Second Language Learning Contexts Research Articles

Cross-cultural interactions in the context of teaching Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) as a second language in preschool

ABSTRACT In 2002, the Brazilian deaf communities’ struggles against academic failure and deaf student dropout won a linguistic policy: the LIBRAS Federal Law. This official law, regulated by Decree N.5626 in 2005, recognises LIBRAS as a national language and requires inclusive educational practices in a bilingual model in order to promote meaningful learning, interaction and participation of deaf students in all educational domains. Nearly two decades later, the Law N. 14.191/2021 has been published, establishing bilingual education for deaf people as a teaching modality on Guidelines and Bases of National Education. Despite these political movements towards an effective inclusive education, the daily reality in Brazilian schools shows there are still challenges to adopting an additive bilingual and cultural approach using LIBRAS. There are also challenges in developing fluid communication between deaf and hearing class members that would enable inclusion, collaboration and understanding of cultural differences in the educational domain. Combining ethnographic perspectives and theoretical discussion of inclusive-bilingual education in Brazil, this article describes interactions in an intercultural dialogue between deaf trainee teachers, hearing children and their hearing teacher in a second-language learning context (LIBRAS). Focussing on the ways in which relationships and communication processes are re-constructed by the participants, this study reveals different ways of representing deaf people and the learning of LIBRAS, highlighting a deterritorialised perspective from the children which moves freely between the ideological boundaries and linguistic and cultural limitations of the deaf and hearing adults.

Online Collaborative Writing through Wikis and Google Docs

Many studies on language learning have highlighted the advantages of collaborative writing (CW) in promoting learners’ writing skills (Strobl, 2014). To achieve the end product of collaborative writing tasks, learners are required to work collaboratively in various stages of planning and editing the writing as well as finalizing the shared texts (Woodrich & Fan, 2017). According to Storch (2011), although CW has been widely used and found to be very effective in promoting writing learning, it has been practiced mostly outside the context of second language (L2) learning. However, Kessler et al. (2012) suggested that with the assistance of technologies, we can integrate Web 2.0[1] applications and pedagogical practices in teaching and learning writing to enhance students’ writing via online CW.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Synchronous Facebook Communication: Native and Non-Native English Speakers

The purpose of this research was to study language with a focus on online communication between native speakers (NSs) and non-native English speakers (NNSs) in an international study consultancy Facebook group. This communication has proven unique and is important to study for two specific reasons. First, the popularity of social networking sites and their use by second language learners both amongst themselves and with NSs makes it important to investigate. Second, the analysis of these types of conversations is essential to understand how power and identity work in online interaction between NSs and NNSs. The study addressed the questions of what type of discourse are these highly contextualized groups of English speakers using to communicate online and how does the online environment shape NNSs’ power relation and identity shifting when interacting with NSs on Facebook. The study findings revealed that there are pedagogical implications in the interactional collaboration between NSs and NNSs in online interaction on Facebook. In the context of second language learning (L2), scaffolding was not only offered by collaborating with peers and interacting with more knowledgeable others, but also by the friendly environment of the social networking sites and the meaning negotiation strategies.

The role of verbal humor in second language education

Instructor humor serves a wide range of functions in educational contexts. This paper reports on a study that investigated the functions of instructors' humorous verbalizations in academic classrooms at a university where English is used as a second language. Data were collected through audio-recordings and classroom observations. The results of an inductive analysis led to the development of three major categories, namely “foregrounding form”, “reinforcing meaning” and “highlighting cultural dissimilarities”. These categories represented the strategies that served as instructional functions of humor in the context of L2 (second language) education. Findings indicate that using verbal humor in L2 classrooms offers opportunities to facilitate access to L2 linguistic and cultural knowledge resources that are embedded in humorous exchanges. Additionally, the findings suggest that L2 instructors must have specific (socio) linguistic and sociocultural humor competence to use humor to engage learners and communicate finer aspects of the L2. The implications of the findings are explored within the context of second language learning and teaching.

Accuracy of teachers’ predictions of language minority and majority students’ language comprehension

The classroom is an important context of second language learning for language minority children. Teachers are responsible for creating good learning opportunities by securing language use well adjusted to the children's level of comprehension. Thus, teachers should have realistic expectations of this. The purpose of the research is to increase knowledge of the classroom as a language learning setting by exploring the accuracy of teachers’ evaluations of their students’ language comprehension and possible biases in their evaluations of language minority compared to majority students. A total of 205 students from 13 different classes and their main teachers from five different schools in Norway participated in the research. The students were tested for vocabulary and grammatical comprehension of Norwegian, and their teachers were asked to predict how each child would score on each test item. The language minority children gained lower scores than the majority children, a difference also predicted by their teachers. The accuracy of teachers’ predictions was higher for language majority than minority children, however. This difference seems to be directly affected by the language minority/majority status of the child. The teachers were, furthermore, most accurate when predicting the comprehension scores of the students they believed to be high performers.

Analyzing the effect of context of second language learning: Domestic intensive and semi-intensive courses vs. study abroad in Europe

This study examines the second language (L2) written and oral performance of three groups of Spanish-speaking university students after being exposed to English in different contexts. One group of learners was spending some time abroad (Erasmus students in the UK), and two groups were following classroom instruction in two different types of intensive courses in Spain: “intensive” and “semi-intensive”. The learners’ L2 written and oral production were analyzed at different time points through different measures of fluency, syntactic and lexical complexity, and accuracy. The main objective of this study was to compare the performance of the students abroad with each of the two intensive programmes. According to the results of the statistical analyses, after an equivalent period of exposure to the L2 in the two contexts, the students abroad outperformed the learners in the “at home semi-intensive” programme in the post-test in some of the variables under study, namely fluency and lexical complexity. Nevertheless, the students’ written and oral performance after an intensive course at home and after the equivalent time abroad was similar.

Artificial Intelligence and Second Language Learning: An Efficient Approach to Error Remediation

While theoretical approaches to error correction vary in the second language acquisition (SLA) literature, most sources agree that such correction is useful and leads to learning. While some point out the relevance of the communicative context in which the correction takes place, others stress the value of consciousness-raising. Trying to reconcile the two approaches, this paper describes an application of artificial intelligence in the second language error remediation process. The software presented is called the Intelligent Tutor. It diagnoses some typical errors in the writing of university students who are learning English as a second language. A quasi-experimental study consisting of a grammaticality judgment pre-test, a treatment in the form of the Intelligent Tutor and a short answer post-test, was carried out with 266 university students in three countries. The findings show that artificial intelligence is an efficient instrument of error remediation, reducing the error rate by an average of 83%. This paper discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the software used, briefly describes the software itself and then presents the study design, its findings and their implications in the wider context of second language learning.

Transcultureel Taalonderwijs

After 'intercultural' and 'multiculturai', we introduce the term 'transcultural' in relation to language education. In our opinion, this term is understood to mean a type of education in which, by means of exchanging culturally different experiences, the culturally biased frame of reference of the language learner contributes to the formation of new concepts. In this way, the classroom becomes a breeding ground for a 'third culture' (Kramsch, 1993), in addition to the first culture of the learner and the second culture associated with the language being learned. Transcultural education, in our view, is the ultimate implementation of intercultural education. In the context of second language learning, the term 'transcultural' has an additional meaning: most of the students find themselves in the transition from one culture to another. In our paper, we develop these two meanings of 'transculturaP as relating to the teaching and learning of Dutch as a second language. Starting from a theoretical framework, we end up with suggestions for application in the language classroom.