Instructors’ Views towards the Second Language Acquisition of the Spanish Subjunctive

abstract: The study of Spanish instructors’ beliefs is a recent development and the body of work is small with little research conducted on their insights on the acquisition of any grammar form. Still, Spanish grammar includes the notoriously difficult subjunctive, a grammatical irrealis mood that is affixed to verbs. A national survey was conducted on Spanish professors and instructors (N=73) who teach at institutions randomly selected from a representative sample of American institutions of higher education. The survey was conducted to inquire on their beliefs regarding the most complex forms in Spanish, the causes of the subjunctive difficulty, and their preferred methods of teaching the form. The results first indicate that participants rated the subjunctive the most difficult grammar form. They attributed the cause of difficulty to be primarily interference from the first language and its abstractness. For instructing the subjunctive, participants generally supported form-oriented instruction with a metalanguage approach that focuses on forms. However, the participants disagreed greatly on whether meaning-focused instruction was valuable and dismissed drilling instruction of the subjunctive. Data from the participants provides a distribution of overextended tense, moods, and aspects in lieu of the Spanish subjunctive. However, instructors indicated that their students’ competence of the subjunctive was higher than their performance and that comprehension was not necessarily reliant on correct usage of the subjunctive as it was for proficiency. Moreover, they provided qualitative data of effective methods and pedagogical challenges of the subjunctive. This study illuminates some of the contributing factors of subjunctive difficulty and preferred pedagogical approaches for teaching it. It also has implications that meaning may not be obstructed if students do not use subjunctive.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Linguistics and Applied Linguistics 201

Somali Stories: A Development of a Story-Based ESL Literacy Tool for Use With Older Adult Somali Women

The focus of this study is on incorporating what was learned through research to develop a curriculum resource. The primary research question addressed in this project is how educators can incorporate stories from older adult Somali women into English language instruction to improve these students’ English language writing skills. Key influences include my experience as an ESL educator and my strong interest in stories, including their use in education. The study has a curriculum development design. A curriculum resource, in the form of a story-based literacy tool designed to teach English language literacy skills to older Somali women, was developed. The literacy tool can be redesigned for use with other student populations. It provides a way for students to improve their English language writing skills and, ultimately, disseminate their stories

Unifying context with labeled property graph: A pipeline-based system for comprehensive text representation in NLP

Extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured digital text presents significant challenges across diverse domains. This research addresses this challenge by proposing a novel pipeline-based system that generates domain-agnostic and task-agnostic text representations. The proposed approach leverages labeled property graphs (LPG) to encode contextual information, facilitating the integration of diverse linguistic elements into a unified representation. The proposed system enables efficient graph-based querying and manipulation by addressing the crucial aspect of comprehensive context modeling and fine-grained semantics. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through the implementation of NLP components that operate on LPG-based representations. Additionally, the proposed approach introduces specialized patterns and algorithms to enhance specific NLP tasks, including nominal mention detection, named entity disambiguation, event enrichments, event participant detection, and temporal link detection. The evaluation of the proposed approach, using the MEANTIME corpus comprising manually annotated documents, provides encouraging results and valuable insights into the system\u27s strengths. The proposed pipeline-based framework serves as a solid foundation for future research, aiming to refine and optimize LPG-based graph structures to generate comprehensive and semantically rich text representations, addressing the challenges associated with efficient information extraction and analysis in NLP

The interaction between grammatical knowledge and explicitness in L2 written corrective feedback

This study investigates the relative effectiveness of different types of written corrective feedback (WCF) relative to error type and grammatical knowledge in developing second language (L2) accuracy in writing. Findings on the effectiveness of WCF have been mixed regarding which types of feedback are more effective, however, recent evidence has suggested potential benefits for direct methods (i.e., supplying students with the correct forms) in developing grammatical accuracy over time (Kang & Han, 2015; Russell & Spada, 2006; van Beuningen, de Jong, & Kuiken, 2012). The opinions of several researchers, teachers, and students, however, support the use of indirect WCF (i.e., indicating the location and type of error for students through use of a code) because it is argued to encourage students’ analytic reflection, engagement, and processing of the feedback they receive (Ferris, 2010, 2011; Lalande, 1982). Several learner-internal and learner-external variables have been hypothesized to moderate the effectiveness of different WCF methods (e.g., learners’ perceptions, proficiency, developmental readiness, the nature of the linguistic target, grammatical knowledge), with limited evidence to support any of these claims. This study reports on a controlled classroom-based quasi-experiment conducted in an EFL university context ( N = 127) that investigates the role of grammatical knowledge in moderating the effectiveness of direct vs. indirect WCF on six target grammatical error types. Results provide further evidence in support of moderate effectiveness of WCF for both direct (Cohen’s d = .28) and indirect methods (Cohen’s d = .43), which outperformed the control after five treatments. No clear relationship was found between prior grammatical knowledge and gains in accuracy at the group level, although further analysis of the top and bottom quartile of test scorers across error types suggests advantages for direct WCF for students with prior grammatical knowledge. Pedagogical and theoretical implications are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research on WCF

Exploring challenges and strategies in English speaking among Indonesian university students: A case study of AKM university

English language education in Indonesia spans from primary school to university levels. However, achieving mastery in English, particularly in speaking, remains a significant challenge for Indonesian university students. This study aimed to investigate the problems faced by these students in speaking English and describe their efforts to overcome this deficiency. The research utilized a descriptive qualitative method, employing questionnaires and interviews as instruments. The study participants consisted of 45 second-semester students from the English Education Department at AKM University (pseudonym). The findings revealed that students encountered both linguistic and psychological challenges when speaking English. Linguistic problems included confusion in tense usage, a lack of grammar understanding, and difficulty in selecting appropriate vocabulary. Psychological issues encompassed feelings of nervousness, lack of confidence, fear of making mistakes, and the fear of being laughed at. Furthermore, insufficient practice emerged as an environmental factor contributing to speaking difficulties. To address these challenges, students adopted various learning strategies proposed by Oxford (1990), including memory strategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies