Interview with Norbert Schmitt

Professor Norbert Schmitt is a professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. He started his career in Japan where he taught English as a Foreign Language and pursued his MA degree. He is mainly known for his work in all aspects of second language vocabulary including pedagogy, acquisition, and assessment. His interest in vocabulary extended through his PhD research at Nottingham. His current research interests include phraseology and formulaic sequences, corpus-based research, and the interface between vocabulary knowledge and the ability to read and listen in English. Dr. Schmitt agreed to talk to us during the SLS Spring 2013 symposium

Effects of Rehearsal on ESL Learners’ Responses to Test Tasks

Second language (L2) testing is often stressful for test takers, especially when they take high-stakes tests such as the TOEFL. On the iBT TOEFL independent speaking questions, for example, test takers are given 15 seconds to prepare to respond to a prompt (Educational Testing Service, 2008) and have only one chance to record their answer, which puts test takers under great pressure. However, the necessity of this stressful situation has not been empirically validated; that is, the effects of giving learners planning opportunities are unclear

Review of Arabic Second Language Acquisition of Morphosyntax

The goal of this book is to combine data-driven findings in the area of Arabic language acquisition with a focus on the order of acquisition, developmental stages and learning patterns of linguistic structures of Arabic. The author starts with research questions on the variables involved in learning Arabic including the developmental path, the role of transfer, the effect of instruction, and other factors involved. Methodologically, the book draws on a pool of longitudinally collected oral data from 9 learners of Arabic and a cross-sectional sample of 109 learners with different native languages including English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Data were elicited through information gap activities and picture description tasks. Based on analyses from this data, chapters are systematically developed to address topics in separate chapters for discussing the acquisition of specific target features

Review of The ESL writer’s handbook

The growing number of international students who come to study at American universities and the over 99,000 students who are specifically enrolled in English language programs (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2013) has revealed the need for well-developed and carefully tailored resources that prepare English-as-asecond-language (ESL) students for academic success. This handbook and workbook combination is one of the resources that has been developed to prepare ESL students for success both in the writing classroom and in their academic careers

Review of Academic Encounters Level 4 Student’s Book Listening and Speaking with DVD: Human Behavior

The rationale for content-based instruction is that the content is often academic subject matter (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche 2003). Academic Encounters Listening and Speaking: Human Behavior is a contentbased textbook dealing with the topic of human behavior related to psychology and communication. The book contains four units: Health, development through life, nonverbal messages and interpersonal relationships. There are two chapters in each unit. The content of each chapter consists most of interviews, lectures and surveys. The interviews and academic lectures are semi-authentic materials from real college classrooms. The DVD that accompanies the text contains all the lectures from the textbook. In each chapter, students are asked to develop four skills: listening, speaking, vocabulary, and note taking

Student attitudes toward accentedness of native and nonnative speaking English teachers

The goal for this study was to examine participants’ familiarity with specific accents, whether participants were able to identify if a speaker was a native speaker (NS) or a non-native speaker (NNS), and what accent the speaker had. I also examined how the participants rated speakers on four Likert-scales of comprehensibility, intelligibility, accentedness, and acceptability as a teacher (the four dependent variables). I included 38 NS and 94 NNS participants from a range of first-language backgrounds. The participants listened to three NSs (Midwestern U.S., Southern U.S., and British) and two NNSs (Chinese and Albanian) and completed the identification and Likert-scale tasks outlined above. Results showed that NNSs were significantly less able than NSs to identify a speaker’s nativeness and accent. Results revealed that familiarity with an accent correlated with comprehensibility and acceptability as a teacher. For familiar accents, familiarity was a significant predictor of the participant ratings on the four dependent variables, though the predicted changes in ratings were small. Overall, participants had generally positive attitudes toward NNSETs; in relation to acceptability as a teacher, accent was the least influential of the dependent variables. I conclude by arguing that students should be exposed to a range of different accents, as familiarity with an accent facilitates comprehension. These findings also challenge current language center hiring practices that exclude NNSETs from jobs based on a non-native status; this study supports the notion that administrators should hire English language teachers based on professional credentials, and not based on accent

The Effect of Task Repetition and Corrective Feedback in L2 Writing: A Pilot Study

There is great interest in the role of task planning on learner performance and L2 development (for a review, see Ellis, 2009). In this line of research, the question of whether or not repetition of the same oral/written task—repeating as a type of task planning— is pedagogically useful for second language (L2) learning is an intriguing one both for second language researchers and educators. In particular, it is of empirical and practical interest to explore to what extent task repetition helps learners to produce improved language output with less cognitive burden inside and outside of the repetition cycle 1 However, such positive effects reported in the literature have often come with limitations regarding their range of benefits. First, the learners generally showed improvement on fluency and complexity, but showed less or no improvement on linguistic accuracy , and how this contributes to the development of multiple dimensions of L2 spoken or written proficiency in the short- and long-term. With this in mind, findings from previous research suggest that implementation of task repetition with or without additional treatment (e.g., reformulation, or feedback) may be beneficial for learners to some extent (e.g., Adams, 2003; Bygate, 1996, 2001; Bygate & Samuda, 2005; Gass, Mackey, Alvarez-Torres, & FernandezGarcia, 1999; Lynch & Maclean, 2000; Sheppard, 2006; Swain & Lapkin, 2002)

Interview with Matthew Poehner

Dr. Matthew Poehner is Assistant Professor of World Languages Education and Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. He delivered a keynote address at the 2013 Second Language Studies Symposium titled Dynamic Assessment: Understanding Mediation. He was kind enough to speak with us after his talk

Weather in stellar atmosphere: the dynamics of mercury clouds in alpha Andromedae

The formation of long-lasting structures at the surfaces of stars is commonly ascribed to the action of strong magnetic fields. This paradigm is supported by observations of evolving cool spots in the Sun and active late-type stars, and stationary chemical spots in the early-type magnetic stars. However, results of our seven-year monitoring of mercury spots in non-magnetic early-type star alpha Andromedae show that the picture of magnetically-driven structure formation is fundamentally incomplete. Using an indirect stellar surface mapping technique, we construct a series of 2-D images of starspots and discover a secular evolution of the mercury cloud cover in this star. This remarkable structure formation process, observed for the first time in any star, is plausibly attributed to a non-equilibrium, dynamical evolution of the heavy-element clouds created by atomic diffusion and may have the same underlying physics as the weather patterns on terrestrial and giant planets.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures; to be published in Nature Physic

Speciation and fate of trace metals in estuarine sediments under reduced and oxidized conditions, Seaplane Lagoon, Alameda Naval Air Station (USA)

We have identified important chemical reactions that control the fate of metal-contaminated estuarine sediments if they are left undisturbed (in situ) or if they are dredged. We combined information on the molecular bonding of metals in solids from X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) with thermodynamic and kinetic driving forces obtained from dissolved metal concentrations to deduce the dominant reactions under reduced and oxidized conditions. We evaluated the in situ geochemistry of metals (cadmium, chromium, iron, lead, manganese and zinc) as a function of sediment depth (to 100 cm) from a 60 year record of contamination at the Alameda Naval Air Station, California. Results from XAS and thermodynamic modeling of porewaters show that cadmium and most of the zinc form stable sulfide phases, and that lead and chromium are associated with stable carbonate, phosphate, phyllosilicate, or oxide minerals. Therefore, there is minimal risk associated with the release of these trace metals from the deeper sediments contaminated prior to the Clean Water Act (1975) as long as reducing conditions are maintained. Increased concentrations of dissolved metals with depth were indicative of the formation of metal HS(- )complexes. The sediments also contain zinc, chromium, and manganese associated with detrital iron-rich phyllosilicates and/or oxides. These phases are recalcitrant at near-neutral pH and do not undergo reductive dissolution within the 60 year depositional history of sediments at this site. The fate of these metals during dredging was evaluated by comparing in situ geochemistry with that of sediments oxidized by seawater in laboratory experiments. Cadmium and zinc pose the greatest hazard from dredging because their sulfides were highly reactive in seawater. However, their dissolved concentrations under oxic conditions were limited eventually by sorption to or co-precipitation with an iron (oxy)hydroxide. About 50% of the reacted CdS and 80% of the reacted ZnS were bonded to an oxide-substrate at the end of the 90-day oxidation experiment. Lead and chromium pose a minimal hazard from dredging because they are bonded to relatively insoluble carbonate, phosphate, phyllosilicate, or oxide minerals that are stable in seawater. These results point out the specific chemical behavior of individual metals in estuarine sediments, and the need for direct confirmation of metal speciation in order to constrain predictive models that realistically assess the fate of metals in urban harbors and coastal sediments