Adult Learners Of English Research Articles

The Acquisition Problem of English Present Perfect to Korean Adult Learners of English: L1 Transfer matters

The Acquisition Problem of English Present Perfect to Korean Adult Learners of English: L1 Transfer matters

Listening Comprehension: Explicit Training on Listening Strategies in Beginning L2 Learners.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the performance scores on a standardized proficiency exam after two months of explicit training on listening comprehension strategies. Two groups of adult learners of English as a foreign language (24 students in total) took part in this study. In the first part of the experiment the 24 participants of this study were subjected to a mock test to obtain their scores. In the second part of the experiment the experimental group (14 individuals in total) received two months (15 classes) of explicit training on listening comprehension strategies. The control group (10 individuals in total) did not have any explicit training on listening comprehension strategies. As expected, participants in the experimental group obtained different scores in the listening comprehension tasks of the proficiency exam after two months of explicit training. The study shows that explicit instructions and additional hours of specific training in the classroom can have a direct influence on students’ performance. The results corroborate the beliefs of Hedge (2007), Vandergrift (2004), Ur (1996) and Mendelsohn (1995), who believe that explicit training in listening strategies can be the key for beginning L2 students’ success in listening comprehension tasks.

Students’ Written Production Error Analysis in the EFL Classroom Teaching: A Study of Adult English Learners Errors

Students’ Written Production Error Analysis in the EFL Classroom Teaching: A Study of Adult English Learners Errors

Engaging Adult Learners of English Using Collaboration and Negotiation

<p class="2M-body">This work stems from the author’s experience as a teacher-researcher handling Intensive English for Foreign Graduate Students from several Southeast Asian countries, in line with the program of the University of the Philippines at Los Baños to enrich their reading and vocabulary skills.</p><p class="2M-body">This reports the teaching-learning practices which help learners to cope with their reading and vocabulary difficulties. Survey and interview encourage adult learners to take active part in planning targets based on identified needs. For these adult learners of English to be responsive and receptive, a thorough needs analysis is required to adopt an appropriate teaching-learning design. Contrary to a common practice of using a predetermined content and conduct of lessons provided by commercially available texts, this particular procedure encourages a contextualized and integrated approach and focuses on scaffolding and empowering of learners through a more dynamic and looser organization of subject matter. Collaboration and negotiation empower learners, making learning fulfilling and liberating; thus, the teacher acts as an effective facilitator of a learning process and not a mere lecturer/proctor who delivers a predetermined learning package.</p><p class="2M-body">The experience highlights the need for teachers to become active, flexible, and engaged action researchers to upgrade the quality of teaching and learning. No educator should settle doing the same routine (lessons, activities, exercises, approaches) considering the ever-changing role of English language in the globalized world. In short, an action research keeps the teacher on track as s/he remains faithful to the ultimate aim of English language teaching: that is, to produce autonomous and empowered individuals who can communicate effectively, solve problems strategically, and think/analyze critically.</p>

Faculty Perspectives and Needs in Supporting Adult English Learners: Linking Measurement to Practice

Results from a survey of 227 adult English learner (EL) faculty in community and technical colleges in the United States reveal a clear desire to better serve adult ELs, but a lack of resources specifically designed to do so. Faculty want and need more resources to support the teaching and learning process, in the form of thoughtful assessments, materials, and an underlying evidence base that can guide and improve educational opportunities for adults learning English. Findings also reveal that information about student background knowledge and skills, which research deems essential to effective instruction, is not always accessible to faculty. Even with measurement tools that do exist, faculty express low to moderate satisfaction, leading to limited insight into students' reading, writing, speaking, listening, and college and career readiness skills on a granular, teachable level. Implications that inform practice with adult ELs and further research, development, and policy are discussed.

‘Here, without English, you are dead’: ideologies of language and discourses of neoliberalism in adult English language learning

ABSTRACTIdeologies of language (and language learning) – in concert with discourses of individualism and meritocracy that characterize neoliberalism – shape pedagogical policies and practices in ways that are consequential for multilingual students all over the developing and developed world. To investigate how such intersections and influences work in adult language teaching/learning settings, this paper critically examines written documents produced by an adult ESL programme, comments made by some of the teachers, and the everyday talk of advanced students in the programme. Understanding neoliberalism as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ [Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3], I examine ‘the local political economy of linguistic and cultural resources’ [Heller, M. 2003. “Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 473–492, 476] in an adult ESL programme. Findings show that texts and talk alike limit the identities (and trajectories) that are imagined for adult refugee learners of English. In some cases, even well-intended and seemingly ‘neutral’ descriptions of pedagogical goals and priorities might become a subtle but powerful way to further the neoliberal agenda of preparing workers for minimum-wage, entry-level employment across sectors of the economy.

An Investigation of the Problems Jordanian EFL Learners Encounter in Presupposition Triggered by Certain Factive Verbs

This study aimed at investigating the problems that Jordanian EFL learners encounter in presupposition triggered by certain factive verbs. Specifically, it sought to find out whether there is a relationship between the subjects’ proficiency level in English and their correct recognition of presupposition triggered by certain factive verbs. It also aims at identifying which factive verbs are much more difficult than others in terms of the presupposed meaning. The subjects of the study were 70 adult learners of English at the University of Jordan. They belong to two different proficiency levels: Intermediate and Advanced. A special test was prepared to elicit the data needed for investigation. The test required the subjects to circle the best choice that presupposes a given sentence. The results showed that the Advanced Group outperformed the Intermediate Group on all the target factive verbs, and the factive verb “ be aware of ” proved to be the most difficult one followed by “forget”. The importance of this study lies in that it invistigates the semantic behaviour of some verbs in English language what contributes to understanding the general semantic system of the language, and this is the main tast of linguists. The study recommended that further investigation should be made in the area of presupposition and factive verbs in order to pinpoint the sources of difficulty for learners. The results of those investigations can be used to improve EFL learning and teaching in Jordan.

The Challenge of Teaching English to Adult Learners in Today's World

In close connection to the fact that, during the past few decades, globalization has grown significantly, more and more adults of different nationalities seek the help of English instructors because they want to find employment abroad, to communicate more effectively at work, to resort to overseas travels, or just to enjoy various types of social situations. In any of these cases, the English learners are highly motivated to study this particular subject. However, those who teach adults must be aware of the differences between the teaching – learning patterns specific to adults, on the one hand, and those that generally function with children, on the other. The paper will discuss the cognitive, attitudinal, behavioural and methodological characteristics presented by the adult learners of English in today's world, taking into account both theoretical and research data. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to arrive at conclusions that are relevant for the English teachers involved in the process of preparing adults for the different situations which require a good knowledge of this foreign language.

Conceptual deviance as a cause of fossilization in performance of Korean advanced learners of English

Despite considerable controversy over the definition and interpretation of fossilization in the literature of SLA, fossilization has been considered one of the most difficult yet interesting topics (Long 2003). Yet, rarely have studies been conducted to investigate fossilization found in the English performance of Korean learners of English. The present study explores fossilization in the performance of advanced Korean adult learners of English. The current study revisited the errors found in Korean English textbooks by Suk and Lee (2001), analyzed nine more textbooks newly introduced since 2009 by the Korean government, and discovered that many errors were robustly ascribable to conceptual differences between lexemes of English and Korean. Not only does this finding support the Mixed Representational System of de Groot (1993) or but also the Selective Fossilization Hypothesis of Han (2009). Based on these findings, the present study proposes Conceptual Incongruity Misusage Hypothesis to predict which English lexemes Korean learners are likely to misuse.

"Impressing Heaven": Creative Non-fiction as Reflective Practice in Foreign Language Teaching and Cross Cultural Study

Impressing Heaven” is the title of my collection of short stories about career decisions and experience interacting in English on the part of actual young adult learners of English as a foreign language in South Korea. (See Impressing Heaven by Barbara Waldern, July 2012 Smashwords ISBN: 9781476467023). While I was first settling in Korea, I got acquainted with a few students and other young adults who liked to talk with and assist English speaking foreigners. They made such a strong impression that I remembered them and thought about our conversations over the years. I ended up writing about them, imagining their real life situations as they had confided in me, or envisioned how their lives would proceed thereafter. I interwove their narrations with my narration of my experience with them to put myself in the shoes of others. This collection thereby serves as a journalistic reflection of some of my first encounters with such students of English as well as a preservation of memories. Given the artistic approach to this work, it is not standard social science although it is a useful exploratory activity, and can be used as one tool of reflective practice in educating, understanding, or relating to a particular cultural group as an outsider. I conclude that this form of creatively written journal keeping serves reflective practice and could contribute to sound methodological and anthropological study as an additional tool of ethnographic research and pedagogical research.

초급 상 수준을 위한 스토리텔링 중심의 영어 말하기 교수 전략

Abstract This study suggests one of English teaching methods to improve English speaking proficiency for adultEnglish learners. Contrary to the traditional English conversation teaching trends such as memorization of specificpatterns or grammar-focused practices, the study introduces a storytelling based teaching of English speaking. To theoretically support the storytelling based English speaking teaching, the study investigates the possibility of the teaching method in three ways. First, the 12 speaking strategies focusing on contents of a story are introduced in the way of securing speech amounts as much as possible. Next, the five rhetoric components by Aristotle are introduced to relate to the storytelling teaching for the purpose of achieving the goal of speaking, which is to deliverwhat a speaker want to say more persuasively. Finally, through the investigation of the learner strategy uses, the possibility of storytelling English speaking teaching can be expected regardless of learners’ low level of English proficiency.

An Analysis of Written Errors of Korean Adult Learners of English

The objective of this study is to identify the common morphological, lexical, syntactic errors committed by Korean university students of English...

THE EFFECTS OF CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK ON INSTRUCTED L2 SPEECH PERCEPTION

To what extent do second language (L2) learners benefit from instruction that includes corrective feedback (CF) on L2 speech perception? This article addresses this question by reporting the results of a classroom-based experimental study conducted with 32 young adult Korean learners of English. An instruction-only group and an instruction + CF group were exposed to five 1-hr form-focused lessons that drew learners’ attention to the nonnative phonemic contrast /i/-/ɪ/, but only the instruction + CF group was given relevant feedback. Forced-choice identification tasks were completed by participants in a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. The two groups showed similar accuracy on the pretest; however, the instruction + CF group outperformed the instruction-only group on the immediate and delayed posttests as well as on unfamiliar words. The significant predictors for these differences turned out to be perceptual accuracy vis-à-vis /ɪ/-natural and /ɪ/-synthesized sounds. These findings are discussed in terms of the pivotal role played by CF in developing accuracy in L2 speech perception.

Do you hear itnow? A native advantage for sarcasm processing

Context and prosody are the main cues native-English speakers rely on to detect and interpret sarcastic irony within spoken discourse. The importance of each type of cue for detecting sarcasm has not been fully investigated in native speakers and has not been examined at all in adult English learners. Here, we compare the extent to which native-English speakers and Arabic-speaking English learners rely on contextual and prosodic cues to identify sarcasm in spoken English, situating these findings within current cross-linguistic effects literature. We show Arabic speakers utilize the cues to a different extent than native speakers: they tend not to utilize prosodic information, focusing on contextual semantic information. These results help clarify the relative weight of contextual and prosodic cues in native-English speakers and support theories that suggest that prosody and emotion could transfer separately in second language learning such that one could transfer while the other does not.

English e-learning in the virtual classroom and the factors that influence ESL (English as a Second Language): Taiwanese citizens’ acceptance and use of the Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment

Currently, the speed of knowledge innovation is accelerating with the prevalence of online learning, which penetrates the limits of both time and space. To date, studies examining English e-learning websites have rarely been conducted from the point of view of both the technology acceptance model (TAM) and information technology. In this research, we use the TAM as our basic theory to research the use of English e-learning websites. We find that (1) most English learners think that using the Internet to learn English is more convenient than using traditional methods; and (2) that most adult English learners think that using the Internet to learn English is more helpful than using traditional methods.

The Effect of English Verbal Songs on Connected Speech Aspects of Adult English Learners’ Speech Production

The present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of English verbal songs on connected speech aspects of adult English learners’ speech production. 40 participants were selected based on the results of their performance in a piloted and validated version of NELSON test given to 60 intermediate English learners in a language institute in Tehran. Then they were equally distributed in two control and experimental groups and received a validated pretest of reading aloud and speaking in English. Afterward, the treatment was performed in 18 sessions by singing preselected songs culled based on some criteria such as popularity, familiarity, amount, and speed of speech delivery, etc. In the end, the posttests of reading aloud and speaking in English were administered. The results revealed that the treatment had statistically positive effects on the connected speech aspects of English learners’ speech production at statistical .05 level of significance. Meanwhile, the results represented that there was not any significant difference between the experimental group’s mean scores on the posttests of reading aloud and speaking. It was thus concluded that providing the EFL learners with English verbal songs could positively affect connected speech aspects of both modes of speech production, reading aloud and speaking. The Findings of this study have pedagogical implications for language teachers to be more aware and knowledgeable of the benefits of verbal songs to promote speech production of language learners in terms of naturalness and fluency. Keywords: English Verbal Songs, Connected Speech, Speech Production, Reading Aloud, Speaking

Following Roba: What happens when a low-educated adult immigrant learns to read

This longitudinal study follows concurrent changes in a multilingual adult English learner's mastery of alphabetic print literacy and his oral learner language. The learner was 29 years old, and began to read and write an alphabetic script for the first time in English, his seventh language, during this study. Systematic observations were made of both his development of specific literacy skills and specific structures in his oral English over the course of six months during one-to-one literacy tutoring sessions with the first author; these occurred one to two times each week. Mixed methods were used for collection of data, including learner observations, oral language tasks, interviews and review of relevant documents. Results document the learner's development of a set of specific literacy skills during the six-month study. Findings include: knowing the names of the letters of the alphabet seemed unrelated to his decoding ability; some syntactic elements of his oral production became more complex with in...

An Empirical Analysis of English Learning Process and Impact Factors of Open Distance Education

With the whole process of English learning as a research perspective, the relationship among adult English learners’ social situation, motivation, learning strategies and learning effects based on self-determined motivation theory and language learning strategy theory is explored in the study. The findings are obtained through empirical analysis, and the teaching feedback, through which some suggestions are put forward, including constructing autonomy-supportive social situation in order to improve the effect of distance English teaching, improving learning motivation by solving the practical problem, perfecting the corresponding teaching strategies and realizing the learning effectiveness [1].

Learning / Teaching EFL to Adult Learners at Language Courses

The article presents the definition of a concept of an adult learner and provides the tips for teaching EFL to adults. The current paper aims at examining the needs, experiences and expectations of adult learners of English at the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences as well as suggesting some ways of overcoming the challenges teachers face. The data of the current research is taken from the survey of adult learners doing an English course at LEU. The main motivating factors, the most difficult and the most important communication skills, the most difficult language aspects and the most useful teaching methods were identified.

Teacher repair in a second language class for low-literate adults

This paper complicates the practice of teacher repair in the second language (L2) classroom by specifically focusing on the subset of adult English learners who have a background of low literacy. Using Conversation Analysis, this study explores the interactional means locally available for the low-literate learners to deal with teacher repair in the activity of vocabulary introduction. The analysis shows that the organization of teacher repair is oriented to the learners’ state of literacy, which for the teacher holds priority over what the literature has found as repair strategies sui generis either inside or outside the L2 classroom. The teacher profitably tailors her (para)linguistic input for the learners to perceive and react to her repair, and this rule-governed turn construction helps them identify the pedagogical intent of each turn. These findings will enrich the discussion of whether our existing knowledge of L2 repair can be extended to all learners.