Structure Grammar Research Articles

SKUTECZNE OCENIANIE GRAMATYKI: OD TRADYCYJNYCH TESTÓW DO ZADAŃ KOMUNIKACYJNYCH

Irrespective of the educational level, grammar is typically tested in a very traditional manner by means of such tasks as multiple choice, gap filling, paraphrasing or translation. The problem with this manner of evaluation is that it mainly taps into learners’ explicit, declarative knowledge that can only be applied when sufficient time is available. In addition, these tasks primarily focus on form, simultaneously ignoring the semantic and pragmatic aspects of grammatical knowledge. The article argues that such traditional tests should be complemented by what is referred to as productive and receptive focused communication tasks (Ellis, 2003), which necessitate the use of a specific grammar structure or at least are designed in such a way that such use is conducive to the attainment of the communicative goal. The application of such tasks allows insights into the implicit, or at least highly automatized, knowledge of the targeted structures (Ellis, 2009; DeKeyser, 2010) as well as shedding light on their form, meaning and use (Larsen-Freeman, 2003). It is suggested that their use not only enhances the validity of testing grammar but can also havea beneficial effect on the ways in which grammar is taught and learned.

The First German Grammar in Russia: Creation and Sources

Die Teutsche Grammatica... by M. Schwanwitz (St. Petersburg, 1730) was the first German grammar printed in Russia. It was bilingual: Russian and German sections were parallel. The Russian text reflected the diversity and variability of the new, early 18 th century "civil" literary language. The article authors describe linguistic terminology of Schwanwitz's textbook, study editorial changes made during its creation and examples corpus used in the grammar, first of all, anthroponyms. Comparative analysis of the structure, content and illustrative material of Schwanwitz's grammar and Die deutsche Grammatica... by Charmyntes (Berlin, 1713) allows us to conclude that Charmyntes's grammar was not the only source of the academic textbook. In cases where Schwanwitz borrowed material from the German source, he critically rethought and rewrote the original. The authors disagree with the assertion outspoken in scientific literature that Schwanwitz's work was for the most part imitative to Die deutsche Grammatica... by Charmyntes and that the Berlin edition should be considered as a conductor of the Western model of grammatical description in Russia. Study of Die Teutsche Grammatica... creation allows to conclude that lack of its author's formal education case was atoned by rich practical experience, ability to learn a lot and quickly and obvious desire to become a philologist recognized by contemporaries.

Sentence Wise Telugu to English Translation of Vemana Sathakam using LSTM

Language translation is a power of humans where machines are lagging and need to acquire. Previous statistical machine translation is used for translation but is applicable for large and similar grammar structure dataset. In this paper neural machine translation with long short term memory (LSTM) is used for addressing the issue. This paper uses a bidirectional LSTM to translate Telugu literary poems of Yogi Vemana to English which exhibited satisfactory translation. The results are compared with existing and proposed methods. NMT with LSTM yields better in language translation.

Designing an English course for tourism at State Amazonian University

The purpose of the investigation were to propose an ESP course for students at “Universidad Estatal Amazonica” in the Department of Life Sciences in Tourism Engineering Puyo, Pastaza- Ecuador. This proposal consists in a Communicative Syllabus with specific topics and grammar structure, which will allow the learners to develop their abilities in English communication. It was organized in four units with the same structure divided into four lessons: a vocabulary lesson, a grammar lesson, a professional lesson and a case study. It was designed to be taught in 64 hours face-to-face and 4 weekly practical hours. he proposal was created to ensure the students get the necessary vocabulary and grammar focused on tourism in English linguistic structures and that they can improve their and oral and written expression speaking as well as them to perform activities related to their field of specialization. As a form of evaluation, the continuous evaluation and final exam were proposed to determine academic progress.

In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination: a reply to Kubota and Levine

We show that Kubota and Levine’s (Linguist Philos 38:521–576, 2015) characterization of the HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination proposed in Yatabe (in: Flickinger, Kathol (eds) Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, CSLI, Stanford, pp 325–344, 2001) and later works is inaccurate, and that the theory in question does not require any ad hoc mechanisms to account for the long-known fact that right-node raising and left-node raising can affect semantic interpretation. In the course of demonstrating this, we fill in some details of this HPSG-based theory that were left unspecified in the previous literature, and we also present novel accounts of split-antecedent relative clauses and of respectively interpretation that are consistent with the theory. Furthermore, we argue that the phenomenon of summative agreement may provide a reason to prefer this theory over CG-based theories like Kubota and Levine’s.

Academic Writing for Publication Purposes: The Infelicities of Style

Low level of literacy of students, postgraduate students and university staff results in infelicities of style in Russian scientific papers and abstracts that might lead to manuscript rejection for publication in international journals. The author addresses the task of readability improvement of abstracts and scientific papers written by university staff members from technical and natural sciences departments. Sentence and text readability is determined not only by the number of words, i.e. the length of a sentence but also by the sentence structure and its grammar and lexical structure. The infelicities of style are caused by differences in scientific discourse between Russian and English languages. In particular, these might be nominalization, complex sentence structure, and wide use of Passive Voice in Russian sentences. Bilingual education is considered as the process of trainees’ introduction to the English-speaking world culture based upon matching Russian and English stylistic features. As the result the trainees realize the necessity of pre-translation adaptation of their texts. The author suggests some ways of pre-translation preparation of a sentence: shortening the sentence length up to 10-20 words by eliminating non-informative words and splitting a complex sentence into two or three according to the rule: one idea = one sentence. Some examples illustrate how chains of nouns in the genitive case could be substituted with other structures. Special attention is paid to parallel structures usage and eliminating non-informative words. In this way Russian authors will be able to write concise and clear texts in Russian and English in accordance with the accepted international language conventions.

ПЕРЦЕПТИВНІ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ПРОСОДІЇ МОДАЛЬНОСТІ ПЕРЕКОНАННЯ В СУДОВОМУ ДИСКУРСІ

In spite the fact that scientific researches reflect the interpretation of the modality problem by modern linguists, there can hardly be found the works devoted to the prosody aspects of modality in court discourse. The aim of the experimental analysis is a complex examination of functional, semantic and pragmatic characters of convincing attitudinal semantics in prosecutor’s speech in two languages: English and Ukrainian. The results of the research demonstrate that the attitude of convincing the listeners in court depends on extra linguistic factors (situation as well as social and status relations), structural, semantic and pragmatic peculiarities of prosecutor’s speech, on the one hand, and individual characteristics of the prosecutor’s communication, on the other. Conviction prosody in a prosecutor’s speech is the most important means that actualizes the stereotypic rules of orator’s phonetic behavior aimed at influencing the audience and combines general and creative aspects. In the speech under consideration the intellectual expressiveness is the leading character (arguments and logics). The character of prosody components interaction when exercising the attitude of conviction is similar in both languages, but the role of either component in prosodic structure differs. Thus, the rhythmic structure of English, importance of temporal parameter in the word-stress, falling character of syllabic melody (in contrast to Ukrainian), fixed position of word-stress in English and free position in Ukrainian lead to peculiarities of English and Ukrainian prosody in communication. Differences in linguistic systems of the two languages: a definite grammar structure, vocabulary peculiarities, phonological system, condition prosodic features characteristic to either of the two languages.

Alignment effects of the continuation task on L2 Chinese writing

Abstract This study aims to investigate the alignment effects of the continuation task on L2 Chinese writing. 60 participants were divided into a continuation group and a summary writing group. The former was required to continue a text with its ending removed, while the latter was required to summarize the text. The effect of the tasks was measured by examining the CSL (Chinese as a second language) learners’ correct use of vocabulary and the key grammar structure: the ba construction (“把” 字句). The study found that the continuation group made significant improvement from the pretest to the posttest, while the summary writing group did not. Moreover, learners in the continuation writing group produced more sophisticated words than those in the summary writing group and used key grammar structures with a greater degree of creativity than those in the summary writing group. These findings provide evidence for the language learning potential of the continuation task, which shows a better effect than the summary writing task.

PRZEKONANIA STUDENTÓW FILOLOGII ANGIELSKIEJ NA TEMAT NAUCZANIA GRAMATYKI

Learners’ beliefs concerning the process of learning and teaching a foreign language without doubt play a very important role since they can determine the effectiveness of the instructional techniques and procedures that are employed by teachers, thereby considerably influencing the outcomes of that process. This applies in equal measure to teaching all the language skills and subsystems, including grammar instruction, or, more generally, form-focused instruction. In view of such considerations, the aim of the present paper is to report the findings of a study which sought to tap the beliefs of 106 Polish students of English philology with respect to such issues as the choice of the syllabus, the degree of integration of focus on form with meaning and message conveyance, the ways in which grammar structures are introduced and practiced as well as the provision of corrective feedback on grammar errors. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire specifically designed for this purpose (Pawlak, 2012, 2013b), which contained both Likert-scale and openended questions related to all of these areas. The analysis of the data demonstrates that the participants manifest clear preferences with respect to the process of learning and teaching grammar, which, on the one hand, may provide a basis for introducing modifications into grammar classes taught to English majors, and, on the other, makes it possible to identify areas that should be given more emphasis in the course of educating future teachers of English.

ZUR FÖRDERUNG DER SPRACHBEWUSSTHEIT – VERGLEICHEN UND BESPRECHEN DER GRAMMATISCHEN STRUKTUREN

This paper elaborates on the notion of language awareness among multilingual students. In the first part the author presents the results of a research study whose objective was to assess if multilingual students are aware that the languages they speak and study (English and German) interact constantly and if they recognize the phenomenon of the positive and negative transfer. The subjects were students of Applied Linguistics at the universities of Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk and Poznań in Poland. The second part of the article is an attempt to connect theory and practice. It contains some suggestions how to improve multilingual foreign language teaching. A comparison and discussion of grammar structures aims to promote language awareness among students of foreign languages.

Grammar learning strategies as a key to mastering second language grammar: A research agenda

AbstractAlthough major advances have been made in research on language learning strategies (LLS), there are some areas that have been somewhat surprisingly neglected by specialists. This applies without doubt to the strategies that learners draw on to better understand and learn grammar rules but also to employ grammar structures in real-time processing, as required in spontaneous communication. In this paper, I outline a research agenda for grammar learning strategies (GLS), identifying three distinct lines of inquiry: (1) identification and measurement of GLS, (2) examination of factors moderating GLS use, and (3) strategies-based instruction as applied to GLS. Although these three areas are to some extent reflective of the main foci of empirical investigations in research on LLS, in each case, I try to demonstrate how cutting-edge theoretical and empirical developments can be applied to the study of GLS. For each of the three areas, I propose research tasks the execution of which has the potential of moving research on GLS forward.

Grammar Teaching Beliefs and Practices: The Case of a Communicative English Skills Teacher in DMU

The study intends to explore how the tensions, debates and beliefs about grammar teaching are adjudicated by a communicative English skills teacher to inform his practices. To that end, the researcher investigated an EFL teacher’s beliefs and classroom practices’ on the teaching of grammar in DMU. The data gathering instruments used were observation and semi structured interview meant to assess the way grammar is taught and uncover the underlying beliefs towards the teaching of grammar. The teacher is assumes contextualizing grammar items and using situations is a good thing in learning grammar while he also believes explicit grammar instruction might be appropriate only in lower grades. Regarding elements /dimensions of grammar to be taught and techniques and activities to be used the teacher believes that he has to dwell on the harmonized materials surfacing lack of awareness about the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic trinities. In the actual classroom, the teacher hardly created a context where their communicative needs necessitated the grammar structures. The teacher adopted PPP and situations and contexts were not created. The presentation stage took much time and effort followed by the practice, but no time for production resulting in absence of integration of skills. The teacher emphasized the structural aspect of grammar items more and syntactic and pragmatic aspects less going The discrepancies between the beliefs and practices are significant though not enormous. Though the teacher believes in creating context for grammar teaching the observations didn’t prove this. The essence of and principles of PPP is of little importance these days as proved in research. Moreover, the emphasis on form and use can’t guarantee an effective grammar lesson. Based on these findings the researcher recommends further investigation of the issue encompassing students’ views and larger samples. DOI : 10.7176/JLLL/59-01 Publication date : August 31 st 2019

Language and Political Psychology: Can Grammar Influence Electability?

Daily, the public is plied with political messages from various sources and millions are invested in campaign ads each election year. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the influence of linguistic details in such messages on attitudes about political candidates, especially within the context of Malaysia. The present study is grounded within the structure of framing and grammar, and suggests that grammar can influence attitudes towards a candidate’s electability. The study involved 387 male and female Malaysian university students (19- to 25-year-olds) of various ethnicities. The researcher designed two comprehensive questionnaires based on Fausey and Matlock’s (2011) work. Participants were randomly assigned Version A ( n =192) or Version B ( n =195) of the questionnaire. Both versions were about the conduct of Members of Parliament, unnamed and without party labels, to avoid bias about actual politicians. The conduct or actions were of negative and positive valence; Version A was framed using the imperfective form [‘was verb + ing ’] and employed the modal verb ‘must’, whereas Version B was framed using the perfective form [‘verb + ed ’] and employed the modal verb ‘have to’. Primarily, results revealed that imperfective descriptions of negative actions resulted in negative responses to the re-election of a candidate. However, the participants were largely insensitive to grammatical alteration when judging a candidate’s past positive actions. The results on modality demonstrated a preference for the modal verb ‘must’ which carries more “emotional value” than ‘have to’. The present study is novel in that it covers the dimension of modality (which has never been explored in previous studies) and that to date, there is no available research similar to it in the Malaysian context.

ENGLISH TEXT AS A MEANS OF STUDENTS’ MONOLOGICAL SPEECH DEVELOPMENT

The article deals with the notion of the text that is regarded from both psychological and linguistic points of view.Text is presented as the way of actualizing lexical units and different grammar structures. It is also proved that the text is a basis to form and develop all language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). A special attention is paid to the developing of monological speech through the text. A few types of monological speech are enumerated. It is also mentioned that text helps to broaden the outlook and is the most important source of information of different type due to which students’ general competence is supposed to develop.There is no doubt that it is up to a teacher to choose the appropriate methods that are suitable in this or that case while teaching (the age of students, the level of their language skills, even the psychological atmosphere should be taken in consideration). Texts should be thoroughly selected for every lesson and presented to students accordingly. It is necessary to follow the necessary stages of work with texts: doing exercises at the pre-text stage, text-stage and after-text stage. So, the text is the aim and the means of education at the same time. The methods of work with the text are well studied and used in practice but at the same time every teacher especially a university teacher should try to find some new and interesting ways of dealing with it. So, some useful and interesting, as the author hopes, innovations in the form of so-called creative tasks are also presented in the article.

Syntax Phrase Models with a Modal Component in the Discursive Space of A.P. Chekhov

The article is dedicated to the research of syntax phrase models with a modal component in the context of Chekhov’s artistic and epistolary prose. Actuality of the undertaken research is attributable to the fact that sentences with idiomatic structure are insufficiently researched: in particular, the issue of their function in discursive space is not resolved. Due to this fact, phrase models with a modal component that possess syntactic bivalency, which are common for Chekhov’s idiomatic style, are considered in this article; they are analyzed by their variety by “intensity” and “confirmation/denial” scales, as well as a “many/few” opposition. The specificity and objectives of the studied material required the usage of complex of research methods: descriptive, component, structural-semantic and statistical methods; text and distributional analysis of phrase models that express modality. The author’s modality is a very important text category, the studying of which is the most productive in terms of text fragments of bigger and shorter extent. In the Chekhov’s discursive space, the paragraph often either starts with the studied phrase models, which are unraveled in the following sentences, or ends with them, creating a summarizing judgement. The studied phrase models are also followed by the explicative and argumentative component, and are established by emotional and expressive units and question marks. The mental space of Chekhov’s works is filled with both relevant vocabulary and grammar structures (e.g., phrase models with modal components), which are oriented to relational meanings in the field of semantic of dependency. Meanwhile, the conditionality category includes not only typical units with meanings of target, cause and effect, but also similar meanings that are followed by the modal and evaluative component.

MOTIVATING ENGLISH LEARNING THROUGH CTL METHOD IN MAS AND MTsS HIFZHIL QUR'AN MEDAN-NORTH SUMATERA

In a learning course requires an appropriate method to get maximum results. Achieving goals in community service in the form of organizing English language training activities is to increase motivation or self-will, understanding and ability of students in learning a language. The purpose of this study was to find out how students' ability to learn English grammar by using the CTL method and to find out how the influence of the method on the spirit of student learning process. The type of research used to determine the results of the purpose of this study researchers used a qualitative approach in the form of field research. The conclusions obtained after the study were that: 1) Training Motivating Learning English Through Learning Methods CTL in MAS Tahfizil Qur'an and MTs Hifzhil Qur'an North Sumatra were conducted and the results were very satisfying. 2) Learning methods Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) that have been applied to students MAS Tahfizil Qur'an and MTs Hifzhil Qur'an of North Sumatra provide significant results where students are motivated and can follow the method so that understanding the grammar structure of sentences directly and the sentence is not immediately understood thoroughly in a relatively short time. 3) Students' ability to understand grammar after being taught using the CTL learning method increased in the percentage of 75% satisfying results in the MAS Tahfizil Qur'an and 70% satisfactory results at MTs Hifzhil Qur'an North Sumatra. 4) The enthusiasm of the students for the method they consider new is relatively new.

Beyond constituency tests: A reply to Osborne

Timothy Osborne argues that phrase structure grammars (PSGs) postulate unnecessarily complex structures, and that Dependency Grammar (DG) is to be preferred on grounds of simplicity (1:1 word-to-node ratio) and empirical adequacy (capturing the results of constituency tests). In this reply, I argue that, while some of Osborne’s criticisms of PSGs are justified, there are both empirical and theoretical problems with his major claims. In particular, his version of DG is too restrictive with respect to certain constituency facts (modified nouns, verbal phrases), and what it gains in simplicity qua number of nodes, it loses in requiring a more complex interface between syntax and other linguistic components (phonology, semantics). I argue that Mirror Theory, a framework that is in a sense intermediate between DG and PSGs, answers Osborne’s justified criticisms while not suffering from the problems of his version of DG.

Clustering and stranding in Dutch

AbstractThis paper has both a descriptive and a theoretical aim. The descriptive one is to demonstrate that the phenomenon of clustering is not limited to verbs, but that it also affects adpositions. The theoretical one is to develop a formal analysis that captures the common properties of verb clustering and adposition clustering. For that purpose we employ the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Both the descriptive and the theoretical part are backed up with quantitative data about the use of adposition clusters in a sample consisting of one million words of spoken Dutch and one million words of written Dutch.

Students’ Attitudes Toward Peer Feedback: Paving a Way for Students’ English Writing Improvement

This study aimed at exploring students’ attitudes toward peer feedback to develop their English writing ability. A mixed methods research, an embedded experimental design, was adopted to elicit students’ viewpoints toward peer feedback making use of five-point Likert scale questionnaires comprising 36 statements and six open-ended questions, which were conducted to 21 undergraduate students majoring in English in one university in the three Southern border provinces of Thailand. For the data analysis, A paired samples t-test was quantitatively analyzed, wherereas content themantic analysis was adopted for qualitative data. The overall findings illustrated that the students had a positive attitude toward using peer feedback that achieved a high level in four domains in terms of the writing process, affective strategies, critical thinking skills and social interaction ability. From the result, it could also be seen that students understood about the writing strategy and were able to conduct peer feedback process more effectively, produced improved writing performance with better grammar structure. Additionally, discussing by peers evevated critical thinking skills and developed social skills through working collaboratively. Importantly, peer feedback process supports a student-centered approach and allows students to become more autonomous learners in writing. Consequently, peer feedback should be taken into consideration in the curricula of L2 writing.

Enseñanza de la escritura y desarrollo de competencias metalingüísticas

El objetivo de este estudio es mostrar cómo se desarrollan competencias metalingüísticas y la competencia comunicativa de adolescentes de bachillerato de primer semestre, mediante una estrategia de enseñanza de la escritura basada en estructuras de párrafos. El estudio se fundamenta en las posturas teóricas de Jackobson (1962) respecto al lenguaje objeto y al metalenguaje; la estrategia de enseñanza se basa en la propuesta de Serafini (1996), en la que presenta la enseñanza de la escritura, por un lado, como un proceso (etapa de pre-escritura, la escritura y la revisión); por otro lado nos ofrece en la segunda etapa, la de escritura, ocho tipos de estructuras de párrafos (enumerativo, desarrollo de concepto, secuencia, comparativo, problema/solución, causa-efecto, introducción y cierre). El método utilizado en el trabajo es investigación-acción en el aula y se muestra el caso de un estudiante de 15 años de un grupo de bachillerato, donde se aplicó una estrategia de enseñanza de escritura que enfoca la formación de estructuras básicas de la lengua: desde la oración simple, el párrafo, hasta la estructura textual. El caso descrito presenta una competencia metalingüística en cuanto al monitoreo de la gramática tradicional y de la gramática textual: el alumno moviliza estructuras de párrafos con cohesión y coherencia; usa una puntuación diferenciada de nivel intermedio; utiliza conectores como forma interfrástica de cohesión; control y monitoreo de la extensión de los enunciados, de más o menos 20 palabras, como forma comunicativa con poca subordinación; y conciencia de la tipología textual en el manejo de formas discursivas propias del texto que escribe, especialmente las de macroestructura de introducción, desarrollo y cierre.