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Proficiency Levels (proficiency + level)
Selected AbstractsAn Investigation of Reading Strategies Applied by American Learners of Chinese as a Foreign LanguageFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 4 2008Li-Chun Lee-Thompson Assistant ProfessorArticle first published online: 19 MAR 200 Abstract: Minimal research has been conducted in reading Chinese as a second/ foreign language (CSI/CFL). In an effort to further the understanding of the reading process, this study, utilizing think aloud and retelling procedures, focuses on the identification of strategies that American university students applied to read Chinese texts (narrative and argumentative), and the difficulties encountered when processing texts for meaning. Also it examines whether Bernhardt's constructivist model can account for the reading process of the CFL learners at the intermediate proficiency level. The results show that the CFL readers employed bottom-up and top-down processing strategies, that their difficulties were pertinent to vocabulary, orthography, grammar, and background knowledge, and that Bernhardt's reading model could account for the reading process of CFL learners with minor modification. [source] Toward Responsive Beginning Language CurriculaFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 2 2001Larbi Oukada An initial phase, the general education phase, would be comprised predominantly of nonmajors who enroll in beginning language courses with the premeditated purpose of satisfying a language requirement or investing on their own a modest amount of credit hours to explore or study a second language. A subsequent phase, the professional phase, would begin with courses intended for prospective majors and minors who are customarily predisposed to commit enough time to reach the necessary proficiency level required for their professional goal. This curricular distinction serves to underscore the particular situation and the particular mission of the general education phase and to propose a particular curricular model, the Indiana Model. This model provides, within the current and autonomous structure of the American educational system, a mechanism for selecting, prioritizing, and structuring the most responsive objectives for general-education foreign language teaching. [source] Second Language Acquisition of Gender Agreement in Explicit and Implicit Training Conditions: An Event-Related Potential StudyLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2010Kara Morgan-Short This study employed an artificial language learning paradigm together with a combined behavioral/event-related potential (ERP) approach to examine the neurocognition of the processing of gender agreement, an aspect of inflectional morphology that is problematic in adult second language (L2) learning. Subjects learned to speak and comprehend an artificial language under either explicit (classroomlike) or implicit (immersionlike) training conditions. In each group, both noun-article and noun-adjective gender agreement processing were examined behaviorally and with ERPs at both low and higher levels of proficiency. Results showed that the two groups learned the language to similar levels of proficiency but showed somewhat different ERP patterns. At low proficiency, both types of agreement violations (adjective, article) yielded N400s, but only for the group with implicit training. Additionally, noun-adjective agreement elicited a late N400 in the explicit group at low proficiency. At higher levels of proficiency, noun-adjective agreement violations elicited N400s for both the explicit and implicit groups, whereas noun-article agreement violations elicited P600s for both groups. The results suggest that interactions among linguistic structure, proficiency level, and type of training need to be considered when examining the development of aspects of inflectional morphology in L2 acquisition. [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] Causatives and Transitivity in L2 EnglishLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 1 2001Silvina 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] Influence of proficiency level and constraints on viewpoint switching: a study in web designAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 1 2009Aline Chevalier Web design is a complex problem in which designers have to consider the user's and the client's viewpoints to make satisfactory websites. Designers, particularly proficient ones, tend to privilege to the client's viewpoint to the detriment of the users' one. Consequently, websites often contain many usability violations and do not fit users' cognitive capacities, hence hampering navigation. The usability quality of websites may be proportional to designers' ability to switch between the client's and the user's viewpoints, which in turn may be influenced by designers' proficiency level. To explore the role of viewpoint switching in web design, performance was compared across three conditions emphasizing either the client's viewpoint, that of the user, or none of them in order to promote or hamper viewpoint switching. This manipulation had a significant effect on proficient designers' performance. Moreover, a significant relation between viewpoint switching and the usability quality of e-mock-ups was found. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] English language proficiency and smoking prevalence among California's Asian Americans,CANCER, Issue S12 2005Hao Tang M.D., Ph.D. Abstract The authors documented California's tobacco control initiatives for Asian Americans and the current tobacco use status among Asian subgroups and provide a discussion of the challenges ahead. The California Tobacco Control Program has employed a comprehensive approach to decrease tobacco use in Asian Americans, including ethnic-specific media campaigns, culturally competent interventions, and technical assistance and training networks. Surveillance of tobacco use among Asian Americans and the interpretation of the results have always been a challenge. Data from the 2001 The California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) were analyzed to provide smoking prevalence estimates for all Asian Americans and Asian-American subgroups, including Korean, Filipino, Japanese, South Asian, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Current smoking prevalence was analyzed by gender and by English proficiency level. Cigarette smoking prevalence among Asian males in general was almost three times of that among Asian females. Korean and Vietnamese males had higher cigarette smoking prevalence rates than males in other subgroups. Although Asian females in general had low smoking prevalence rates, significant differences were found among Asian subgroups, from 1.1% (Vietnamese) to 12.7% (Japanese). Asian men who had high English proficiency were less likely to be smokers than men with lower English proficiency. Asian women with high English proficiency were more likely to be smokers than women with lower English proficiency. Smoking prevalence rates among Asian Americans in California differed significantly on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and English proficiency. English proficiency seemed to have the effect of reducing smoking prevalence rates among Asian males but had just the opposite effect among Asian females. Cancer 2005. © 2005 American Cancer Society. [source] Psychometric Properties of IRT Proficiency EstimatesEDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT: ISSUES AND PRACTICE, Issue 3 2010Michael J. Kolen Psychometric properties of item response theory proficiency estimates are considered in this paper. Proficiency estimators based on summed scores and pattern scores include non-Bayes maximum likelihood and test characteristic curve estimators and Bayesian estimators. The psychometric properties investigated include reliability, conditional standard errors of measurement, and score distributions. Four real-data examples include (a) effects of choice of estimator on score distributions and percent proficient, (b) effects of the prior distribution on score distributions and percent proficient, (c) effects of test length on score distributions and percent proficient, and (d) effects of proficiency estimator on growth-related statistics for a vertical scale. The examples illustrate that the choice of estimator influences score distributions and the assignment of examinee to proficiency levels. In particular, for the examples studied, the choice of Bayes versus non-Bayes estimators had a more serious practical effect than the choice of summed versus pattern scoring. [source] Impact of the Proficiency Scale and the Oral Proficiency Interview on the Foreign Language Program at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language CenterFOREIGN LANGUAGE ANNALS, Issue 4 2003Martha Herzog PhD Both are closely related to actual language tasks identified as critical for government employees. Over time, the scale has been expanded to include four skills, a system of levels, and the testing needs of numerous organizations. At the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC), analyses of the proficiency levels into afunctional trisection consisting of task, content, and accuracy have fostered use of the OPI and ILR scale in teaching as well as testing. The article begins with a backgound discussion of the OPI and the ILR scale, then focuses on the trisection and its implications for instruction. [source] Two Mandarin readers in Taiwan: characteristics of children with higher and lower reading proficiency levelsJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 2 2005Jia-ling Charlene Yau This study investigated how two readers of Mandarin with differing reading-proficiency skills interacted with a narrative passage, as well as what knowledge they brought to and made use of while reading the text. The perspectives of reading comprehension, transactional theory and social-cognitive models of reading served as this study's theoretical framework. Two Sixth-Grade participants were selected for inclusion through snowball sampling. The data in this study were obtained from interviews and think-alouds. Qualitative analysis indicated that the skilled Mandarin reader's stance moved along the efferent/aesthetic continuum, while the less-skilled Mandarin reader's was mainly efferent. The skilled reader employed strategies of inferencing, summarisation and synthesis during and after reading, while the less-skilled reader applied bridging inferences, paraphrasing and repetition. The findings of this study corroborate previous findings that proficient readers employ more sophisticated approaches to reading than less-proficient readers. [source] Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 2 2005Devyani Sharma Research on indigenized non-native varieties of English has aimed to distinguish these varieties from individual second language learning in structural and social terms (B. Kachru 1983; Platt, Weber and Ho 1984; Cheshire 1991),; however, quantitative evidence of this divergence remains scarce. Through an analysis of a range of Indian English speakers in a contact situation in the United States, this study distinguishes developing dialect features from second language learning features and explores the concomitant emergence of dialect consciousness. First, an implicational analysis shows that some non-standard variables (past marking, copula use, agreement) exhibit a second language learning cline while others (articles) form a more stable, incipient non-standard system shared to some extent by all speakers; a multivariate analysis suggests that both sets of variables are governed by proficiency levels. Next, the explanatory scope of proficiency is assessed by examining the use of selected phonological variants (rhoticity, l -velarization, aspiration). The use of these features resembles native-like style-shifting, as it appears to be more sensitive to speakers' attitudinal stances than to proficiency levels. This points to the importance of understanding emerging speaker awareness and perceptions of stigma, risk, and value in new varieties of English. [source] The Role of Task-Induced Involvement and Learner Proficiency in L2 Vocabulary AcquisitionLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue 2 2008YouJin Kim Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) proposed a motivational-cognitive construct of task-induced involvement to account for variation in effectiveness among different vocabulary learning tasks. Building upon their original research, this study consisted of two experiments investigating the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary learning. Experiment 1 compared the performance of 64 adult English as a second language (ESL) learners from a range of countries at two different proficiency levels (i.e., matriculated undergraduate students vs. students in an Intensive English Program) to ascertain the effectiveness of three vocabulary tasks with different levels of task-induced involvement. Experiment 2 investigated whether two tasks hypothesized to represent the same level of task-induced involvement would result in equivalent initial learning and retention of target words by 20 adult ESL learners at two different levels of proficiency. The results of Experiment 1 showed that a higher level of learner involvement during the task promoted more effective initial vocabulary learning and better retention of the new words. The findings of Experiment 2 indicated that when different tasks had the same involvement load, they resulted in similar amounts of initial vocabulary learning and retention of new words. The results of the two experiments are discussed in light of the involvement load hypothesis. [source] Patterns of Development in Spanish L2 Pragmatic Acquisition: An Analysis of Novice Learners' Production of DirectivesMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 4 2006LYNN PEARSON This article investigates from an acquisitional approach the development of pragmatic competence by novice learners of second language (L2) Spanish. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of various strategies (e.g., head acts, use of softeners, formality marking, and hearer-oriented directives) to realize Spanish directives. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data detected patterns in the learners' directive production. The analysis considered factors such as instruction, L2 grammatical competence, and the influence of the first language (L1) to illustrate the patterns of development of L2 pragmatics at lower proficiency levels. The results show (a) verb forms with increased morphological complexity replaced lower level directive strategies, possibly as a result of the expansion of L2 grammatical competence; (b) pragmatic competence seems to precede grammatical competence; and (c) the L1 pragmatic system appears to play a role in interpreting and processing new L2 data for use in production. [source] The Use of Reception Strategies by Learners of French as a Foreign LanguageMODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 3 2006THOMAS S. C. FARRELL Listening in a second or foreign language is a very demanding task because it involves both correctly interpreting incoming speech and responding appropriately to the speaker. This qualitative classroom-based investigation describes the types and frequency of reception strategies used by learners at three different proficiency levels in French while engaged in a two-way information-gap task. Results indicate that the learners used various strategies in order to achieve understanding while interacting with one another. These strategies were used either to obtain new information from interlocutors, to confirm information, or to repair comprehension problems. The results also suggest that learners at all proficiency levels were able to use these strategies when needed and evidently without prior training in strategy use. [source] Language-dependent memory in bilingual learningAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 8 2006Viorica Marian Spanish-English bilinguals were taught academic-type information about History, Biology, Chemistry and Mythology in their two languages. Upon testing, it was found that memory was more accurate and retrieval was faster when the language of retrieval and the language of encoding matched than when they did not match. For accuracy, the pattern of results was influenced by bilinguals' language proficiency, so that only balanced bilinguals whose high proficiency levels were similar in both languages showed language-dependent recall. For reaction time, bilinguals were faster to retrieve information when the languages of retrieval and encoding matched than when they mismatched, but only for material encoded in Spanish. The influence of encoding and retrieval languages on error patterns was also examined. Together, the study's findings suggest that bilingual learning may be subject to language dependency and that experience with a language may increase the strength of linguistic cues in producing language-dependent memory. The results are consistent with previous findings of language-dependent memory in autobiographical narratives, carry applied implications for bilingual education, and are discussed within the theoretical framework of the relationship between language and memory. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | |||||||||||||