Nevertheless, it is argued that a model which does not postulate syntactic constraints (along the lines of Mahootian 1993, MacSwan 1997) or production principles (along the lines of de Bot 1992) specific to code switching is to be preferred on cognitive and theoretical grounds. Chapter 3 concerns word order between lexical heads and their complements in code-switching. It is shown that the language of a lexical head (i.e. noun or verb) may or may not determine the word order of its complement. Chapter 4 investigates word order between functional heads and their complements in code-switching. Contrary to the case with lexical categories, the language of functional heads (e.g. D, I and C) is shown to determine the word order of their complements in code-switching. It is proposed that word order between heads (lexical or functional) and complements is governed by head-parameters, and the difference between lexical heads and functional heads is due to their differential processing and production in terms of Levelt's (1989) algorithm. Chapter 5 investigates the selection properties of functional categories in codeswitching, with special reference to Cantonese-English. Contrary to the Functional Head Constraint (Belazi et al. 1994), it is shown that code-switching can occur freely between functional heads and their complements, provided that the c-selection requirements of the functional heads are satisfied. Chapter 6 investigates the selection properties of lexical categories in code-switching, again with special reference to Cantonese-English. It is shown that "language-specific" c-selection properties need not be observed: a Cantonese verb may take an English DP whereas an English verb may take a Cantonese demonstrative phrase (DemP). Similar phenomena are drawn from other language-pairs involving a language with morphological case and a language without morphological case. The difference between functional categories and lexical categories in their selection properties is again explained in terms of the different production processes they undergo. Chapter 7 is devoted to prepositions which have been problematic in terms of their status as a functional category or a lexical category. Based on the behaviour of prepositions in code-switching, it is suggested that prepositions display a dual character. It is proposed that prepositions may well point to the fact that the conventional dichotomy between functional categories and lexical categories is not a primitive one in the lexicon. Chapter 8 looks at code-switching in a wider perspective. and explores the pragmatic determinants of code-switching in the light of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). It is argued that many types of code-switching (e.g. repetitions, quotations, etc.) are motivated by the desire to optimize the "relevance" of a message, with "relevance" as defined in Relevance Theory

Methodological Tools for Linguistic Description and Typology.

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