A longitudinal study of the effects of instruction on the development of article use by adult Japanese ESL learners

This dissertation investigates the effects and value of instructional activities for improving second language use of English articles. After reviewing a number of issues concerning pedagogical, linguistic, psycholinguistic, and internal validity, this study presents the results of eight longitudinal time-series case studies of adult Japanese learners of English residing in Vancouver, Canada, four of whom received grammatical explanations, input processing activities, and output practice activities regarding English article use. Learner development was assessed on three different narrative retelling tasks (spoken, written, and cloze) and the production was analysed with reference to specific contexts of use, indicating the form-function mappings that comprised the learners' interlanguage knowledge. The results indicated that the learners' interlanguage production exhibited (a) the anticipated task variation, with greater suppliance of the on tasks that allowed greater attention to form, and (b) the anticipated discoursal variation, with the supplied more consistently when it was primed as a redundant element on the written task and with the supplied less consistently when it was efficiently deleted as a redundant element on the spoken task. The results also indicated the variable nature of individual development and the value of assessing development longitudinally on different tasks. Importantly, the results indicated that the learners improved or continued improving after instruction, and strongly suggested that instruction can cause automatization of interlanguage knowledge. This finding suggests that form-focused instruction may be valuable for second language learning, and that pedagogical positions opposing form-focused instruction may need to be revised or abandoned.Education, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat

A syntactic analysis of noun incorporation in Cree

This thesis outlines a syntactic analysis of Noun Incorporation in Cree. In this construction, certain morphemes, 'medials', that appear as the nominal root of an external NP can alternatively appear within a verb. This thesis extends previous analyses of Algonquian medials by utilizing the theory of Incorporation developed in Baker (1988b). Within this theory of grammar, medials are base-generated as nouns within an 'object' NP and then optionally adjoined to the verb stem as a result of head (X$sp{ rm o}$) movement. Established restrictions on head movement can account for many properties of NI, including paraphrasing, doubling, bare modifiers, possible thematic relations, and differences between NI and compounds. The efficacy of the syntactic approach validates a modular account of polysynthetic word formation. In addition, the distribution of Cree NI validates several putatively universal principles of theta-role assignment

Theory Development in Applied Linguistics: Toward a Connectionist Framework for Understanding Second Language Acquisition

This paper builds upon the Competition Model to create a broadframework that can inform a connectionist approach to second language acquisition research. After adopting three types ofexplanationsfor second language acquisition and outlining criteriafor evalu- ating theories, the paper summarizes the Competition Model, a theory that utilizes those threetypesofexplanations. Thepaperthensummarizesfindingsregardingthelongitudinal developmentofpasttimeexpression. Toaccountforthesepatterns,thepaperintroduces additional constructs that are consistent with the Competition Model. Integrating "the competition offormsfor expressing functions" with the notion of "cumulative complexity" (Brown, 1973), these new constructs are combined in the Sign-based, Connectionist, Envi- ronmentalist, and Compositionist (SCEC) Framework. The past time patterns are inter- preted as manifestations of expansions in neural connectivity and modifications of connec- tion strengths, changes that result from the associative learning that occurs during the processing of a large number of exemplars