Consciousness-raising Approach Research Articles

Learning with a purpose: Acquisition of compliments and compliment responses by beginning learners of Spanish in synchronous online exchanges

This research examines the effect of explicit pragmatic instruction and student's perceptions of guided reflections on the acquisition of compliments and compliment responses (CRs) in beginning learners of Spanish. It adopts a pragmatic consciousness-raising approach and a four-step lesson plan for teaching compliments and CRs in the language classroom. Unlike many studies in interlanguage pragmatics conducted in classrooms or laboratory settings at the intermediate and advanced level, this study examines the acquisition and use (or lack thereof) of compliments and CR's though synchronous online face-to-face conversations of L2 learners with L1 speakers of Spanish. It analyzes change overtime with the same learners using a pretest-posttest design. A quantitative analysis indicated statistically significant differences in the production of compliments, yet no significant differences were observed in the production of CR's. The qualitative analysis of the guided reflections highlighted a need for more in-class practice with compliments and CR's. Students' responses suggest that reflections can help raise awareness of the use (or lack thereof) of these speech acts. This study contributes to L2 pragmatics and to our understanding of L2 acquisition developmental stages.

Critical Review on “Form-Focused Remedial Instruction: An Empirical Study” and “Acculturation to English by An Ethnic Minority: The Language Attitudes of Indian Adolescents in A Hong Kong International School”

This article abbreviatedly introduced the main idea of the research done by Chan and Li, which explored how effective the oral remedial instruction with the consciousness-raising method is. The research was completed with several control groups through pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test. Although the research confirmed that the consciousness-raising approach could benefit for second language learners to notice their morpho-syntactically well-defined errors, there exists some shortcomings which could be improved to enhance its objectiveness and comprehensiveness of it. Meanwhile, the former article was also compared with the research completed by Patri and Pennington, which explored various teaching methods through fundamental experiments, because they both utilized Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) in their exploration of second language acquisition and made control experiments and made the comparison to find out whether their differences are significantly relevant. The combination of basic language teaching theory and research with the utilization of statistical analysis software, the representativeness of the research methods with experiments, and the integrity of the procedures of the experiment and research made these two articles worthy of further analysis, discussion, and comparison. This paper analyzed the research with critical review in terms of both its advantages and disadvantages, and the data got with SPSS were also evaluated.

The Postminimal is Political: Social Activism in the Music of Julius Eastman and Ann Southam

The emergence of postminimalism around 1980 allowed composers to combine minimalist musical techniques with their own distinct compositional approaches. Some composers, including American Julius Eastman and Canadian Ann Southam, exercised a consciousness-raising approach to composition by infusing their postminimalist works with political messages relevant to the gay liberation and feminist movements of the late twentieth century. In the work Gay Guerrilla (1979), Eastman pursued an original compositional approach, which he called ‘organic music,’ to explore themes of heroism and courage in the work’s climax. These musical themes resonated with the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement in the United States, particularly the assassination of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Additionally, the repetitive processes of Southam's Glass Houses No. 5 (1981) constitute a highly organised compositional approach wherein the same music is constantly repeated in different contexts. These tight patterns referenced the contemporary genre of 'women's music' by physically resembling patient and cyclic work done by hand – work traditionally completed by women – and by critiquing this collective experience of ‘women’s work.’ By including these political associations in their art, Julius Eastman and Ann Southam created consciousness-raising critiques of contemporary trends of North American social activism.
 Content Note: This paper discusses violence against the queer and trans community, including an assassination, and also mentions two musical compositions which use a racial slur in their titles.

Teacher and learner perceptions of adult foreign language learners’ engagement with consciousness-raising tasks in four languages

At some UK universities, non-credit bearing courses for the general public are offered in a wide range of languages, often taught by hourly paid staff. Ensuring similar, high quality learning experiences and learning outcomes across languages can be a challenge. This study inquired into the viability and value of a consciousness-raising approach, i.e. whether teachers would be able and likely to implement it, and whether students would engage with such tasks and find them useful. The study included students and teachers engaged in the learning/teaching of Arabic, French, Italian, and Spanish. Following some input about Language Awareness pedagogic principles, and with some mentoring by the researchers, the teachers designed their own consciousness raising grammar tasks with accompanying communicative output opportunities and implemented them in their classes. To respond to our research questions, this paper draws on semi-structured interviews with teachers and students. The tasks, which combined a form and meaning focus, presented rich affordances for learner engagement with language and were enjoyed by the majority of students. The teachers struggled to correctly estimate task difficulty and time needed but felt that the approach had contributed to improving their teaching and that they were likely to use it in the future.

Teaching writing skills through genre: applying the genre-based approach in Iran

Developing effective argumentative and persuasive texts is a challenge for both native and non-native students of writing skills, where a lack of linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural awareness skills are major problems in effective written communication. International research results show that a Genre-Based Approach based in particular on Systemic Functional and Cognitive Linguistics allows students to take a significant leap towards controlling macro and micro-genre structures as well as language and that taking a consciousness-raising approach to genre seems to be a key contributing factor to better writing development. We report on the findings of two recent Iranian studies, one that implemented the Genre-Based Approach, and the other Mobile-Assisted Dynamic Assessment following mixed Product-Process methodology, as well as giving an overview of some recent research into the development of academic writing skills through genre teaching-learning in contrast to traditional approaches. Results show that, though traditional methodologies can have success, the Genre-Based Approach, with its focus on better genre characteristics identification along with improved teaching and learning methodology, combining elements of structure, language, rhetoric, and cultural contextualization, gives more rapid results, and leads to better and more confident writers, as well as better syllabus development.

Fossilized Use of Active and Passive Simple Present by Iraqi M.A. Students

Interlanguage fossilization is a crucial dilemma that foreign language learners may fall in. The problem of the present study is shown clearly in the answers of Iraqi students of Master of Arts in the College of Education for Women University of Baghdad. In spite of all the previous years of studying English language, some still have the problem of fossilized active and passive simple present tense. The present study aims at shedding light on the reasons behind the Iraqi students’ problem. An error analysis is applied to critically examine the students’ answers in their final course exam of two courses namely; pragmatics and discourse analysis. Depending on Selinker’s model (1972) of error analysis, students errors are all traced back to the language transfer of their native language. Among the results of analysis the researchers have arrived at a suitable solution for the current problem embodied by Sharwood’s Consciousness-Raising Approach (1981). It is recommended as a psycholinguistic model for defossilization. It is very suitable for mentally matured learners and help to solve the dilemma.

Fossilized Use of Active and Passive Simple Present by Iraqi M.A. Students

Interlanguage fossilization is a crucial dilemma that foreign language learners may fall in. The problem of the present study is shown clearly in the answers of Iraqi students of Master of Arts in the College of Education for Women University of Baghdad. In spite of all the previous years of studying English language, some still have the problem of fossilized active and passive simple present tense. The present study aims at shedding light on the reasons behind the Iraqi students’ problem. An error analysis is applied to critically examine the students’ answers in their final course exam of two courses namely; pragmatics and discourse analysis. Depending on Selinker’s model (1972) of error analysis, students errors are all traced back to the language transfer of their native language. Among the results of analysis the researchers have arrived at a suitable solution for the current problem embodied by Sharwood’s Consciousness-Raising Approach (1981). It is recommended as a psycholinguistic model for defossilization. It is very suitable for mentally matured learners and help to solve the dilemma.

Enhancing Thai Engineering Students’ Complaints and Apologies through Pragmatic Consciousness-Raising Approach (PCR)

Successful communication requires “Pragmatic Competence” or abilities to use appropriate language in transferring one’s needs while maintaining a positive relationship with the interactant (Thomas, 1995; Leech, 1983). This study was an attempt to investigate the pragmatic competence of Thai Engineering students when making complaints and apologies through twelve sessions of a pragmatic consciousness-raising approach (PCR). Perceptions toward the innovative teaching activities were also examined. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data from forty-five engineering students (n=45) at a university in Thailand. Pre-test and posttest written discourse completion tests (WDCTs) were administered and a semi-structured interview was conducted. Three native speaker raters scored the performances through WDCTs using assessment criteria from Hudson (2001) and Duan (2008). For data analysis, paired-samples t-test was employed to compare the mean scores of students, while the researcher employed a Grounded Theory’s color coding technique (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to generate the findings on students’ perceptions about the innovative methods implemented. The results revealed significant development of students’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic abilities in both complaints and apologies. Furthermore, participants perceived the PCR class to be beneficial in four areas: having more awareness of the impacts of social factors in language use, realizing the favor of indirect strategies, more understanding of nonverbal communication, and provision of motivating class atmosphere. However, some participants concerned about three aspects: inadequate confidence to use expressions learned in class in real communication, insufficient endeavor to develop grammar knowledge, and the test abilities of the roleplay test. The results confirm the teachability of pragmatic and the benefits of PCR in EFL contexts; whereas, students’ concern about learning through the approach might be helpful for further teaching practices.

Training undergraduate translators: a consciousness-raising approach

ABSTRACTThis paper describes a consciousness-raising approach to the teaching of second-year undergraduate students in two semester courses. The teacher first explains the translation techniques with sentence examples. The students are then encouraged to translate as many versions as possible so that they may have opportunities to consciously practice different translation techniques in the process of choosing the most suitable version for a given context. By the fourth week, students are given short paragraphs to translate so as to train their capability to take a larger context into consideration. Towards the middle of the semester, students start to identify a source text for a long project. Once the source text for the whole class has been selected, the students then begin to translate the text individually. They then meet their group members for a discussion before presenting their own section in front of the whole class. Finally, after every group has finished the presentation, the students submit their own final versions together with a reflective journal. It is evident that the students’ critical thinking, and their awareness of adopting translation techniques are strengthened by the repeated, explicit practice of the techniques and by the process of working on the long project.

Exploring Impacts of Consciousness-raising in a Genre-based Pedagogy

This study reports on the findings of a genre teaching course for developing academic writing of a class of EFL students in Iran. The information report genre was taught in a cyclical way of teaching and learning, which was started from ‘setting the context’ and ‘deconstruction’ of prototype information report genre, and continued with ‘joint construction’, ‘independent construction’, and finally ‘comparing’ with different academic genres. Results of the analysis revealed that the students have taken a significant leap towards controlling macro genre structures. Some progressions were also observed at micro language features such as lexical density and the frequency of embedded clauses. The findings of the analysis revealed that the consciousness-raising approach in genre teaching course might be a contributing factor for text development.

A Critical Review of Consciousness-Raising Approaches: Applied Linguistics vs. Systemic Functional Linguistics

<p class="2"><span lang="EN-AU">This paper is a critical review of the notion of consciousness-raising approach in the mainstream Applied Linguistics (AL) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It reviews the development of this approach from traditional grammarian perspectives to the recent developments in AL, and compares and contrasts this approach in AL with the notion of grammatical metaphor (GM) in SFL as a compatible resource for consciousness-raising. The paper concludes that SFL introduces new and developmental resources of consciousness at different times and spaces, which is subject to further linguistic investigations. It has also implications for the English language teaching and learning in EFL contexts. </span></p>

Consciousness-raising, Error Correction and Proofreading

The article sets out to explore the impact of developing a consciousness-raising approach in error correction at the sentence level in order to improve students’ proofreading ability at the level of text. Learners of English in a foreign language environment frequently fall into a reliance on translation as a composing tool and while this may act as a scaffold and provide some support with some utterances, it frequently leads to predictable and persistent errors. Such fossilization leads to on-going inaccuracies that detract from student composition and that require focused instruction and repeated practice in order to eradicate the errors. The current paper reports on an experiment in consciousness-raising about specific categories of errors with a group of 30 trainees teachers in Zayed University, Dubai during the spring semester 2014. Results on post-tests compared with scores on the pre test indicate a significant improvement in students’ performance as a result of focused instruction.

The Effects of Input Flood and Consciousness-Raising Approach on Collocation Knowledge Development of Language Learners

Many researchers stress the importance of lexical coherence and emphasize the need for teaching collocations at all levels of language proficiency. Thus, this study was conducted to measure the relative effectiveness of explicit (consciousness-raising approach) versus implicit (input flood) collocation instruction with regard to learners’ knowledge of both lexical and grammatical collocations. Ninety-five upper-intermediate learners, who were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups, served as the participants of this study. While one of the experimental groups was provided with input flood treatment, the other group received explicit collocation instruction. In contrast, the participants in the control group did not receive any instruction on learning collocations. The results of the study, which were collected through pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test, revealed that although both methods of teaching collocations proved effective, the explicit method of consciousness-raising approach was significantly superior to the implicit method of input flood treatment.

Advancing Social Justice in Urban Schools Through the Implementation of Transformative Groups for Youth of Color

The unique challenges faced by some youth of color living in high poverty contexts necessitate the creation of innovative, culturally relevant, group interventions. Framing the work of group counselors from a social justice perspective provides a structure for emphasizing the complex intersection of economic, political, and socio-historical issues facing some urban youth of color. The purpose of this article is to describe the transformative group approach for working with youth of color in under-resourced contexts. The implementation of 2 pilot groups using this critical consciousness-raising approach with 7th and 8th grade urban students of color will also be presented.

Consciousness-raising Activities in Some Lebanese English Language Classrooms: Teacher Perceptions and Learner Engagement

The article starts from the premise that approaches to the teaching of English can only be assessed in the particular settings where they may be used. Cultures of learning, teachers’ and students’ beliefs and prevailing material conditions will all have a bearing on how a particular approach is received. In the case study reported on here, four teachers implemented a consciousness-raising (CR)approach to grammar instruction with nearly 200 students in years 7, 8 and 9 of a Lebanese secondary school. The teachers’ and students’ reactions to the particular set of activities trialled were recorded in teacher diaries and reports and through interviews with the teachers and their coordinator, and discussions with the participating students. Both teachers and students felt generally positive towards the approach. The prevailing culture of learning, which encourages learner autonomy and an analytical approach to language, seems to have contributed. It was found, however, that in order to avoid discrepancies in the use of metalanguage and classifications and to allow insights from CR to be used in language production-for-practice, CR would need to be an integral part of the regular integrated skills syllabus.

A consciousness-raising approach to the teaching of conversational storytelling skills

Anecdotes and personal narratives are frequently heard in day-to-day human interaction, and it would, therefore, seem reasonable to conclude that the teaching of storytelling skill should feature as a component in second language conversation courses. After outlining the generic features of one frequently heard story type, this paper goes on to describe a consciousness-raising activity involving a picture story and story transcript designed to raise learner awareness of some of the linguistic realizations of these features. We then consider how this activity may be supplemented by other activities which encourage students to make use of this growing awareness, and generate the type of language which will help them develop their own conversational storytelling ability.

A consciousness-raising approach to the teaching of conversational storytelling skills

Abstract Anecdotes and personal narratives are frequently heard in day-to-day human interaction, and it would, therefore, seem reasonable to conclude that the teaching of storytelling skill should feature as a component in second language conversation courses. After outlining the generic features of one frequently heard story type, this paper goes on to describe a consciousness-raising activity involving a picture story and story transcript designed to raise learner awareness of some of the linguistic realizations of these features. We then consider how this activity may be supplemented by other activities which encourage students to make use of this growing awareness, and generate the type of language which will help them develop their own conversational storytelling ability.