REDESIGNING THE COURSE OF MORPHOSYNTAX FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDENTS

Morphosyntax is inseparable from the aspect of applied linguistics. The theory of morphological processes such as affixation, word order, and rewriting rules are unconsciously employed by English teachers to develop students’ reading and writing skills. However, the understanding that Morphosyntax entails to English proficiency is not widely known by some English teachers, since the terminology of Morphosyntax tends to be associated to diachronic linguistics research. It affects to the perception that the course of Morphosyntax is designed to be more linguistics, although the students are the English language education ones. Whereas, the needs of English language education students revolve more on vocabulary mastering and sentence pattern to support their English proficiency skills. This paper proposes the course-redesigning products of Morphosyntax based on Corder’s concept of lexical and skill-based syllabus design. The elements of Morphosyntax courseredesigning discussed in this paper consists of the basic competencies, materials, references, course description, concept map, course objectives, competencies and achievement indicators, timeline, assessment, and teaching strategies

The influence of distraction on speech processing: How selective is selective attention?

-* indicates shared first authorship - The present study investigated the effects of selective attention on the processing of morphosyntactic errors in unattended parts of speech. Two groups of German native (L1) speakers participated in the present study. Participants listened to sentences in which irregular verbs were manipulated in three different conditions (correct, incorrect but attested ablaut pattern, incorrect and crosslinguistically unattested ablaut pattern). In order to track fast dynamic neural reactions to the stimuli, electroencephalography was used. After each sentence, participants in Experiment 1 performed a semantic judgement task, which deliberately distracted the participants from the syntactic manipulations and directed their attention to the semantic content of the sentence. In Experiment 2, participants carried out a syntactic judgement task, which put their attention on the critical stimuli. The use of two different attentional tasks allowed for investigating the impact of selective attention on speech processing and whether morphosyntactic processing steps are performed automatically. In Experiment 2, the incorrect attested condition elicited a larger N400 component compared to the correct condition, whereas in Experiment 1 no differences between conditions were found. These results suggest that the processing of morphosyntactic violations in irregular verbs is not entirely automatic but seems to be strongly affected by selective attention

Presenting complex ideas using simple syntax in fiction for low-literate immigrant adults

Manuscript based on this conference presentation Vainikka, A. and M. Young-Scholten. 2012. Presenting complex ideas using simple syntax in fiction for low-literate immigrant adults. Presentation a the Second Language Research Forum, Pittsburgh. October. </p

Literacy in the development of L2 morphosyntax.

Pre-publication version of: Vainikka, A., M. Young-Scholten, C. Ijuin and S. Jarad. 2017 Literacy in the development of L2 morphosyntax. Proceedings of the 12th LESLLA symposium, Granada.</p