‘Yuk, the Skin of Insects!’ Tracking Sources of Errors in Second Language Reading Comprehension

This article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project.Readers for whom English is a second language often misinterpret texts. One source for such errors is failing to accurately recognize phonemic and graphemic features, leading to interpreting a text within a framework not intended by the author. Teachers can help second language readers become more perceptive by preparing students for the material and providing practice in recognizing the text's syntactic connections

Understanding Direct Mail Letters as a Genre

This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project.What makes non-profit, philanthropic discourse so persuasive has not been well explored to date. Using a specialized corpus of direct-mail letters from philanthropic organizations in five different fields, this study seeks to combine the tools of corpus analysis with the specificity of genre analysis in a way that has not been done before to provide a new perspective on a genre that is not well understood. The underlying goal is to look for a methodology that will provide much of the qualitative detail that is common to genre analysis while at the same time provide the reliability that is best assured by the quantitative power of computerized corpus analysis. Using Bhatia's approach to genre analysis (1993) and his exploratory efforts in investigating fundraising discourse (1997, 1998) as a foundation, key patterns in the rhetorical structure of direct-mail letters revealed through a large-scale corpus analysis are presented

Designing and Evaluating a Transitional Academic Program

This article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Permission granted through posted policies on copyright owner’s website or through direct contact with copyright owner.The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire faced the ethical dilemma of admitting non-native English speaking immigrants and refugees who were academically at-risk, but not providing the academic and language support the students needed to succeed. This paper provides a description and an evaluation of a transitional academic program designed to address these students' language and learning needs as well as help them integrate into the university. Its success is reflected not only in strong student improvement, but in the collaboration of many university departments and units to create an efficient and cost-effective administrative structure

First and Second Language Use in Reading Comprehension Strategies of Japanese ESL Students

This article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright rests with the author.Reading in a second language (L2) is not a monolingual event; L2 readers have access to their first language (L1) as they read and many use it as a strategy to help comprehend an L2 text. Due to difficulties in observing the comprehension process, little research has been conducted to try to determine what roles the L1 and L2 play in the reading strategies of L2 readers or how these roles vary at different proficiency levels. This study attempts to address these two issues. Eleven native speakers of Japanese, at two different proficiency levels, were asked to think-­aloud –in the language of their thoughts—as they were reading an English text. In retrospective interviews, subjects then listened to their tape-­recorded think-­aloud protocols and were asked to clarify and explain their thoughts. Three generalizations about L1 and L2 strategy use emerged from the data and are discussed

Editorial: Nursing Papers

This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Permission granted through posted policies on copyright owner’s website or through direct contact with copyright owner.Spanning issues 3.1 and 3.2 of this journal is a series of case studies looking at the practice of fund raising cross-culturally. These articles were first presented at a seminar jointly sponsored by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC) and the IU Center on Philanthropy (COP), "Case Studies of Fundraising Internationally," which was held on the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis campus in October 2001

Learner Uptake of Teacher Electronic Feedback in ESL Composition

The research on electronic feedback in second language writing is scarce, despite the increasingly frequent use of computers in ESL writing classrooms. The current study's purpose is to determine (1) what types of electronic written feedback ESL learners receive on writing that has been submitted and returned electronically, and (2) the relationship between teacher feedback and uptake. Twelve ESL students and three teachers participated in this longitudinal study. Multiple drafts of two essays from two semesters of college-level first-year composition were analyzed. The findings show that most of the teachers' electronic feedback consisted of marginal comments that were, for the most part, directive, explicit, principled, systematic, and needs-based – much like handwritten feedback. Importantly, electronic feedback was successful at eliciting appropriate revisions of grammatical structures or surface-level features, but also content and organization. This suggests that electronic feedback can be effective and therefore should not be avoided

Textbook Writers’ Perspectives on Theoretical Frameworks in Beginning and Intermediate Chinese Textbooks

This article explores textbook writers’ perspectives on theoretical frameworks in beginning and intermediate Chinese textbooks. Four prominent textbook authors were interviewed, and modified structured interviews were used. Interview data reflect the following three trends. (1) Four textbook authors had different foci in applying in their textbooks widely accepted principles of second language acquisition and approaches to second language teaching. (2) While all four textbook authors guide the teaching of language structures by communicative functions and relate the teaching with culture, they use one of the two methods in the process: practicing language structures and then completing communicative activities or completing communicative activities to learn grammatical structures. (3) The four textbook authors show distinctive features in their textbooks: grounding communicative Chinese language instruction in U.S.-specific language, educational and social contexts; enabling communication through setting up frameworks of language structures; developing proficiency by providing relevant materials in practical and manageable steps; motivating students by engaging them in communicative activities. Pedagogical application of the above findings in teaching Chinese as a foreign language is discussed

Synchronous and asynchronous teacher electronic feedback and learner uptake in ESL composition

We know little about how teacher feedback and student revisions are influenced when feedback is given electronically. This study contributes to a better understanding of teacher electronic feedback (TEF) in second language writing by investigating its effectiveness in face-to-face and online ESL writing classes in which TEF was offered asynchronously, as Word comments and track changes in electronic drafts, as well as in synchronous text chats between teachers and students. TEF was extracted from 93 drafts written by 64 students and 93 chats in which they conferenced with their teachers. Students’ perceptions about TEF were then solicited via a survey. Additionally, the three participating teachers were interviewed about their use of TEF. Findings show that most TEF was successfully implemented or attempted, and that it was focused on content. Important conclusions are that TEF is effective, and synchronous TEF effectively reinforces asynchronous TEF

An Approach to Corpus-based Discourse Analysis: The Move Analysis as Example

This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Permission granted through posted policies on copyright owner’s website or through direct contact with copyright owner.This article presents a seven-step corpus-based approach to discourse analysis that starts with a detailed analysis of each individual text in a corpus that can then be generalized across all texts of a corpus, providing a description of typical patterns of discourse organization that hold for the entire corpus. This approach is applied specifically to a methodology that is used to analyze texts in terms of the functional/communicative structures that typically make up texts in a genre: move analysis. The resulting corpus-based approach for conducting a move analysis significantly enhances the value of this often used (and misused) methodology, while at the same time providing badly needed guidelines for a methodology that lacks them. A corpus of ‘birthmother letters’ is used to illustrate the approach

'I want to go back to the text': Response Strategies on the Reading Subtest of the New TOEFL

This post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of the article submitted to IUPUI ScholarWorks as part of the OASIS Project. Article reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Permission granted through posted policies on copyright owner’s website or through direct contact with copyright owner.This study describes the reading and test-taking strategies that test takers used on the ‘Reading’ section of the LanguEdge Courseware (2002) materials developed to familiarize prospective respondents with the new TOEFL. The investigation focused on strategies used to respond to more traditional ‘single selection’ multiple-choice formats (i.e., Basic Comprehension and Inferencing questions) and the new selected-response (multiple selection, drag-and-drop) Reading to Learn items. The latter were designed to simulate the academic skill of forming a comprehensive and coherent representation of an entire text, rather than focusing on discrete points in the text. Verbal report data were collected from 32 students, representing four language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and ‘Other’) doing the Reading section tasks from the LanguEdge Courseware materials. Students were randomly assigned to two of the six reading subtests, each consisting of a 600–700 word text with 12–13 items, and subjects’ verbal reports accompanying items representing each of the ten item types were evaluated to determine strategy use. The findings provide insights into the response behaviors prompted by the reading tasks on the new TOEFL