The canon of pedagogical grammar for ELT: a mixed methods study of its evolution, development and comparison with evidence on learner output

The teaching of grammar plays a key role in English Language Teaching (ELT). Pedagogical grammars such as English Grammar in Use and the Azar-Hagen Grammar Series are mainstays within the profession, their enduring appeal confirmed by the recent publication of fifth editions of both. Furthermore, most ELT coursebooks use structural syllabuses – essentially, lists of grammatical items to be taught – as a ‘primary organizing principle’ (McDonough, Shaw and Masuhara, 2013, p. 34). Yet how is the grammatical content of such ELT materials decided? And in the case of coursebooks, how is it decided in which order, and at which level, the grammar points should be taught? O’Keeffe and Mark (2017, p. 466) argue that over time a ‘canon’ of pedagogical grammar has evolved, which is ‘perpetuated and sustained through materials and examinations.’ However, what exactly is the nature of the system that perpetuates and sustains this canon? How, when and where did the canon develop? And does the canon reflect empirical evidence on the development of grammatical competence of learners of EFL? This thesis addresses these questions in three ways. Firstly, a thematic analysis of interviews with ten key figures in ELT publishing on the question of grammatical content in teaching materials is presented. Secondly, an analysis of the treatment of three areas of grammar – conditionals, relative clauses and future forms – in grammars and coursebooks from the 17th century to the present is carried out. Finally, the current coursebook consensus on how and when to teach different aspects of these three areas of grammar is compared with empirical evidence on the use of grammar by learners, in the form of the English Grammar Profile. The analysis shows that the process of evolution of pedagogical descriptions of these areas of grammar was slow, and largely undocumented. The ELT professionals interviewed frequently referred to the existence of a strong consensus on grammatical content and ordering that must be respected, the need to follow successful competition titles, the importance of market research and user expectations, the influence of school and state institutions, and the need to avoid commercial risk by diverging too much from the consensus and expectations. The comparison between the coursebook consensus and data from the EGP reveals some areas of agreement between the two, but also that learners are often able to produce grammatical structures before they are typically taught in coursebooks, and can often produce a wider range of grammar than is typically covered in coursebooks.N

A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS)

A Grammar of Italian Sign Language (LIS) is a comprehensive presentation of the grammatical properties of LIS. It has been conceived as a tool for students, teachers, interpreters, the Deaf community, researchers, linguists and whoever is interested in the study of LIS. It is one output of the Horizon 2020 SIGN-HUB project. It is composed of six Parts: Part 1 devoted to the social and historical background in which the language has developed, and five Parts covering the main properties of Phonology, Lexicon, Morphology, Syntax and Pragmatics. Thanks to the electronic format of the grammar, text and videos are highly interconnected and are designed to fit the description of a visual language

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

The Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLIFF) is a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to discuss the members\u27 current research. As the word feedback suggests, the group\u27s purpose is the sharing of ideas. The group also promotes interdisciplinary contacts between researchers who share an interest in Cognitive Science. There is no single theme describing the research in Natural Language Processing at Penn. There is work done in CCG, Tree adjoining grammars, intonation, statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, incremental interpretation, language acquisition, syntactic parsing, causal reasoning, free word order languages, ... and many other areas. With this in mind, rather than trying to summarize the varied work currently underway here at Penn, we suggest reading the following abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. Their abstracts illustrate the diversity of interests among the researchers, explain the areas of common interest, and describe some very interesting work in Cognitive Science. This report is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We pride ourselves on the close working relations between these groups, as we believe that the communication among the different departments and the ongoing inter-departmental research not only improves the quality of our work, but makes much of that work possible

Reading Academic English : a case study. StratApp - The Art of Learning

The aim of this dissertation is to describe the different issues that might help university students improve their reading academic English skills. This piece of research focuses on describing the importance of reading academic English; the different key skills and strategies which are crucial for academic reading; the features of academic English which are relevant to familiarise university students with the language academic texts have, and mobile learning. The present study illustrates its theoretical background together with a description of how to turn non-academic texts into academic ones (B1-B2 level) by describing a game-based mobile application: StratApp - The Art of Learning.L'objectiu d'aquesta tesi és descriure els diferents factors que poden ajudar els estudiants universitaris a millorar la lectura de l'anglès acadèmic. Aquesta investigació se centra en descriure la importància que té la lectura d'anglès acadèmic; les diferents habilitats i estratègies clau per a la lectura acadèmica; les característiques de l'anglès acadèmic que són rellevants per familiaritzar els estudiants universitaris amb els textos acadèmics, i en l'aprenentatge mòbil. Aquest treball il·lustra els seu marc teòric descrivint com s'han adaptat els textos no acadèmics en textos acadèmics (nivell B1-B2) d'una aplicació mòbil: StratApp - The Art of Learning.El objetivo de esta tesis es describir los diferentes factores que pueden ayudar a los estudiantes universitarios a mejorar la lectura del inglés académico. Esta investigación se centra en describir la importancia que tiene la lectura de inglés académico; las diferentes habilidades y estrategias clave para la lectura académica; las características del inglés académico que son relevantes para familiarizar a los estudiantes universitarios con los textos académicos, y en el aprendizaje móvil. Este trabajo ilustra su marco teórico describiendo como se han adaptado los textos no académicos en textos académicos (nivel B1-B2) de una aplicación móvil: StratApp - The Art of Learning

Analyzing Authentic Texts for Language Learning: Web-based Technology for Input Enrichment and Question Generation

Acquisition of a language largely depends on the learner's exposure to and interaction with it. Our research goal is to explore and implement automatic techniques that help create a richer grammatical intake from a given text input and engage learners in making form-meaning connections during reading. A starting point for addressing this issue is the automatic input enrichment method, which aims to ensure that a target structure is richly represented in a given text. We demonstrate the high performance of our rule-based algorithm, which is able to detect 87 linguistic forms contained in an official curriculum for the English language. Showcasing the algorithm's capability to differentiate between the various functions of the same linguistic form, we establish the task of tense sense disambiguation, which we approach by leveraging machine learning and rule-based methods. Using the aforementioned technology, we develop an online information retrieval system FLAIR that prioritizes texts with a rich representation of selected linguistic forms. It is implemented as a web search engine for language teachers and learners and provides effective input enrichment in a real-life teaching setting. It can also serve as a foundation for empirical research on input enrichment and input enhancement. The input enrichment component of the FLAIR system is evaluated in a web-based study that demonstrates that English teachers prefer automatic input enrichment to standard web search when selecting reading material for class. We then explore automatic question generation for facilitating and testing reading comprehension as well as linguistic knowledge. We give an overview of the types of questions that are usually asked and can be automatically generated from text in the language learning context. We argue that questions can facilitate the acquisition of different linguistic forms by providing functionally driven input enhancement, i.e., by ensuring that the learner notices and processes the form. The generation of well-established and novel types of questions is discussed and examples are provided; moreover, the results from a crowdsourcing study show that automatically generated questions are comparable to human-written ones

Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL)

The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) was founded in 2014 at Indiana University by Dr. Öner Özçelik, the residing director of the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR). As the nation’s sole U.S. Department of Education funded Language Resource Center focusing on the languages of the Central Asian Region, CeLCAR’s main mission is to strengthen and improve the nation’s capacity for teaching and learning Central Asian languages through teacher training, research, materials development projects, and dissemination. As part of this mission, CeLCAR has an ultimate goal to unify and fortify the Central Asian language learning community by facilitating networking between linguists and language educators, encouraging research projects that will inform language instruction, and provide opportunities for professionals in the field to both showcase their work and receive feedback from their peers. Thus ConCALL was established to be the first international academic conference to bring together linguists and language educators in the languages of the Central Asian region, including both the Altaic and Eastern Indo-European languages spoken in the region, to focus on research into how these specific languages are represented formally, as well as acquired by second/foreign language learners, and also to present research driven teaching methods. Languages served by ConCALL include, but are not limited to: Azerbaijani, Dari, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Lokaabharan, Mari, Mongolian, Pamiri, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Shughnani, Tajiki, Tibetan, Tofalar, Tungusic, Turkish, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek, Wakhi and more!The Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics held at Indiana University on 16-17 May 1014 was made possible through the generosity of our sponsors: Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR), Ostrom Grant Programs, IU's College of Arts and Humanities Center (CAHI), Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center (IAUNRC), IU's School of Global and International Studies (SGIS), IU's College of Arts and Sciences, Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (SRIFIAS), IU's Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS), and IU's Department of Linguistics

Towards profiles of periodic style: discourse organisation in modern English instructional writing

A notorious challenge in the study of the diachrony of English is to determine whether developments in syntax, including changing frequencies of a particular construction, or word-order changes as suggested by perceived patterns in extant texts, represent genuine linguistic changes or are due to changes in conventions of writing. What is intuitively clear, however, even to a casual eye, is that a piece of English prose from, say, the 16th-century differs markedly from texts from the 18th-century. Yet such judgements cannot be based on syntactic changes alone, since essential grammatical features of Present-Day English are in place already by the end of the Late Middle English period. As a result, these differences are often simply ascribed to the notoriously elusive domain of style. The current study attempts to come to grips with the issue of period-specific conventions of writing by focusing on features of discourse structure and textual organisation as of the Early Modern English period. It can be positioned at the meso-level between large-scale quantitative approaches of sentence-level linguistic features and detailed, small-scale discourse-analytic studies of individual texts. Texts selected for the current purpose, manuals for equine care, derive from a sub-domain of instructional writing with a long history in the vernacular. As these texts share similar communicative purposes and deal with the same "global" topics of feeding and looking after a horse, any differences between them cannot be attributed to different genres or differences in subject matter. This permits us to zoom in on 'agnates', different ways of expressing the same meanings, and allows us to see how the stylistic options selected by authors achieve the various communicative goals that have to be negotiated, such as discourse coherence or the transition to new topics. The three main sections in this dissertation offer different ways to identifying developments in discourse organisation. The first section explores the traditional corpus-based approach that is frequently used to measure the parameter of "personal involvement", an indicator of periodic style. Initially, this approach restricts itself to measuring the contribution of frequencies of individual lexical items like first and second person pronouns. Next, this section will focus on the presence and linguistic realisation of the interlocutors of these instructional texts, i.e. the writer and the reader. The second main section will try to diagnose such varying styles by employing a completely data-driven, quantitative methodology which offers a linguistically unbiased and theory-independent perspective on the data in the corpus. This second approach offers cues as to how `subliminal' patterns of grammar may affect perceptions of style, and how quantitative measures may aid in assessing whether the texts in our corpus cluster in expected or unexpected ways. The third section draws on theories of referential coherence and textual progression. By charting the variation with which texts from different periods in the history of English apply conventions for discourse organisation, it offers an insight into developments of hierarchical discourse structures (i.e., coordinated versus subordinated discourse relations) and practices of co-reference. Taken together, these three independent measures offer a novel, multi-angled approach to stylistic developments in prose writing. Combining features `above the sentence' level which involve discourse and information structural changes, this dissertation affords a glimpse into the emergence of written textual conventions, or 'grammars of prose', in the history of English

Relationship between an english language program and student's performance in national standardized tests

This research paper attempts to analyze the relationship between the results obtained by a group of Industrial Engineering students in the English module of the Saber Pro test and the English program they completed at a language institute where this study took place. In order to carry out this study, the methodology followed was based on the Critical Theory Paradigm, using a quantitative approach in which both a small portion of quantitative data was incorporated. Since the study focuses on the Industrial Engineering program, it is possible to state that we are going to work with a case study design. The instruments used were: Documents analysis, interviews, observations, surveys and statistical analysis. This paper contributes to a general understanding of the English program itself and its impact on students’ performance in the Saber Pro Test. Results can benefit different stakeholders such as academic and administrative staff, the teachers and the students in order to examine how the program helps the students to reach the level of English proposed by the institute (B1) and in general how it helps students develop their language skills. Results in these standardized tests are used to rank the universities at national level therefore they are an important source of information.MaestríaMagister en la Enseñanza del Ingle

Demonstratives in discourse

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics