MI as a predictor of students’ performance in reading competency

The purpose of this study was to examine whether performance in MI could predict the performance in reading competency. The other objectives were to identify the components of MI which are correlated with the reading test scores, and to determine the relationship between the multiple intelligences and reading proficiency. A descriptive and ex post facto design was employed to ascertain relationships among the variables. The participants were 128 randomly chosen pre-university students (grade12, 18-19 years old) of both genders studying in Tehran in the academic year 2008-2009. Three instruments were utilized in this study: 1) a demographic questionnaire; 2) the Persian version of Mckenzie’s MI Inventory; and 3) a standardized reading proficiency test which was selected from retrieved paper-based TOEFL® tests. Results of the correlation analysis revealed no significant relationship between the two variables of MI and reading scores of the students. Furthermore, the results of the correlation analysis revealed that there was a low significant, negative relationship between musical-rhythmic intelligence and reading which suggests that when the reading score of a student increases, musical-rhythmic intelligence of the same student decreases and vice versa. Overall, three categories of MI (musical-rhythmic, verbal-linguistic, bodily-kinesthetic) were found to be predictive of reading proficiency

A validation study of the Persian version of McKenzie's multiple intelligences inventory to measure profiles of pre-university students

Traditionally, intelligence was viewed as a single static entity. Revolutionizing the once-dominated "singlestatic entity" conceptualization, Gardner initially (1983) proposed his theory of Multiple intelligences (MI) that encompasses seven different areas of intelligence (verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal), and later on added the eighth and ninth areas (naturalist and existential) in 1999. Based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), a person may be viewed as intelligent in any of these areas, and the identification of the dominant intelligence type has proven to have pedagogic implications. McKenzie's MI questionnaire (1999) is one of the established tools to identify the typology of intelligence. The present study aims to validate the Persian version of the MI Inventory (questionnaire) proposed by McKenzie (1999). This instrument provides an objective measure of MI. This paper describes the validation exercise of the abovementioned questionnaire that involved 173 pre-university students of both genders in Tehran. In addition, the variables gender and discipline were also considered in this study. The findings of the study indicate that overall, the Persian version of the questionnaire has a high reliability. In addition, the results show a moderate to high relationship between gender and MI profiles of the students

A validation study of the Persian version of Mckenzie's (1999) multiple intelligences inventory to measure MI profiles of pre-university students

Traditionally, intelligence was viewed as a single static entity. Revolutionizing the once-dominated "single-static entity" conceptualization, Gardner initially (1983) proposed his theory of Multiple intelligences (MI) that encompasses seven different areas of intelligence (verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal), and later on added the eighth and ninth areas (naturalist and existential) in 1999. Based on the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), a person may be viewed as intelligent in any of these areas, and the identification of the dominant intelligence type has proven to have pedagogic implications. McKenzie's MI questionnaire (1999) is one of the established tools to identify the typology of intelligence. The present study aims to validate the Persian version of the MI Inventory (questionnaire) proposed by McKenzie (1999). This instrument provides an objective measure of MI. This paper describes the validation exercise of the abovementioned questionnaire that involved 173 pre-university students of both genders in Tehran. In addition, the variables gender and discipline were also considered in this study. The findings of the study indicate that overall, the Persian version of the questionnaire has a high reliability. In addition, the results show a moderate to high relationship between gender and MI profiles of the students

English relative clauses: what Malay learners know and use

Second language (L2) learners have problems when acquiring relative clauses (Hawkins and Chan 1997; Wong 1999). This study examines and attempts to explain the learners' competence in the use of relative clauses. The L2 learners are L1 (first language) speakers of Malay who were gauged to have elementary proficiency in English by the Oxford Placement Test. A grammaticality judgment task (GJT) was administered to determine the subjects' ability to distinguish between the grammatical and ungrammatical forms of relative clauses. The task revealed the students' acquired competence in this particular area. This competence is further examined in the context of a production task which gauged their ability to form relative clauses through sentence combining. Results from the GJT showed consistently low scores for a variety of extractions from various positions in the formation of relative clauses. This is further supported by the results obtained from the sentence-combination task where the production of correct sentences using relative clauses was the focus. In sum, the Malay learners failed to recognise and produce appropriate relative clause constructions. The data confirmed other findings that relative clauses are a source of difficulty for these L2 learners and these findings have pedagogic implications for the learning of this essential grammar component

Acquisition of third person personal pronouns by L1 Malay speakers

This study investigates the acquisition of English third personal person pronouns (henceforth third person pronouns) by first language (L1) Malay learners. The theoretical framework adopted for the study is the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins & Chan, 1997) which claims that second language (L2) learners who begin the task after a particular period of time will not be able to acquire the L2 property and its associated functional features if these have not been instantiated in the learners’ L1. Specifically the aim of this study is to find out to what extent the learners of three different age groups and matched levels of proficiency are able to acquire the English third person pronouns and their associated features (gender, case and number). One hundred and fifty (50 elementary, 50 intermediate, 50 advanced) L1 Malay speakers participated in the study. Two instruments, the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT), were administered to the respondents. The OPT was used to determine the proficiency level of the respondents. The main task, i.e. the GJT, comprised 72 items (both grammatical and ungrammatical) on third person pronouns, tests the respondents’ knowledge on gender, case and number. The data obtained indicated that the learners in the elementary group had the most difficulty in the acquisition of the items tested, followed by the intermediate and the advanced groups, respectively. This indicates that the learners go through developmental stages of acquisition. Overall, the learners’ performances for the grammatical items were better than the ungrammatical items even at the advanced level, implying that at ultimate attainment, they were not able to reach native-like competence. This could be due to the parametric differences between the two languages for the grammatical property being investigated

Acquisition of the present perfect and the simple past by Malaysian Chinese ESL learners

The simple past and present perfect are two areas of English grammar that are introduced to Malaysian learners at an early stage at primary school level. However, many Malaysian learners seem to have persistent difficulty distinguishing between the two and using them even at an advanced level of proficiency. This persistent difficulty raises the question of whether or not such difficulty is directly attributable to fist language (L1) influence. Since competing hypotheses attempting to explain this phenomenon have received limited testing particularly in the Malaysian context, this study considers the implications of the FFFH approach, (Hawkins & Chan, 1997) to explain how the L1 might influence the L2 acquisition of the English present perfect. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether the persistent difficulty in the use of the present perfect and the simple past is directly attributable to L1 influence. In addition, the study also investigated whether or not Chinese speakers experience syntactic deficits in the L2 if specified parameterised features present in the functional categories of the L2 are not specified in the L1. Participants involved in this study were 30 Chinese ESL learners whose proficiency in English ranged from intermediate to advanced levels based on their combination scores in the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT). The instruments used for this study was a Paradigm Task, which was taken from Liszka's work (2005), and an oral production task. The study was in part a replication of Liszka's study (2005) which was the acquisition of form-meaning relations of the English present perfect among L2 learners. The results of the present study suggest that the Chinese ESL learners persistently face difficulty in their production of the present perfect and simple past forms. The finding would have implications for the Malaysian ESL classroom

Acquisition of the verb movement parameter in English by adult Arabic speakers

This study investigates the acquisition of the verb movement parameter in English by adult Arabic-speaking learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) 1 . English and Arabic differ in the settings they adopt for the verb movement parameter. English is [-strong], while Arabic is [+strong]. Accordingly, the placement of the verb with respect to negation, adverbs and floating quantifiers (FQs) in English are considered difficult to acquire for adult Arabic ESL learners. In order to examine the nature of adult Arabic ESL learners’ interlanguage (IL) grammar at the L2 ultimate attainment level as well as the extent to which the adult Arabic ESL learners can reset the verb movement parameter and correctly place the verb with respect to negation, adverbs and FQs in finite and non-finite contexts with lexical and auxiliary verbs, an oral production task was conducted with 77 adult Arabic ESL learners who were subdivided into three proficiency levels (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced). The results reveal that the Arabic ESL learners, even at ultimate attainment level, have great difficulty in resetting the parameterized property associated with the verb movement. These results support the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH) (Hawkins and Chan, 1997) which proposes that post-childhood adult L2 learners are unable to reset parameters from their L1 values to the L2 settings where these differ from the L1 setting

Islam and Muslims in the New York Times: two versions, two camps

This paper discusses the coverage of Islam and Muslims in the New York Times (NYT) in the wake of the 9/11 events and the ensuing two years. The study shows that coverage of Islam and Muslims takes a new trajectory regarding their representation by which the NYT departs from a monolithic representation towards a fragmented perception. It stays away from the previous themes that have been constantly projected about Islam and Muslims in the western media and provides a more diverse picture. As such, it showed Islam to have two versions, moderate and extremist, and portrayed Muslims based on these two versions. A myriad of diverse themes are manifested and projected in relation to the different versions and camps of Islam and Muslims. From another perspective, the NYT utilizes the essentialization strategy to affiliate extremism to all Islamic movements operating in the domain of politics. It lumps all of them together, portraying them as a threat without concern as to whether they seek political means or use violence to achieve their goals. No distinction is made among these movements in regard to whether they are traditional, modern, violent or peaceful. In adopting this strategy, it thus becomes unclear where moderate Islam ends and where extremism or fundamentalism begins. This dichotomy of Islam and Muslims camps and the essentialization of political Islam are revealed in the light of a multi-disciplinary approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in which a textual analysis and a critical linguistic approach are adopted

Lion metaphors in Chinese and English

This study intends to explore the cultural similarities and differences between the lion metaphors in Mandarin Chinese and British English. Most previous studies on animal metaphors focussed on the expressions with human beings as the target domain by collecting data either from questionnaires or dictionaries based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. This study, however, focusses on the expressions with non-humans as the target domains and is based on data collected from authoritative corpora. Three hundred and ninety-seven metaphorical expressions in Mandarin Chinese were identified from the Modern Chinese Corpus compiled by the Centre for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University (CCL Corpus) and 241 metaphorical expressions in British English were identified from the British National Corpus (BNC). After analysing the expressions from the perspective of the source domain and the target domain, the results show that first, the metaphorical expressions in Mandarin Chinese are mainly projected from the lion’s appearance to non-humans, but those in British English are mainly projected from the lion’s characteristics to non-humans. Second, the expressions are mainly mapped onto seven target domains in each language; four are the same. In addition, the dominant evaluation of the seven target domains in each language is mostly neutral. Third, ten conceptual metaphors were generalised from Mandarin Chinese and one from British English. All of these indicate the occurrence of cultural similarities as well as differences in the lion metaphors in the two languages

Representation of English front vowels by Malay-English bilinguals

This paper presents the results of a study conducted to investigate the representation of English vowels among Malay-English bilingual speakers. The study focused on five front vowels of English. There is a tense-lax contrast in high- and mid-vowels in English (Davenport and Hannahs, 2005; Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams, 2003), but this contrast does not exist anywhere in Malay (Nik Safiah et al., 2008). Thus, a forced choice identification task is constructed with PRAAT (Boersma and Weenick, 2009). Stimuli for the experiment were synthesized using the AT&T text-to-speech demo programme available from AT&T Labs. The values of the first and second formants of the vowels were checked to make sure that they were within the range given in the literature. Fifty-two Malay-English bilingual undergraduates participated in this study. The results showed that Malay-English bilinguals have only three categories of contrast for the front vowels. These results show that the vowel representation of the second language in Malay-English bilinguals is similar to the representation of vowels in the first language