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Selected AbstractsProcessing English Compounds in the First and Second Language: The Influence of the Middle MorphemeLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2010Victoria A. Murphy Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g.,,rat-eater,not,rats-eater) while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g.,,mice-eater) (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has been considered insufficient to explain this dissociation between regular and irregular plurals in compounds because naturally occurring compounds in English rarely have plurals of any type included within them (e.g., Gordon, 1985). However, the constraint on the production of plural inflection in English compounds could be derived from the patterns in which regular plural and possessive morphemes occur in the input. To explore this idea, native adult English speakers and adult Chinese learners of English were asked to process a series of compounds containing different medial morphemes and phonemes. Comparisons were made across compounds with regular and irregular plurals and possessive [-s]. Native speakers (NS) of English processed compounds with medial possessive morphology faster than compounds with medial regular plural morphology. The second language learners did not show the same pattern as the NSs, which could be due to the fact that they had considerably less exposure to the relevant input patterns relative to the NSs. Regular plurals may be excluded before a rightmost noun in English because the pattern "Noun,[-s] morpheme,Noun" is more frequently used for marking possession in English. Irregular plurals do not end in the [-s] morpheme and therefore do not "compete" with the possessive marker and, consequently, may be optionally included in compounds. It is possible, therefore, that the input English learners receive could indeed be sufficient to constrain this aspect of English compound production. [source] A Comparison of the Attitudes of Learners, Instructors, and Native French Speakers About the Pronunciation of French: An Exploratory StudyFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 3 2007Isabelle Drewelow The stereotype has it that native French Speakers are annoyed by foreign Speakers' errors in pronunciation. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess beliefs about the importance of accurate pronunciation in French held by three afferent groups: (1) 73 second- and third-semester students of French at a large midwestern research university in the United States, (2) 16 nonnative-speaker instructors of French at the same institution, and (3) 24 native Speakers of French living in France. In a fall Semester, each of the three groups received near mirror-image versions of a questionnaire, ranging from 33 items (for the learners) to 29 items (for the instructors) to 26 items (for the native French Speakers) in true/false format. Acknowledging that attitudes toward foreign accents might be language- and nationality-specific, all questions pertained to Americans speaking French. Percentages were calculated, and corresponding questions on all three questionnaires were grouped according to theme, then compared and cross-referenced with participants' backgrounds. Generally, this study revealed a gap between the attitudes of hypothetical native Speakers, promoted in teaching on the one hand, and the attitudes professed by real native Speakers on the other hand. The results of this study discredit the myth that native French Speakers have a low tolerance for an American accent in French. Instructors, and nonnative Speaker instructors specifically, need to project more realistic goals and refrain from misinforming their students that a perfect native-like pronunciation is vital to successful communication with native Speakers. [source] The Use of Generalizability (G) Theory in the Testing of Linguistic MinoritiesEDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT: ISSUES AND PRACTICE, Issue 1 2006Flores, Guillermo Solano We contend that generalizability (G) theory allows the design of psychometric approaches to testing English-language learners (ELLs) that are consistent with current thinking in linguistics. We used G theory to estimate the amount of measurement error due to code (language or dialect). Fourth- and fifth-grade ELLs, native speakers of Haitian-Creole from two speech communities, were given the same set of mathematics items in the standard English and standard Haitian-Creole dialects (Sample 1) or in the standard and local dialects of Haitian-Creole (Samples 2 and 3). The largest measurement error observed was produced by the interaction of student, item, and code. Our results indicate that the reliability and dependability of ELL achievement measures is affected by two facts that operate in combination: Each test item poses a unique set of linguistic challenges and each student has a unique set of linguistic strengths and weaknesses. This sensitivity to language appears to take place at the level of dialect. Also, students from different speech communities within the same broad linguistic group may differ considerably in the number of items needed to obtain dependable measures of their academic achievement. Whether students are tested in English or in their first language, dialect variation needs to be considered if language as a source of measurement error is to be effectively addressed. [source] The Combined Effects of Immersion and Instruction on Second Language PronunciationFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 3 2010Gillian Lord Abstract: This preliminary study investigates the acquisition of second language phonology with respect to two variables: immersion in a target language community, and explicit instruction in the form of a phonetics/pronunciation class. Specifically, the research examines the second language acquisition (SLA) of specific properties of the Spanish phonology system as achieved by native speakers of English participating in a summer program in Mexico, some of whom had previously taken a Spanish phonetics course. Results suggest that it is not one factor or another in isolation that is most beneficial, but rather the combination of the two. The findings are analyzed not only in terms of how the SLA of sound systems develops, but also with respect to pedagogical, curricular, and administrative implications. [source] Short-Term Study Abroad: Predicting Changes in Oral SkillsFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 3 2010Rob A. Martinsen Abstract: Increasing numbers of students are opting for study abroad programs of 2 months or less while research on study abroad generally focuses on semester- or year-long programs. This study quantitatively examines changes in students' spoken Spanish after 6 weeks in Argentina using native speaker ratings of student speech. The researcher then uses self-report measures to determine which of the following variables predict improvements in speaking, pre-program motivation and intercultural sensitivity, relationship with the host family, and interaction with native speakers. Results suggest that short-term programs can benefit language skills, as the majority of students in this program demonstrated small yet highly significant improvements in spoken Spanish even though a percentage of students showed a decrease in their skills. Surprisingly, only pre-program levels of cultural sensitivity predicted students' improvements in language skills, providing further evidence of the importance of culture in language learning. [source] The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2008Gabriela Vokic Abstract: In this pilot study, the speech of 12 adult native speakers of English with intermediate to intermediate-high proficiency in Spanish as a second language (L2) was analyzed to determine whether L2 learners rely on distributional information in the process of L2 speech learning and if so, if similar or dissimilar distributional patterns of sounds are more easily acquired. The parameter for (dis)similarity was set around the notion of structural position in combination with native language (L1) and L2 phonemic inventories. The results show that the subjects were consistently more successful in producing the phonemes with overlapping distributional patterns in L1 and L2 than phonemes whose distribution differed in L1 and L2 as well as novel L2 contrasts. [source] An fMRI study of canonical and noncanonical word order in GermanHUMAN BRAIN MAPPING, Issue 10 2007Jörg Bahlmann Abstract Understanding a complex sentence requires the processing of information at different (e.g., phonological, semantic, and syntactic) levels, the intermediate storage of this information and the unification of this information to compute the meaning of the sentence information. The present investigation homed in on two aspects of sentence processing: working memory and reanalysis. Event-related functional MRI was used in 12 healthy native speakers of German, while they read sentences. Half of the sentences had unambiguous initial noun-phrases (masculine nominative, masculine accusative) and thus signaled subject-first (canonical) or object-first (noncanonical) sentences. Noncanonical unambiguous sentences were supposed to entail greater demand on working memory, because of their more complex syntactic structure. The other half of the sentences had case-ambiguous initial noun-phrases (feminine gender). Only the second unambiguous noun-phrase (eighth position in the sentences) revealed, whether a canonical or noncanonical word order was present. Based on previous data it was hypothesized that ambiguous noncanonical sentences required a recomputation of the sentence, as subjects would initially commit to a subject first reading. In the respective contrasts two main areas of brain activation were observed. Unambiguous noncanonical sentences elicited more activation in left inferior frontal cortex relative unambiguous canonical sentences. This was interpreted in conjunction with the greater demands on working memory in the former condition. For noncanonical ambiguous relative to canonical ambiguous sentences, an activation of the left supramarginal gyrus was revealed, which was interpreted as a reflection of the reanalysis-requirements induced by this condition. Hum Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] What Are We Talking About?HYPATIA, Issue 4 2005Politics of Social Kinds, The Semantics Theorists analyzing the concepts of race and gender disagree over whether the terms refer to natural kinds, social kinds, or nothing at all. The question arises: what do we mean by the terms? It is usually assumed that ordinary intuitions of native speakers are definitive. However, I argue that contemporary semantic externalism can usefully combine with insights from Foucauldian genealogy to challenge mainstream methods of analysis and lend credibility to social constructionist projects. [source] Multicompetence and L2 users' associative links: being unlike nativelikeINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2010Alla Zareva The study set out to examine the effects of multicompetence on proficient L2 users' associative links. Three groups of 36 participants each were recruited , NSs of English, NSs of Bulgarian, and proficient Bulgarian L2 users of English , who completed a familiarity and word association test. The findings revealed that L2 users' natural drive to main connectivity of their lexicons was the motivation for their building lexicosemantic connectedness , which, however, was unlike the patterns of connectivity maintained by the native speakers of both their languages. This showed that, as a result of their developing multicompetence, the L2 users were unlike nativelike in that they developed their lexicosemantic associative links favoring diversity over communality and language-neutral idiosyncrasy over L1 or L2 nativelikeness. [source] Bilingual lexical development: a Persian,Swedish word association studyINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2004Shidrokh Namei Previous word association studies show that the first language (L1) mental lexicon is organized mainly on a semantic basis, while the organization of the second language (L2) mental lexicon in the early stages of development is phonologically based, indicating a less profound lexical knowledge. This study examines whether or not this is the case by comparing 100 Persian,Swedish bilingual subjects with 100 native speakers of Swedish and Persian. The elicitation instrument was the Kent-Rosanoff association list (1910), and the subjects' task was to give a single-word response to each stimulus word. The results show that phonologically-based associations occur in both the L1 and the L2 as a function of the degree of word knowledge. Phonologically-based organization is a primary acquisition feature of every individual word, and it is not abandoned even during the advanced stages of language proficiency, whether in the L1 or the L2. It was found that words that are barely known may elicit phonologically-based associations, those that are partially known may have a strong syntactic organization, and well-known words are connected to other words mainly on a semantic basis. [source] On the framing of one kind of indefinite referring expression: learning challenges and pedagogical implicationsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2002Asha Tickoo The paper shows that two key principles of communication (the Shared Knowledge Principle and the Economy Principle), which monitor the framing of all well-formed referring expressions, are manifest in a specialized mode in the framing of focal specific indefinite referring expressions. It is suggested that the special features associated with this type of reference pose a challenge for a group of advanced learners whose L1 is Cantonese. The strategies that these learners adopt in framing this category of indefinite referring expressions are examined and compared to those customarily used by educated native speakers. Pedagogical implications are explored. [source] Test-based accountability: Potential benefits and pitfalls of science assessment with student diversityJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 1 2010Randall D. Penfield Abstract Recent test-based accountability policy in the U.S. has involved annually assessing all students in core subjects and holding schools accountable for adequate progress of all students by implementing sanctions when adequate progress is not met. Despite its potential benefits, basing educational policy on assessments developed for a student population of White, middle- and upper-class, and native speakers of English opens the door for numerous pitfalls when the assessments are applied to minority populations including students of color, low SES, and learning English as a new language. There exists a paradox; while minority students are a primary intended beneficiary of the test-based accountability policy, the assessments used in the policy have been shown to have many shortcomings when applied to these students. This article weighs the benefits and pitfalls that test-based accountability brings for minority students. Resolutions to the pitfalls are discussed, and areas for future research are recommended. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 6,24, 2010 [source] Katakana representation of English loanwords: Mora conservation and variable learner strategiesJOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2004Dennis R. Preston In Japanese, English CVC monosyllables usually show consonant gemination after obligatory vowel epenthesis (e.g. ,put' becomes ,putto'). The katakana syllabary, which is a good reflection of pronunciation, allows us to study very quickly how a number of native speakers and learners at various levels handle novel loanwords. We show that, while learners do not geminate at as high a rate as native speakers do, they improve over years of study. More interestingly, learners use another strategy, namely vowel lengthening (e.g. ,puuto'), to represent these items, a compensatory strategy, we believe, related to their perception of the proper number of morae to be rendered in the output. We show how Broselow and Park's (1995) account of mora conservation will not handle the complexity of these data, particularly learner performance in the gemination of unstressed syllables, and we provide a variable account rather than one which suggests that parameters are set to a native speaker, learner, or mixed setting. Additionally, we show the surprising influence of gender in some areas of learner performance, a reflex, we believe, of the type of male students more typically registered in Japanese language classes at the university level. [source] Is the Acquisition Order of Grammatical Morphemes Impervious to L1 Knowledge?LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 4 2009Articles, Evidence From the Acquisition of Plural - s, Possessive 's In SLA, it has been often assumed that the effect of the first language (L1) is not very strong in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes (e.g., Ellis, 1994; Mitchell & Myles, 2004). However, such an assumption has not been systematically examined in the literature. This article reviews the morpheme studies conducted with native speakers of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Spanish to test the effect of the L1 in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. The review reveals that although Spanish L1 learners' acquisition order generally conforms to the "so-called" natural order (Krashen, 1977), native speakers of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mostly acquire plural ,s,and articles later than, and possessive,'s,earlier than, is predicted by the natural order. This indicates that learners can acquire a grammatical morpheme later or earlier than predicted by the natural order, depending on the presence or absence of the equivalent category in their L1. This suggests that L1 transfer is much stronger than is portrayed in many SLA textbooks and that the role of L1 in morpheme acquisition must be reconsidered. [source] Age of Onset and Nativelikeness in a Second Language: Listener Perception Versus Linguistic ScrutinyLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2009Niclas Abrahamsson The incidence of nativelikeness in adult second language acquisition is a controversial issue in SLA research. Although some researchers claim that any learner, regardless of age of acquisition, can attain nativelike levels of second language (L2) proficiency, others hold that attainment of nativelike proficiency is, in principle, impossible. The discussion has traditionally been framed within the paradigm of a critical period for language acquisition and guided by the question of whether SLA is constrained by the maturation of the brain. The work presented in this article can be positioned among those studies that have focused exclusively on the apparent counterexamples to the critical period. We report on a large-scale study of Spanish/Swedish bilinguals (n,=,195) with differing ages of onset of acquisition (<1,47 years), all of whom identify themselves as potentially nativelike in their L2. Listening sessions with native-speaker judges showed that only a small minority of those bilinguals who had started their L2 acquisition after age 12, but a majority of those with an age of onset below this age, were actually perceived as native speakers of Swedish. However, when a subset (n,=,41) of those participants who did pass for native speakers was scrutinized in linguistic detail with a battery of 10 highly complex, cognitively demanding tasks and detailed measurements of linguistic performance, representation, and processing, none of the late learners performed within the native-speaker range; in fact, the results revealed also that only a few of the early learners exhibited actual nativelike competence and behavior on all measures of L2 proficiency that were employed. Our primary interpretation of the results is that nativelike ultimate attainment of a second language is, in principle, never attained by adult learners and, furthermore, is much less common among child learners than has previously been assumed. [source] Input and SLA: Adults' Sensitivity to Different Sorts of Cues to French GenderLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005Susanne E. Carroll All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language acquisition (SLA) input. Pattern detection, a mainstay of current connectionist modeling of language learning, presupposes a sensitivity to particular properties of the signal. Learning abstract grammatical knowledge from the signal presupposes, as well, the capacity to map phonetic properties of the signal onto properties of another type (segments and syllables, morpheme categories, and so on). Thus, even seemingly "simple" grammatical phenomena may embody complex structural knowledge and be instantiated by a plethora of diverse cues. Moreover, cues have no a priori status; a phenomenon of a given sort takes on a value as a cue when acquisition of the grammatical system reveals it to be useful. My study deals with initial sensitivity to cues to gender attribution in French. Andersen (1984) asked: "What's gender good for anyway?" One answer comes from a number of studies, done mostly in the last 20 years, of gender processing by both monolingual and bilingual speakers (among many others, Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996; Bates & Liu, 1997; Friederici & Jacobsen, 1990; Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillemon, & Besson, 1994; Guillemon & Grosjean, 2001; Taft & Meunier, 1998). These studies provide evidence that in monolinguals and early (but not late) L2 learners, prenominal morphosyntactic exponents of gender prime noun activation and speed up noun recognition. Over the same period, a growing number of studies detailing the course of L2 gender acquisition for a variety of different target languages and learner types (e.g., Bartning, 2000; Chini, 1995; Dewaele & Véronique, 2000; Granfeldt, 2003; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004) have provided support for the hypothesis that developmental paths differ for early and later learners of gender. Yet despite its obvious importance to SLA theorizing, few studies have dealt directly with adult learners' ability to detect and analyze potential cues to gender at the initial stage of exposure to the L2 (and this despite considerable discussion in recent years of the nature of the "initial state" of L2 learning). The study reported on in this article, which was actually conducted in the late 1980s, was an attempt to shed some light on what the beginning learner can do with the gender attribution problem. This study was, at that time, and is even now, an anomaly; most research dealing with "input" provided descriptions of what people say to learners, not what learners can perceive and represent. Indeed, most studies that shed light on the initial analytical capacities of absolute beginners were concerned with "perceptual" learning, that is, with the acquisition of phonetic or phonological distinctions (e.g., Broselow, Hurtig, & Ringen's [1987] study of tone learning or various studies on the perception of the /r/ vs. /l/ phonemes in American English by Japanese speakers). In this update, it is therefore worth mentioning Rast's (2003) dissertation and Rast and Dommergues (2003), which is based on it, which examined the results of the first 8 hr of instructed learning of Polish by francophone adults. My study asked if anglophone adults, with little or no prior exposure to French, given auditory stimuli, were equally sensitive to phonological, morphosyntactic, or semantic cues to French gender classes. The issue of what learners can detect in the signal and encode is an empirical one. I presented 88 adult English speakers with highly patterned data in list form, namely, auditory sequences of [Det + N]French + translation equivalentEnglish forms. The patterns, all true generalizations, were drawn from linguistic descriptions of French. These cues are believed by grammarians of the language to be "psychologically real" to native speakers. I then measured in 3 different ways what my participants had acquired. Given the extreme limitations on the input (no visual supports to identify referents of names), the participants performed pretty well. Moreover, they proved to be highly sensitive to "natural" semantic and morphological patterns and could generalize accurately from learned instances to novel exemplars. These patterns, however, are not directly instantiated in the speech signal; they are abstractions imposed on the stimuli by human linguistic cognition. Moreover, although it would be inaccurate to describe the learning patterns as "transfer"(because English nouns have no gender feature), prior knowledge seemed to be implicated in the results. Above all, these Anglophones appear to perceive the gender learning problem as a semantic one and to make use of "top-down" information in solving it. It follows that the pattern detection that they can do when listening to speech is clearly biased by what they already know. These results, therefore, provide support for hypotheses that the initial state is to be defined in terms of the transfer of first language (L1) grammatical knowledge and/or the transfer of L1-based processing procedures. [source] Avoidance of Phrasal Verbs: The Case of Chinese Learners of EnglishLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2004Yan Liao This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests (multiple-choice, translation, or recall), which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that 3 factors (proficiency level, phrasal- verb type, and test type) affect learners' avoidance of phrasal verbs. The authors speculate that the differences between first and second languages and the semantic difficulty of phrasal verbs may be reasons for the learners' avoidance. Incorporating the findings of 3 previous studies, this study claims that learners' phrasal-verb avoidance behavior is a manifestation of interlanguage development. [source] Exact Repetition as Input Enhancement in Second Language AcquisitionLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 3 2003Eva Dam Jensen This study reports on two experiments on input enhancement used to support learners' selection of focus of attention in second language listening material. Eighty-four upper intermediate learners of Spanish took part. The input consisted of video recordings of quasi-spontaneous dialogues between native speakers, in tests and treatment. Exact repetition and speech rate reduction were examined for their effect on comprehension, acquisition of decoding strategies, and linguistic features. Each of three groups listened to each utterance of the dialogue three times, in different speed combinations: fast-slow-fast, fast-slow-slow, fast-fast-fast, respectively. A fourth group served as a baseline and received no treatment. Comparisons of pretest and posttest scores showed significant effects for all three parameters. No difference with regard to effect could be established between treatment conditions. [source] The Role of Diminutives in the Acquisition of Russian Gender: Can Elements of Child-Directed Speech Aid in Learning Morphology?LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2001Vera Kempe Diminutives are a pervasive feature of child-directed speech (CDS) in Russian. Their frequent use might be beneficial for gender acquisition because it eliminates nontransparent morphophonological marking. To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns, with half of the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on the nondiminutive base forms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. Learners were then tested on various types of novel nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated better learning of noun gender, and better generalization to novel forms, indicating that regularization of gender marking through diminutives promotes the extraction of morphophonological regularities. [source] Bilingual Education in Flanders: Policy and Press Debate (1999,2006)MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2010KATRIEN BOLLEN Although Belgium is officially trilingual (Dutch, French, and German), its legislation does not allow for bilingual education (BE). Recently, concerns about the position of Dutch in the face of French and immigrant languages have politicized the issue in the bilingual capital of Brussels and the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders. Considering Belgium's linguistic and educational policies, the authors analyze the media coverage of BE in Flanders by looking at the region's major newspapers for the pivotal period 1999,2006. Their content-analytical approach reveals a fairly positive bias toward BE. Yet, Flemish newspapers also reflect a tendency described by Brisk (2005): the tension between the promotion of BE for the majority (i.e., native speakers of Dutch and French) and its rejection for minorities (i.e., immigrants). Nevertheless, the fear of "frenchification" remains prominent in articles on majority-language BE. The study therefore sheds light on the complexities of the BE public debate in Flanders and on current political developments in the field. [source] Toward Mastering the Discourses of Reasoning: Use of Grammatical Metaphor at Advanced Levels of Foreign Language AcquisitionMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 2 2010MARIANNA RYSHINA, PANKOVA Situated within the framework of the systemic,functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that linguistic variation in style impacting communicative effectiveness of written texts created by learners representing different levels of FL acquisition can be partly captured by means of grammatical metaphor, as a phenomenon of,transcategorization, whereby processes (typically realized by verbs), attributes (typically realized by adjectives), or whole propositions (typically realized by sentences) are encoded as nouns. Based on a study conducted on 55 book reviews written by advanced American learners of German and 30 texts written by native speakers in the same genre, the article identifies various types of grammatical metaphors or approximations toward it as characteristic of various acquisition levels. It also demonstrates the role and functions of grammatical metaphor in enhancing the ability of writers to construct a logical argument or a persuasive evaluation. Comparisons to the use of grammatical metaphor in the texts produced by native writers of German show it to be a prominent feature of adult language use in literate and academic contexts, by native or nonnative language users. [source] Applying Conceptual Grammar to Advanced-Level Language Teaching: The Case of Two Completive Constructions in KoreanMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 2 2006SUSAN STRAUSS This article introduces conceptual grammar as an approach to the analysis and teaching of grammar in foreign and second language contexts through a combination of paradigms: corpus, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. Although the approach is applicable to virtually any language and any construction within that language at various levels of study, we provide a detailed demonstration using Korean as a model. In particular, we focus on constructions expressing the completive aspect. The Korean system of marking aspect can be quite complex; what renders the Korean completive even more perplexing is the fact that it is expressed through two seemingly similar auxiliary forms, each of which signals different elements in the speaker's or writer's stance vis-à-vis the described event. By combining the paradigms of corpus, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics, the article demonstrates how a conceptual grammatical approach can render salient the particular discursive and conceptual patterns underlying the target forms. It is designed as a pedagogical tool to guide users to discern both inductively and deductively how native speakers conceptualize these differences and express them morphosyntactically,a perspective that is absent from most existing reference grammars and textbooks. In this article, we present samples of pedagogical materials developed using this model in addition to results of an experiment in which a version of those materials was administered to teachers and students of advanced Korean. [source] Word Searches in NNS,NS Interaction: Opportunities for Language Learning?MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 4 2003Catherine E. Brouwer A substantial portion of second language acquisition research focuses on interactional practices in which nonnative speakers (NNSs) engage. From various theoretical viewpoints, it is assumed that certain types of interactional practices, specifically those in which participants focus on linguistic form, may promote language learning. The question of whether, and under which conditions, such sequences can be seen as providing the NNS with language learning opportunities, is considered in a purely data-driven way, applying conversation analysis (CA) as a method. The article considers one specific type of interactional practice, "word search" sequences, and opportunities for language learning that they may provide for NNSs on the basis of naturally occurring interactions between native speakers of Danish and Dutch speakers of Danish. It is argued that in order to distinguish between "language learning opportunities" and other types of interactional practices, the researcher needs to analyze the data in detail. [source] Cultural Identification and Second Language Pronunciation of Americans in NorwayMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 2 2002Karen Lybeck Schumann's Acculturation Theory as presented in The Pidginization Process: A Model for Second Language Acquisition (1978) predicts that the degree of a learner's success in second language (L2) acquisition depends upon the learner's degree of acculturation. Attempts to test this theory have not been particularly fruitful due to the lack of an adequate measure of acculturation and the particular linguistic markers selected to measure success in L2 acquisition. This study proposes to measure sojourners' acculturation in terms of their social exchange networks (Milroy & Wei, 1995). It measures L2 success in terms of pronunciation, which in the view of many scholars (Guiora, Beit,Hallahmi, Brannon, Dull, & Scovel, 1972; Labov, 1972; Scovel, 1988) is the strongest linguistic marker of a speaker's cultural identification. Using this framework, the current study provides strong evidence in support of Schumann's Acculturation Theory. The acculturation experiences and L2 pronunciation of 9 American women residing in Norway are described and the relationship examined. It is concluded that learners who developed positive network connections with native speakers of Norwegian evidenced more native,like pronunciation than those who had greater difficulty establishing such relationships. [source] | |||||||||||||