Phonological processing skills in young learners' EFL vocabulary acquisition

Four factors were examined to investigate English vocabulary learning among 9-year-old elementary school children in Taiwan. The four factors were use of their native language, length of English instruction, and two phonological processing capabilities-phonological memory and phonological sensitivity. Apart from a series of paper-and-pencila nd computerized vocabulary assessmentst,w o nonword repetition tasks along with five detection and production tasks of rimes and phonemes were used to measure phonological memory and phonological sensitivity. The young learners' scores on all vocabulary tests were positively correlated with phonological memory and phonological sensitivity, as was also evidenced in studies by Gathercole et al. (1997) and Bowey (1996). A similar pattern of association was found between the learners' vocabulary performance and their length of English instruction. However, neither of the two phonological processing capabilities was associatedw ith English instruction length. The reaction times of the two online vocabulary tests suggest that an extra input of Ll gloss in explicit vocabulary teaching might have resulted in faster aural recognition of single English words. This supports Kroll and Stewart's (1994) revised hierarchical model of bilingual representation,w hich postulatest hat beginning L2 learners have their two languages interconnected at the lexical level. Results of stepwise and hierarchical regression analyses confirmed that English phonological sensitivity was the best predictor of young learners' English vocabulary performance and contributed uniquely to their vocabulary scores after age, English instruction length, vocabulary knowledge from school textbooks, Chinese phonological sensitivity, and phonological memory were statistically controlled.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Linear Order in Language:an Error-Driven Learning Account

Learners of German often struggle with learning the grammatical gender of nouns and their correct articles, for example, that it should be “die Gabel” (the fork) and not “der Gabel”. Why is this so hard? And why do gender systems even exist?I taught participants differently structured artificial languages and found that it is especially difficult to learn a gender system, when gender is marked before the noun (e.g., in German: “die Gabel”, the fork, vs. “der Löffel”, the spoon) as compared to when gender is marked after the noun (e.g., in Albanian: “pirun-i”, the fork, vs. “lug-a”, the spoon). With computational simulations I could show that this effect arises because human learning is sensitive to the order of words.However, while gendered articles are hard to learn, they can facilitate communication because they can make following nouns more predictable and therefore easier to process: for example, after the German article “der”, “Löffel” is quite likely, “Gabel”, however, is very unlikely to follow. This is a function that gendered suffixes, as in Albanian, or genderless articles, as in English, cannot fulfill. In a language production study, I observed that speakers produce more articles that can make following nouns predictable, such as German articles, than articles that cannot fulfill this function, such as the English article “the”.I conclude that the order in which gender is marked in languages affects language learning as well as communication. This makes German gender hard to learn but useful for communication

The acquisition of literacy in Chinese with special reference to the case of adults of Chinese origin in Italy.

The number of Chinese people who live in Europe has been rising constantly during the past 30 years. The large majority of them come from Southern China, and their adjustment to life in the European countries has engendered research questions on their settlement, on their relationship with the local people, habits, and rules, as well as on the education of their children. My thesis focuses on the issue of the teaching of Chinese written language to adult learners of Chinese origin settled in Italy. It points to the devising of a viable teaching method through the analysis of the answers to three relevant questions: 1. Who are the learners to whom the Chinese written language teaching methodology is addressed. 2. Why would they need and benefit from such a teaching methodology. 3. How is the teaching of Chinese written language to be made viable and effective to adult learners of Chinese origin who live in Italy. The first two questions are dealt with in the first part of the research. In Chapter 1, I outline the history of Chinese migration movements towards Europe, and describe the circumstances and features of Chinese settlement in the UK and in Italy. Chapter 2 explores language use within the communities. It takes into account language as a marker of identity and language proficiency as an asset, by referring to the position of Mandarin within the community as well as at a transnational level. Chapter 3 focuses on literacy, on its definition, and on the way different definitions may apply to languages with different writing systems, with a focus on Chinese written language and the features which mostly affect literacy acquisition in Chinese. The second part centers on the third question and is articulated into two chapters. In Chapter 4, I analyse the methods in use in four different teaching contexts: Chinese primary schools, Western universities, week-end classes for Chinese children in the UK and in Italy, and adult education in China. I substantiate my analysis with the results of the fieldwork I carried out in China, Great Britain and Italy. The four contexts are taken as a reference for selecting among the teaching devices and discussing their effectiveness as related to the features of each context. In Chapter 5, I describe the case of adult learners of Chinese origin in Italy. I choose among the selected devices those which better apply to the study case, and discuss the principles according to which these devices suit the study case features. The final part of Chapter 5 consists of a sample of a teaching approach that is likely to work for the study case. I select content and illustrate how to teach it according to the principles derived from my previous analysis