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Target Language (target + language)
Selected AbstractsLiterary Texts and Grammar Instruction: Revisiting the Inductive PresentationFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 1 2005Article first published online: 31 DEC 200, Kate Paesani In this approach, which employs strategies from the teaching of grammar and the teaching of reading, literary texts serve as the basis of the inductive presentation of new grammatical forms and as a springboard for communicative practice of these forms after explicit instruction. The goal is to provide learners with meaning-bearing input to assist their acquisition of grammatical forms, to raise students' consciousness about the target language, to encourage meaningful communication among learners, and to develop skills and strategies in the reading of literary texts. The presentation of the proposed technique is followed by an example of teaching French relative pronouns based upon Prévert's (1949) poem "Le Message." [source] What Underlies Immersion Students' Production: The Case Of Avoir Besoin DeFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 3 2004Sharon Lapkin What they say offers insights into the students' beliefs about the target language they are learning and using, and reflects the cognitive processes they use to produce an utterance. In this paper, we analyze dialogues between pairs of eighth grade French immersion students about avoir besoin de. Our analysis provides insights that allow teachers to help students more accurately encode the meaning they wish to express. Teachers and researchers are also given an insiders view of how learners make use of what they already know to support their learning of an additional language. [source] Literary Texts and Grammar Instruction: Revisiting the Inductive PresentationFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 1 2004Article first published online: 31 DEC 200, Kate Paesani PhD In this approach, which employs strategies from the teaching of grammar and the teaching of reading, literary texts serve as the basis of the inductive presentation of new grammatical forms and as a springboard for communicative practice of these forms after explicit instruction. The goal is to provide learners with meaning-bearing input to assist their acquisition of grammatical forms, to raise students' consciousness about the target language, to encourage meaningful communication among learners, and to develop skills and strategies in the reading of literary texts. The presentation of the proposed technique is followed by an example of teaching French relative pronouns based upon Prévert's (1949) poem "Le Message." [source] How Foreign Language Teachers in Georgia Evaluate their Professional Preparation: A Call for ActionFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 1 2004Article first published online: 31 DEC 200, Thomas C. Cooper PhD The project involved conducting an online survey of 341 current foreign language teachers in Georgia in order to determine how these K-12 teachers perceived and evaluated the effectiveness of their professional preparation. Close to 60% of the teachers in the sample were graduates of colleges and universities in Georgia. Most of the others had received their training from various other colleges and universities in the United States, and 51 individuals reported that they had graduated from foreign institutions. The survey consisted of 42 questions asking teachers to evaluate their preparation in language skills, knowledge of foreign language standards, planningfor instruction, methodology, using technology in instruction, meeting the needs of socially and economically diverse students, classroom management skills, and professional growth. The survey results strongly suggest that foreign language teacher development programs should include (1) more time spent in carefully supervised and monitored prestudent-teaching field experiences; (2) more careful mentoring of student teachers during the student-teaching internship; (3) more time spent in language learning experiences in countries where the target language is spoken; (4) more emphasis on developing foreign language proficiency in the requisite university classes; and (5) more effort spent on teaching effective classroom management. [source] Teachers' Pedagogical Beliefs and the Standards for Foreign Language LearningFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 5 2002Article first published online: 9 SEP 2010, Linda Quinn Allen ABSTRACT: This study examined Midwestern foreign language teachers, (n = 613) responses to the Foreign Language Education Questionnaire (FLEQ) in order to determine the extent to which their beliefs are consistent with major constructs underlying the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century. Additionally, respondents rated their familiarity with the standards and provided background information that was used to identify factors that influence their beliefs. The purpose of this study was to provide direction for teacher education, in-service professional development, and future research. Analysis of the data suggests that the teachers believe that foreign language instruction should be delivered in the target language, available to all students, consonant with the "Weave of Curricular Elements," included in early elementary school curriculum, and within the coverage model. Generally, the teachers felt somewhat familiar with the standards. Factors that have an impact on their beliefs include urban versus rural location, membership in professional organizations, gender, percentage of teaching assignment in a foreign language, highest educational degree earned, and private versus public school. [source] Enhancing Learners' Communication Skills through Synchronous Electronic Interaction and Task-Based InstructionFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 1 2002Lina Lee ABSTRACT: Online interactive exchange offers the learner many opportunities to use the target language to negotiate both meaning and form in a social context that is crucial for second language acquisition. This paper discusses a pilot study using synchronous electronic chats combined with task-based instruction (TBI) to enhance learners' communication skills. TBI focuses on the two-way exchange of information on real-life topics. This pilot study shows that computer-mediated communication using less structure-controlled but more open-ended exchange had a significant impact on the process of language learning. Students benefited from online task-based activities because they had to access different functional skills to construct and negotiate meaning collaboratively. However, foreign language educators need to be aware that the quick cyberspace interactions impeded students from producing correct and coherent discourse, especially during learner-learner interaction. One corrective technique is to make students reexamine and revise their exchanges with guided instruction. [source] Electronic Mail in Foreign Language Writing: A Study of Grammatical and Lexical Accuracy, and Quantity of LanguageFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2000Manuela Gonzälez-Bueno The authors statistically analyzed the quality and quantity of discourse generated via the electronic and the traditional (i.e., paper-and-pencil) medium. The primary objective was to determine whether the use of electronic mail had any effect on grammatical accuracy, appropriate use of vocabulary, and language productivity. In addition, the participants completed a written survey at the end of the semester that elicited their opinions of the program's effectiveness. It was found that the electronic version of dialogue journals had a significantly positive effect on the amount of language generated by the students, and that it improved students' attitude towards learning and practicing the target language. However, the electronic version of dialogue journals did not seem to pose any significant advantage over the paper-and-pencil version with regard to lexical and grammatical accuracy. [source] Willingness to communicate: can online chat help?1INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2006Mark Freiermuth This study compared the experiences of small groups of female Japanese university students communicating in English to solve tasks using online chat with those who solved the same tasks in face-to-face settings using spoken language. The groups were compared using a counterbalanced research design so that the nine groups consisting of four participants each took part in solving tasks in both the online mode and the traditional face-to-face setting. Data gathered from questionnaires, along with an analysis of the discourse produced by students, led to the conclusion that under the conditions in the study, online chatting provided a more comfortable environment, enhancing students' willingness to communicate. Regarding benefits to the language teacher, online chat provides another fruitful tool to enhance interaction in the target language. [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] Teaching Language Categories and Learning About Language Categories from TeachingLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2010Sachiko Yamahashi Familiar category terms, such as ,noun', ,verb', and ,adjective', are usually used in language classes. However, the application of these labels in the target language is not necessarily intuitive. English learners of Japanese often have problems with: (i) ,deverbal nouns', problems that stem from the ,noun,verb' distinction, and (ii) ,adjectives', which are divided into two types unlike English ,adjectives'. This article builds on these examples toward an analysis of Japanese involving four categories defined by the intersection of the nominative case and tense markers. The moral is that a language could be learned more accurately and readily if categories were based on such salient distinctions in the target language. [source] Student and Instructor Beliefs and Attitudes about Target Language Use, First Language Use, and Anxiety: Report of a Questionnaire StudyMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2003Glenn S. Levine This article presents the results of an anonymous, Internet-based questionnaire study on target language (TL) and first language (L1) use in university-level foreign language (FL) classes. The participants were 600 FL students and 163 FL instructors. The goals of the study were to develop preliminary components of a descriptive model of TL and L1 use and explore the relationships between TL use and student anxiety about TL use. It was hypothesized that (a) amounts of TL use would vary according to constellation of interlocutors and communicative contexts, and (b) the amount of TL use overall would correlate positively with student anxiety about it. The results support the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis was not supported. Analysis of the data revealed a negative relationship between reported amounts of TL use and reported TL-use anxiety. Tenets are offered for maximizing TL use while at the same time granting to L1 pedagogically sound functions. [source] Reformulation and the Learning of French Pronominal Verbs in a Canadian French Immersion ContextMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 4 2002Sharon Lapkin In this article, we examine a subset of collaborative dialogues that occurred in a multistage task where 8 Canadian grade 7 French immersion students worked together in pairs. Each pair wrote a story, noticed differences between their text and a reformulator's revision of that text, and reflected on their noticing. We analyze the transcripts of their talk in these 3 task sessions, identifying and describing the language-related episodes. We trace the development of the target language (French), with specific reference to pronominal verbs, from the learners' first collaborative draft to their posttests. The study explores task differences and differences between lower- and higher-proficiency dyads. The language-related episodes selected for close analysis, along with the posttest data, provide evidence that in most cases, learners have progressed in their correct use of pronominal verbs in French. [source] Promoting Openness toward Culture Learning: Ethnographic Interviews for Students of SpanishMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002Blair E. Bateman Although learning to understand another culture is often mentioned as a benefit of foreign language learning, merely studying a foreign language does not automatically produce cross,cultural understanding. Many students study a language only to fulfill requirements and see culture learning as a nonessential element of the curriculum. This article explains how conducting ethnographic interviews can promote openness toward culture learning. Following a brief review of the culture learning process and of attitudinal theory, the article reports on a study that replicated Robinson,Stuart and Nocon's (1996) San Diego State study in a Midwestern setting. Thirty,five college students from 2 second,year Spanish classes were introduced to ethnographic interviewing skills and assigned to interview a native speaker of Spanish. As in the previous study, the results showed that the interviews positively affected students' attitudes toward the target language and its speakers as well as their desire to learn Spanish. [source] The Role of an Interactive Book Reading Program in the Development of Second Language Pragmatic CompetenceMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002Daejin Kim The development of pragmatic competence in another language is significant to second (L2) and foreign language (FL) learners' ability to communicate successfully in the target language. Although a great deal of research has focused on defining and comparing the content of pragmatic competence across culture groups, far less attention has been given to examining its development. Our study is a partial response to this gap. The purpose of the study was to investigate the connection between Korean children's participation in an interactive book reading program and their development of pragmatic competence in English. We found that their participation led to significant changes over a 4,month period in the mean number of words, utterances, and talk management features as measured by the changes in children's use of these during role play sessions. The findings suggest that participation in such reading programs provides opportunities for the development of at least some aspects of L2 pragmatic competence. [source] Research on Direct versus Translated Writing: Students' Strategies and Their ResultsMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 2 2001Andrew D. Cohen This study explored an alternative approach to short essay writing on language assessment tasks. Thirty-nine intermediate learners of French performed 2 essay writing tasks: writing directly in French as well as writing in the first language and then translating into French. Two-thirds of the students did better on the direct writing task across all rating scales; one-third, better on the translated task. While raters found no significant differences in the grammatical scales across the 2 types of writing, differences did emerge in the scales for expression, transitions, and clauses. Retrospective verbal report data from the students indicated that they were often thinking through English when writing in French, suggesting that the writing tasks were not necessarily distinct in nature. Since the study was intended to simulate writing situations that students encounter in typical classroom assessments, the findings suggest that direct writing in French as a target language may be the most effective choice for some learners when under time pressure. [source] Translation and Testing of the Cardiac Diet Self-Efficacy Scale for Use With Taiwanese Older AdultsPUBLIC HEALTH NURSING, Issue 5 2009Su-Hui Chen ABSTRACT Objectives: The purposes of this investigation were to translate the Cardiac Diet Self-Efficacy (CDSE) scale from English to Mandarin Chinese and to test the validity, reliability, and feasibility of the translated scale in a sample of Taiwanese older adults. Design and Sample: This study used a methodological design to translate the CDSE based on the Brislin's model: (1) translation from source language (SL) of English to the target language (TL) of Chinese, (2) evaluation of Chinese version, (3) blind back translation from Chinese to English, (4) comparison of original and back-translated English versions, and (5) evaluation of the translated scale by a committee of bilingual Taiwanese experts. The translated CDSE scale was tested with 156 community-dwelling Taiwanese older adults, and any problems occurring during the administration of the scale were documented. Results and Conclusions: The validity and reliability of the Chinese version of CDSE scale were acceptable. However, the validity of items may have been impacted by differences in culture, language, and educational levels between English-speaking and Chinese-speaking populations. These findings suggest the need for further methodological study to evaluate and refine translation tools to resolve differences in culture, language, and educational levels between SL and TL. [source] | ||||||||||