Guidance on the principles of language accessibility in National Curriculum Assessments : research background

This review accompanies the document, which describes the principles which should guide the development of clear assessment questions. The purpose of the review is to present and discuss in detail the research underpinning these principles. It begins from the standpoint that National Curriculum assessments, indeed any assessments, should be: - appropriate to the age of the pupils - an effective measure of their abilities, skills and concept development - fair to all irrespective of gender, language, religion, ethnic or social origin or disability. (Ofqual, 2011) The Regulatory Framework for National Assessments: National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage (Ofqual, 2011) sets out a number of common criteria which apply to all aspects of the development and implementation of National Assessments. One of these criteria refers to the need for assessment procedures to minimise bias: “The assessment should minimise bias, differentiating only on the basis of each learner’s ability to meet National Curriculum requirements” (Section 5.39, page 16). The Framework goes on to argue that: “Minimising bias is about ensuring that an assessment does not produce unreasonably adverse outcomes for particular groups of learners” (Annex 1, page 29). This criterion reinforces the guiding principle that any form of assessment should provide information about the knowledge and understanding of relevant content material. That is to say that the means through which this knowledge and understanding is examined, the design of the assessment and the language used should as far as possible be transparent, and should not influence adversely the performance of those being assessed. There is clearly a large number of ways in which any given assessment task can be presented and in which questions can be asked. Some of these ways will make the task more accessible – that is, easier to complete successfully – and some will get in the way of successful completion. Section 26 of the Fair Access by Design (Ofqual, 2010) document lists a number of guiding principles for improving the accessibility of assessment questions, although the research basis for these principles is not made completely clear in that document. The aim of the current review is to examine the research background more closely in order to provide a more substantial basis for a renewed set of principles to underpin the concept of language accessibility. In the review, each section will be prefaced by a statement of the principles outlined in Guidance on the Principles of Language Accessibility in National Curriculum Assessments and then the research evidence underpinning these principles will be reviewed

Reading in a foreign language: Strategic variation between readers of differing proficiency

For university language students who are required to deal with literary texts for linguistic or literary purposes, there is hardly any transitional stage between short adapted expository texts, read in the early stages of language learning, and complex literary texts, encountered at university in the literature class. Language readers must then make a substantial mental effort to understand texts intended for a native readership. In challenging reading mode, the quality of reading depends on the efficiency of problem-solving operations, including evaluative and executive strategies, put into place in order to attempt to fill in the comprehension gaps present in complex texts. Although reading strategies used by foreign language learners have been identified and categorised by research, the conditions of their use and their relationships are still unclear. Moreover, to my knowledge, no empirical investigation has focused specifically on comprehension monitoring in the context of foreign language literary texts. Literature instruction would benefit from such a study. Using verbal reports to elicit data, this study proposes to examine how proficient and less proficient university students of French, at intermediate level of instruction, implement problem-solving strategies when reading literary texts. Strategies such as guessing at words, consulting a dictionary, and translating mentally, are studied in relation to their contribution to the overall monitoring cycle. The results obtained indicate that proficient and less proficient readers tend to use the same strategies but with different purposes. The study demonstrates that the major difference between the two groups of respondents resides in ability some readers have to integrate meaning and construct text in a cohesive and synthetic fashion

A Comparative Study of Linguistic Features of English Agricultural Journal Abstracts Written by American and Chinese Scientists

The present study investigated the variations in linguistic features of English academic writing by American and Chinese scientists by building a corpus of 600 English agricultural journal abstracts and using the natural language processing tool Coh-Metrix. Through a one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and a discriminant function analysis (DFA), we statistically analyzed the corpus texts based on their lexical, syntactic and cohesive features and generated 8 distinguishing linguistic indices. The results indicated that Chinese scientists tended to write abstracts with more frequent words, more similar sentence structures, more modifiers per noun phrase and more agentless passive voice forms, while the American counterparts tended to write abstracts with a wider range of vocabulary, more specific terms, more words with multiple senses and more adversative connectives. These findings offer good guidance for Chinese scientists to write in a style closer to the agricultural research field and the native speakers so as to get their manuscripts better reviewed and more easily published. These findings also have practical implications for the development of agricultural English teaching materials as well as the curriculum design

Genre analysis of English article abstracts in Ecuadorian and North American journals: A contrastive study

In the era of online searches and digital libraries, the importance of research article abstracts (RAAs) is perhaps unquestionable. As a result, cross-linguistic research, particularly in the field of corpus linguistics has received considerable attention as it explores how scholars introduce their studies in a convergent genre, namely abstract. A significant body of research has addressed the variation of abstracts in terms of content and structure across languages and disciplines. The current dissertation compares abstracts published in North American and Ecuadorian journals (NA&EJ), considering humanities and sciences. The corpus analysis consisted of 240 abstracts written in English: 120 in North American and 120 in Ecuadorian journals. Sentences were the unit of analysis. The top-down and bottom-up approaches identified the rhetorical moves and drew the boundaries between them. The English corpora went through software-driven text analysis. The L2 syntactic complexity analyzer (L2SCA) gauges the syntactic complexity while the Lextutor vocab-profile measures the lexical richness of abstracts. It used the SPSS statistical tool to analyze the output of the linguistic analyzers. Results showed an emergent rhetorical organization of eight moves with four recurrent moves in abstracts of NA&EJ. There was significant variability in the overall sentence complexity, amount of subordination, and degree of phrasal sophistication between NA&EJ. Notwithstanding, though there was variability in the means of syntactic complexity in NA&EJ abstracts, no statistical differences were found between fields and between the four syntactic dimensions across disciplines at the level of significance (α = .05). There were differences between the lexical density and lexical sophistication, but not in the proportion of lexical diversity. This study has shown that although abstracts in NA&EJ followed a similar rhetorical structure, the frequency of the moves varies across disciplinary fields. Even though abstracts in NA&EJ used extensive vocabulary and diverse types of sentence structure, resemblant linguistic outcomes and cohesive means emerged regardless of their publishing context and disciplines. This study affords valuable insights to investigate the recurrent rhetoric, lexical and syntactic structure used in abstracts. Ideally, research outcomes will uncover the actual use of language to discuss linguistic implications and provide pedagogical applications for academic writing

Beyond Contrastive Rhetoric: Helping International Lawyers Use Cohesive Devices in U.S. Legal Writing

This Article attempts to use linguistics, specifically text analysis and pragmatics, to help explain how and why lawyers who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) struggle with cohesion in their U.S. legal writing. Then in light of that discussion, it offers a four-step, receptive and productive exercise to engage students in contrastive analysis of cohesive features across languages and cultures. It begins by distinguishing coherence (top-down flow related to rhetorical preferences and organization of content and argument) from cohesion (bottom-up flow related to the surface features that exhibit connections between clauses). As background, it explores the role of cohesion in English as understood by linguists in text analysis. Through this discussion, it explains that while cohesion does not create coherence, inappropriate or incorrect use of cohesive devices may interfere with coherence and a sense of top-down flow, which is of particular concern for NNS lawyers. Next the Article offers perspectives from pragmatics, primarily Relevance theory, to identify the principles that guide a writer’s decisions about when and whether to use cohesive devices—principles that provide insight into how NNS lawyers may approach the problem of connecting. From there, it elaborates on how the use of cohesive ties varies across languages and cultures. Finally, the Article argues that law professors can extend the contrastive analysis they already do for top-down organization and flow to bottom-up structures related to cohesion. To this end, the Article offers a simple, adaptable exercise aimed at helping NNS lawyers increase their repertoires of cohesive devices as well as their understanding of how native English writers use cohesive devices to signal connections and relationships between their ideas. This exercise asks students to (1) use contrastive analysis to examine the cohesive features of a model, five-paragraph, persuasive essay; (2) write a similar, research-free, five-paragraph essay based on lessons from discussion of the model; (3) engage in an intensive, guided peer-review of the cohesive ties in these essays; and (4) revise their own work based on comments and contrastive analysis. At each stage, students identify important nuances and differences between how cohesive devices are defined and used in different legal discourse communities, while building their own repertoires and commands of the cohesive devices used by successful U.S. legal writers

An Analysis of the Narrative Writing the Ninth Grade Students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar Based on Text's Cohesion and Coherence

This study aimed at describing and explaining the cohesion and coherence created by the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in their narrative writings. Another aim was to describe and explain the problems encountered by students in their narratives. This study used qualitative research which focused on describing and explaining the coherence and cohesion created by the ninth grade students' in their narrative writings, and the problems encountered by the students. The subject of this study was the ninth grade students of SMP Negeri 1 Gianyar in academic year 2011/2012. The obtained data were in the form of: a) scripts of students narrative writings, b), responses to the students' questionnaire, and c) script of teacher' interview. The main instrument was the researcher himself. The data were analyzed by using the theory introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976), Alterberg (1987), Wuang, Hui and Sui, Danni, (2010), and Connor (1990) and Connor and John (1990). The findings of the study showed the cohesion of the narratives was achieved by the used of cohesive devices. Grammatical devices included references, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. And lexical devices included reiteration and collocation. The coherence of the narratives was also achieved through the development of themes, the generic structure, and the tenses used. Most of the students have created cohesive and coherent narratives although some problems identified. They were in sentence patterns, verb patterns or forms, conjunction, spelling, word choice, plural form, over generalization, the use of article, ellipsis, and the use preposition, the use of pronoun, apostrophe, adverb forms, syllabification, and capital letters

Self-reported problems of L1 and L2 college writers: what can writing instructors do?

Understanding self-reported problems of L1 and L2 writers regarding the writing process holds important pedagogical implications for instructors to address their students’ specific writing needs. L2 writers were usually reported to have more difficulty setting goals and generating material, and to produce less accurate and effective texts (Leki, 1992; Silva 1993, 1997). This paper compares the self-reported writing difficulties of two groups: L1 (N=19) and L2 (N=19) freshman composition students from an American university. To analyze the group differences, a questionnaire (using 5-point Likert scale) about the perceptions of writing difficulties and approaches to writing process was used. Findings from the descriptive statistical analysis suggest that despite self-reported common problems, such as keeping clarity by using appropriate syntax, the L1 and L2 students presented different views on the importance of visuals in a text. While L1s find visuals to be least important for the reader to understand the text, L2s find visuals to be most important. The results reveal that although instructors focus on teaching essay organization, both L1 and L2 students need more instruction on creating better sentence structures. Encouraging L2 students to use visuals (pictures and graphs) in their persuasive essays would prove beneficial for them to overcome writing problems in English