Purported use and self-awareness of cognitive and metacognitive foreign language reading strategies in tertiary education in Mozambique

This paper explores the results of a Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS)-based questionnaire administered to 28 university student participants. The study is carried out in a post-colonial multilingual context, Mozambique. The main aims of the paper are to assess the degree of purported use and awareness of participants own use of reading comprehension skills and strategies in a foreign language (English). The participants were tested for their reading text comprehension using an IELTS comprehension test (Cabinda, 2013). The results revealed low reading comprehension levels. Results contrast with results from the SORS-based questionnaire (Cabinda, 2013) which revealed claims of use of a wide range of cognitive, metacognitive and supply strategies – aspects of high level reading ability and text comprehension. Conclusions show that the participants used or claimed to chiefly use metacognitive and cognitive reading strategies equally, matching the behaviour of good readers, but they also reported a high degree of supply strategies to construe meaning from text, mainly code-switching, translation and cognates. The latter confirms results from studies by Jimenez et al. (1995, 1996) and Zhang & Wu (2009), yet do not conclusively show a correlation between the participants’ degree of text comprehension and their effective use of reading skills and strategies to construe meaning. Further conclusions show that the reported high use of these L1 (Portuguese or other) related supply strategies (not used by English L1 readers) does not aid their reading comprehension

Listening & Speaking, Reading & Writing: Improving Four English Language Skills through the Eclectic Approach of International Educators in Japan

This paper elaborates on the language teaching experiences of four international educators working in Japan. With diverse nationalities and backgrounds, and as language learners themselves, these professionals’ eclectic approach is the result of many years of teaching within a multilingual and multicultural environment. It is argued that alternative forms of teaching might influence student’s motivation towards speaking, listening, reading and writing in an L2 (second/foreign language). In addition, the authors provide a few suggestions of activities that might contribute to successful outcomes in the English language education in Japan, which presently strives for communicative language teaching practices.研究ノー

MAINTAINING VERNACULARS TO PROMOTE PEACE AND TOLERANCEIN MULTILINGUAL COMMUNITY IN INDONESIA

Indonesia is a large nation in terms of ethnics, cultures, and vernaculars. Indonesian constitution guarantees that the cultures, vernaculars will be taken care of by the government. Thiss in line with the UNESCO recommendation, to preserve vernaculars as the world culturalheritage. The most important thing is that preserving vernaculars will promote peace andsolidarity in multilingual community. In reality, speakers of many vernaculars in Indonesia aregetting less and less. Sneddon states that this is caused by lingua franca and language shift (2003:203). Areas of higher linguistic diversity like Indonesia always need means of interethniccommunication, i.e. lingua franca. People shift to lingua franca may cause vernacular speakersdecline rapidly, which may cause language decay. The teaching of vernaculars only at the passiveevel, not emphasizing writing and reading will fasten the language decay.Vernaculars will bepreserved if they are respected, used, and inherited to the following generation. Friberg (2011)ates that languages that can be maintained are the ones written and can be read. We should notonly use our national language, but also our vernaculars in order to maintain our regionalanguages. And as people of multilingual community, it is better if we are multilingual. It should beborne in mind that vernaculars reflect local cultures, local values, local identity. The exposure toregional languages will make people familiar with the languages. And as a result, the people willbe familiar with their own cultural values and other people‘s cultural values. Komorowska (2010)aims that understanding others‘ languages will promote understanding and communicationbetween citizens. And this will lead to peace process, to deeper knowledge of other communitiesand their cultures, and in consequence to promote tolerance

How speaker tongue and name source language affect the automatic recognition of spoken names

In this paper the automatic recognition of person names and geographical names uttered by native and non-native speakers is examined in an experimental set-up. The major aim was to raise our understanding of how well and under which circumstances previously proposed methods of multilingual pronunciation modeling and multilingual acoustic modeling contribute to a better name recognition in a cross-lingual context. To come to a meaningful interpretation of results we have categorized each language according to the amount of exposure a native speaker is expected to have had to this language. After having interpreted our results we have also tried to find an answer to the question of how much further improvement one might be able to attain with a more advanced pronunciation modeling technique which we plan to develop

Editorial: Language Acquisition in Diverse Linguistic, Social and Cognitive Circumstances

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