Pitch ability as an aptitude for tone learning

Tone languages such as Mandarin use voice pitch to signal lexical contrasts, presenting a challenge for second/foreign language (L2) learners whose native languages do not use pitch in this manner. The present study examined components of an aptitude for mastering L2 lexical tone. Native English speakers with no previous tone language experience completed a Mandarin word learning task, as well as tests of pitch ability, musicality, L2 aptitude, and general cognitive ability. Pitch ability measures improved predictions of learning performance beyond musicality, L2 aptitude, and general cognitive ability and also predicted transfer of learning to new talkers. In sum, although certain nontonal measures help predict successful tone learning, the central components of tonal aptitude are pitch-specific perceptual measures

Making the match between content and foreign language: A case study on university students’ opinions towards CLIL

The present article intends to show the positive evaluation of post-graduate university students at a Spanish university after the curricular integration experience and the application of CLIL scaffolding techniques. It also aims to identify areas of methodological improvements and recommendations in the application of CLIL in the referred programme as well as in higher education contexts. The researchers used a cross-sectional study to survey the students’ opinion on ICL after the integration of the syllabus of one foreign language subject and another content subject in a post-graduate degree at a private Spanish university in Madrid (Spain). The results point to a positive view of CLIL from Spanish higher education post-graduate students. The survey results also seem to show the students’ confidence in CLIL for their English-led classes aids them to simultaneously increase their foreign language acquisition and their nonlinguistic contents learning. However, researchers detected certain linguistic scaffolding aspects appear to need further students’ training and teachers’ methodological adjustments, as they can negatively affect learners’ engagement and hence, their learning outcomes. The authors note more research is needed to collect data from a wider population and increase the reliability of the results.DOI: 10.18870/hlrc.v5i1.23

The role of task-supported language teaching in EFL learner’s writing performance and grammar gains

Recent research in SLA advocates the use of task as a useful class activity claiming that task approximates language use in the context of classroom to the way language is used in the real world. Framed under a cognitive framework to task-based language teaching, this study was set out to investigate whether task-based oriented activities bear any superiority to that of more traditional ones evident in PPP (Presentation-Practice-Production) model. Twenty eight female pre-intermediate participants studying English in one language school in Urmia, Iran, took part in the study. They participated in ten half-an-hour long sessions of instruction during which they were instructed four structural points: simple past, simple present, present continuous, and ‘There is/There are/How much/How many’ structures. PPP group received their treatment through conventional approach and task-based group, through task-oriented activities. The quantitative analysis performed on the post-test (consisting of a grammar recognition test and a writing activity) suggested that participants in the PPP group did significantly better in the grammar recognition section of the post-test. However, their counterparts in the task group gained better scores in the writing section of the test. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper

A Pilot Study on the Use of Nonlinguistic Concrete Materials and Drama to Aid Vocabulary Learning for Third-Grade Students

This article reports on the effects of the use of nonlinguistic concrete materials and dramatization on student vocabulary learning in eight third-grade classrooms. It follows a preceding study which determined that the use of nonlinguistic concrete materials and drama in K-3 classrooms for vocabulary instruction was minimal and varied across content areas. The results of the pilot study showed that the use of nonlinguistic materials significantly improved vocabulary learning for normally-progressing students (p=0.00185), but had little or no effect on students in reading intervention classrooms. The study was quasi-experimental in nature and utilized six third-grade classrooms of normally-progressing students and two third-grade reading intervention classrooms. Each set of classrooms was randomly divided between treatment and control groups. The study did not prescribe a vocabulary instructional method other than requiring that nonlinguistic concrete materials and drama were to be used in the treatment groups. The concept of augmenting vocabulary lessons with these materials was based on extending the preliterate method of learning names of objects by seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting them. Vocabulary instruction time was held constant throughout the study for both treatment and control groups

Reexamining feedback on L2 digital writing

The integration of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in the second language (L2) and heritage language (HL) classrooms has expanded our notion of writing, shifting from a focus on the written mode to include other modes of expression (e.g., visual, textual, or aural). Notwithstanding the increasing presence of L2 multimodal learning tasks, which combine different semiotic resources (e.g., language and visual components such as images or videos) as intrinsic elements used to generate meaning, instructors have not yet modified the way in which they provide feedback. That is, despite the increasing integration of different modes in a multimodal task, instructors still focus exclusively on language development – replicating the feedback behaviors modeled by non-digital writing assignments – rather than on all the components of multimodal texts. In digitally influenced environments and societies, however, there is a need to reconsider our approaches to feedback to pay greater attention to the linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of DMC. With the scarcity of research on feedback in DMC, this article first identifies a gap in multimodal teaching and research regarding the role and focus on feedback in DMC, and, second, provides an assessment rubric from which to base formative feedback that addresses both linguistic and nonlinguistic elements to help students develop their multimodal texts

An integrated theory of language production and comprehension

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation (such as semantics, syntax, and phonology). We show (a) how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, (b) how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and (c) how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal

Spatial Components in the Use of Count Nouns Among English Speakers and Japanese Speakers of English as a Second Language

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98154/1/j.1467-1770.1996.tb01235.x.pd

Towards a complete multiple-mechanism account of predictive language processing [Commentary on Pickering & Garrod]

Although we agree with Pickering & Garrod (P&G) that prediction-by-simulation and prediction-by-association are important mechanisms of anticipatory language processing, this commentary suggests that they: (1) overlook other potential mechanisms that might underlie prediction in language processing, (2) overestimate the importance of prediction-by-association in early childhood, and (3) underestimate the complexity and significance of several factors that might mediate prediction during language processing

Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns

English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motionevents. English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately. Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion. Children learningEnglish and Korean show sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months. For example, learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes. These findings challenge the widespread view that children initially map spatial words directly to nonlinguistic spatial concepts, and suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning. We discuss how input and cognition may interact in the early phases of learning to talk about space