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L2 Learners (l2 + learner)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

The Role of Structural Position in L2 Phonological Acquisition: Evidence from English Learners of Spanish as L2

FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2008
Gabriela 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]

Linearity in rhetorical organisation: a comparative cross-cultural analysis of newstext from the People's Republic of China and Australia

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2000
Guy RamsayArticle first published online: 3 APR 200
Second or foreign language teachers would be familiar with student comments such as, "I can't follow what they're saying!", "What are they getting at?", or "What's their point?", particularly when reading L2 texts of considerable length. This paper seeks to address the issues premised by such comments made by L2 learners of Modern Standard Chinese, within the rubric of contrastive rhetoric studies. Such studies to date have produced equivocal evidence of variation in rhetorical organisation across culturo-linguistic groups. In order to contribute to this continuing debate, this study employs the Rhetorical Structure Theory analytic framework to produce pictorial representations of lengthy Chinese and Australian news journal text. Results obtained clearly demonstrate the feasibility of using the RST framework in this kind of analysis. While the small size of the newstext corpus severely limits the generality of other findings, they give tentative support to the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis. Pedagogical implications include the benefits of promoting awareness of such cross-cultural variation within the L2 classroom. [source]

Influence of First Language Orthographic Experience on Second Language Decoding and Word Learning

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2008
Megumi Hamada
This study examined the influence of first language (L1) orthographic experiences on decoding and semantic information retention of new words in a second language (L2). Hypotheses were that congruity in L1 and L2 orthographic experiences determines L2 decoding efficiency, which, in turn, affects semantic information encoding and retention. College-level English L2 learners with typologically similar (Korean) and dissimilar (Chinese) L1 backgrounds were participants. Their decoding efficiency was measured by a pseudoword naming task with phonologically regular and irregular conditions. They learned the meaning of the pseudowords paired with pictures. Subsequent recall tasks showed that the Korean group had better overall retention but greater impairment with the irregular pseudowords. These findings suggest that L1 orthographic distance influences L2 word learning processes. [source]

Self-qualification in L2 Japanese: An Interface of Pragmatic, Grammatical, and Discourse Competences

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 3 2007
Naomi Geyer
In Japanese, self-qualification, or a qualifying segment of talk that reduces the force of the speaker's own utterances, is frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as demo, kedo, and ga. This study explores the relationship between the grammatical and pragmatic competence of Japanese L2 learners by examining their use of such self-qualification in a corpus of oral proficiency interviews. It demonstrates that successful self-qualification is achieved not only by the placement of appropriate connective expressions but also through effective use of foregrounding and/or backgrounding discourse mechanisms. The results indicate a close relationship between pragmatic, grammatical, and discourse competence in learner language. [source]

Input and SLA: Adults' Sensitivity to Different Sorts of Cues to French Gender

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005
Susanne 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]

Causatives and Transitivity in L2 English

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2001
Silvina Montrul
This study investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a Picture Judgment Task show that L2 learners do discover these properties, and that overall verbs appear to cluster in classes in their interlanguage grammars. However, the Turkish group, at a lower proficiency level than the Spanish one, accepted transitivity errors with unaccusative, unergative and non-alternating transitive verbs. Although some of the developmental trends observed could be attributed to L1 influence, lower-proficiency learners may start with a wider grammar, and therefore not differentiate lexico-syntactically among different verb classes. With higher proficiency, L2 learners eventually recover from overgeneralizations. [source]

Some Input on the Easy/Difficult Grammar Question: An Empirical Study

MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009
LAURA COLLINS
The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is possible to distinguish between "difficult" and "easy" constructions for second language (L2) learners by examining characteristics of the structures as they occur in aural input. In a multidimensional analysis of 3 English structures with different acquisition profiles,the simple past, possessive determiners,his/her, and the progressive aspect,we examined the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexicosemantic characteristics of the forms as they occurred in a 110,000-word corpus of instructional talk to L2 learners. We analyzed the type/token distributions of the forms, their lexical properties, and their perceptual salience. Our findings revealed key input factors that distinguished between the early-acquired progressive, on the one hand, and the later-acquired past and,his/her,determiners, on the other hand. These results lend support to theoretical accounts of the input,acquisition relationship and also generate hypotheses for manipulating instructional input to increase the salience of opaque constructions. [source]

Subject-Matter Content: How Does It Assist the Interactional and Linguistic Needs of Classroom Language Learners?

MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 1 2002
Teresa Pica
This study focused on the role of subject-matter content in second language (L2) learning. It sought to identify ways in which teachers modified classroom interaction about subject-matter content in order to assist the input, feedback, and production needs of L2 learners, and to promote their attention to developmentally difficult relationships of L2 form and meaning that they had not fully acquired. Data were collected from 6 preacademic English L2 classes whose content consisted of thematic units on film and literature. Each class was composed of 10,15 high intermediate English L2 students and their teachers. Analysis of the data focused on teacher-led discussions, because these were the predominant mode of interaction in each of the classes, and on form-meaning relationships encoded in noun and verb forms for purposes such as reference, retelling, argument, and speculation regarding film and literary content. Results of the study revealed numerous contexts in which the discussion interaction might have been modified for the kinds of input, feedback, or production that could draw students' attention to developmentally difficult form-meaning relationships. However, there were relatively few instances in which this actually occurred. Instead, the teachers and students tended to exchange multiutterance texts, the comprehensibility of which provided little basis for modified interaction and attention to form and meaning. [source]