Study Of Language Acquisition Research Articles

Fostering Lifelong Interest in Research among Teachers at their Postgraduate Infancy

SKBI6113 Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is one elective course offered at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) that is predominantly enrolled by teachers teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). To some of these teachers, the course plays an important role in developing their research skill for thesis writing. This paper presents six classroom interventions initiated to help a batch of ESL teachers develop their research skills in second language acquisition studies. Their favourable comments to the majority of the interventions suggest that lifelong interest in research can be fostered if proper interventions were introduced at their postgraduate infancy.

三大理论框架下的二语习得研究

本文在介绍普遍语法、认知心理学、社会文化理论的基础上，找到了这三大理论框架与第二语言习得研究的接口，认为二语习得研究如果在这三大理论框架下进行，会更有解释力。最后，我们以普遍语法框架下的结果补语研究为例，介绍了这类二语习得研究的具体操作方法和程序。希望本文的研究可以帮助今后的第二语言习得研究理清思路，提高理论性。 At first, this article introduces three theoretical frames: Universal Grammar, Cognitive Psychology and Sociocultural Theory. Then, we find the interface between these three frames and second language acquisition studies. We claim that if we do second language acquisition research on the basis of these theoretical frames, it will get more persuasive. At last, this article takes a research of Chinese resultatives under the framework of Universal Grammar as an example, and shows me- thod and procedure of second language acquisition studies. We hope this article can help the fol- lowing studies get their thoughts into shape and raise the level of theory.

Model for Teaching a Foreign Language Class Based on the Principles of Chaos/ Complexity Theory

Chaos/complexity theory first appeared in studies of the natural sciences like physics and mathematics over 50 years ago. This up to date theory has been used in different fields to study complex systems, including social studies particularly the study of language and second language acquisition. Language learning in an instructional context is complex, chaotic, dynamic, open, nonlinear, self- organizing, adaptive, sensitive to initial conditions and creates fractals, strange attractors and feedback. In this study the present researcher has thought of applying chaos/complexity features into teaching second language class. The aim of this study is to familiarize English teachers with chaos/ complex theory and have a greater awareness of this up to date theory of pedagogy. At least forty theories of SLA have been proposed, but none of them gives a complete explanation of this complete process. Complexity theory takes into account all factors and may offer a sound language teaching model. In a training session, the researcher introduced the features of chaos/complexity theory in SLA to English teachers and also provided some practical educational implications to use into their teaching practice. Finally teachers’ feedback and attitudes were analyzed through content analysis and grounded theory to see whether their feedback and opinions are positive or negative. Chaos theory produces a multidimensional classroom that students and facilities interact. The language class context is exactly mirrored by 15 features, which emphasized the elements in natural system. And finally, students will learn how to learn, how to live pleasantly and will be empowered by English language.

Language learners’ use of non-turn-final ne

Abstract The present study examines how learners of Japanese as a second language employ the Japanese pragmatic particle ne in non-turn-final positions during their conversations. Data taken from class and club sessions totaling roughly 34 hours reveal that intermediate learners of Japanese studying in an American immersion language program use the particle in three main positions: turnfinal, turn-initial, and turn-internal. In particular, the turn-final and turn-initial uses were characterized by the use of formulaic sequences. Furthermore, the data indicate that the physical locations of language classrooms and club activities do not affect the position of the particle. These findings suggest that discourse structures and issues of (in)formality or intimacy influence learners’ variety of ne use. This study concludes with proposals to integrate these factors in theoretical and educational studies of Japanese language acquisition.

Non‐sentential vs. Ellipsis Approaches: Review and Extensions

AbstractNon‐sententials (also known as fragments, elliptical structures) can be roughly characterized as free‐standing utterances, which are, or at least appear to be, smaller than a sentence. The persisting controversy regarding non‐sententials is the following: are they pretty much what you see, base‐generated words, phrases, or small clauses (non‐sentential analysis), or are they full finite sentences that have undergone deletion/ellipsis (sentential/ellipsis analysis). This issue is all the more important today given that various interdisciplinary enterprises hinge on how it is resolved, including studies of language acquisition, language disorders, language evolution, and language representation in the brain. This review focuses on the most recent wave of controversy pertaining to non‐sententials and provides a critical assessment of the crucial connectivity/anti‐connectivity arguments, which are the backbone of both approaches, including islandhood, case, preposition stranding, and complementizer effects. The conclusion of this review is that a careful reexamination of each of these (anti‐)connectivity phenomena demonstrates that the non‐sentential approach is at least as successful as the ellipsis approach in accommodating these effects. Moreover, the non‐sentential approach opens up new and exciting prospects for enriching syntactic theory with new data and perspectives, as well as provides a better framework for interdisciplinary extensions mentioned above.

Low-educated immigrants and the social relevance of second language acquisition research

Since the 1980s’ decoupling of the formal study of second language acquisition from pedagogical concerns, the social relevance of such research has been of little concern. Early studies, in the 1970s, of uninstructed adult learners’ acquisition of morphosyntax pointed to social implications: these working class immigrants had varying levels of schooling, and it turned out that those with the least education made the slowest progress. With a shift in interest to consideration of poverty of the stimulus effects, researchers no longer needed to rely on adults who were uninstructed in the second language (L2) while immersed in the target language. Reliance on easy-to-recruit middle-class secondary school and university participants has had the – unintended – consequence of diminishing the attention paid to socially excluded adult L2 learners. This has left a range of language-external factors unaddressed in second language acquisition (SLA) at the international level; however, at the local level, interest in the language acquisition and literacy development of adult immigrants has risen along with increased immigration by adults with little or no native language schooling. These adults face considerable challenges in acquiring the linguistic competence and literacy skills that support participation in the economic and social life of their new communities. Those who teach such adults have very little SLA research to refer to in dealing with increasingly politicized policies and worsening provision. A return to the type of studies conducted in West Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s would serve this population of learners well.

Learning Strategies and Literary Response: Negotiating Meaning in the Literature Classroom

Reading is one of the most important skills for acquiring knowledge. However, it is a disturbing fact that students experience difficulties in this skill and thereby lose the pleasure of reading. The concept of learning strategies applied in the classroom, which students use in comprehending a text’s meaning, is rooted in second language acquisition studies. Thus, the objective of this paper is to use such strategies in a literature classroom to find the relationship between the learning strategies and literary response and to measure the levels of use of the learning strategies and their literary response in order to determine whether or not this response differs when analyzed according to sex, program and literature subject enrolled. The findings assert that the use of learning strategy of the students is high with socio-affective strategy as the most used. The respondents have a satisfactory literary response with the female students having a higher literary response than the males. The results also show that the Education students have a higher literary response than the Liberal Arts and ABA students. Moreover, those students taking an advanced literature subject (Literature 2) have a higher literary response than those who are only on their first literature subject (Literature 1). Statistical analysis shows that there is a high correlation between learning strategies and literary response. The use of learning strategies in the literature classroom greatly impacts the level of the response of the students to the reading materials offered in the literature classroom.

Multilingualism and fMRI: Longitudinal Study of Second Language Acquisition.

BOLD fMRI is often used for the study of human language. However, there are still very few attempts to conduct longitudinal fMRI studies in the study of language acquisition by measuring auditory comprehension and reading. The following paper is the first in a series concerning a unique longitudinal study devoted to the analysis of bi- and multilingual subjects who are: (1) already proficient in at least two languages; or (2) are acquiring Russian as a second/third language. The focus of the current analysis is to present data from the auditory sections of a set of three scans acquired from April, 2011 through April, 2012 on a five-person subject pool who are learning Russian during the study. All subjects were scanned using the same protocol for auditory comprehension on the same General Electric LX 3T Signa scanner in Duke University Hospital. Using a multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) for statistical analysis, proficiency measurements are shown to correlate significantly with scan results in the Russian conditions over time. The importance of both the left and right hemispheres in language processing is discussed. Special attention is devoted to the importance of contextualizing imaging data with corresponding behavioral and empirical testing data using a multivariate analysis of variance. This is the only study to date that includes: (1) longitudinal fMRI data with subject-based proficiency and behavioral data acquired in the same time frame; and (2) statistical modeling that demonstrates the importance of covariate language proficiency data for understanding imaging results of language acquisition.

Basque bilingualism: A tale of many stories

The present volume presents six papers, which study a number of topics in Basque by bilingual Basque-Spanish children growing up in the Autonomous Basque Region in Spain. The authors have dealt with a number of subjects, which range from lexical to genuinely syntactic issues, whereby all papers address the issue of whether one of the languages acquired by a child influences the other. The language combination studied in the present volume offers plenty of opportunities to inquire whether cross-linguistic influence occurs and which factors may determine or explain its duration, language internal or structural issues and language external or sociolinguistic factors. For the study of any phenomena that concern the Basque and Spanish languages, it is important to mention that these two languages have coexisted for many centuries, which has resulted in a number of contact phenomena that are already grammaticalized (see below). For the study of early language acquisition and language learning at school, it is of the utmost importance to take the complex sociolinguistic environment into account when drawing conclusions and making generalizations on the basis of a limited corpus. In what follows, we will briefly present the issue of cross-linguistic influence as it is discussed at present, we continue with a description of the most important grammatical facts and will finish with the actual sociolinguistic situation, which includes a historical and synchronic perspective.Let us begin with the issue of cross-linguistic influence. The growth in linguistic literature, which has been devoted to different acquisition types within bilingualism in the last two decades or so, has led us to rethink the issue of research in the field of language acquisition in a number of ways, that is, themes to be studied, methodological issues and ultimately interpretation of primary data. A variety of questions has been discussed in the past, such as whether bilinguals attain the same level of competence in both languages and whether bilingual acquisition is more costly than monolingual acquisition. One of the most controversially discussed papers in bilingual language acquisition has been the seminal work by Volterra and Taeschner (1978) who proposed that bilinguals, initially, had one lexicon for both languages, which splits into two at a second stage. The second stage is also characterized by the existence of one grammar which splits into two at a later stage. The gradual emergence of two languages out of one lexicon as suggested by Volterra and Taeschner has been severely criticized due to the methodological and conceptual shortcomings of the article over many years and was abandoned in terms of explanatory adequacy. However, any scholar working in the area of bilingual acquisition was aware of the fact that, although ultimate attainment in monolingual and bilingual acquisition was in most cases identical, some stages between onset and ultimate attainment in bilingual settings contained features that could be attributable to one of the two languages being acquired and, hence, required some attention rather a mere mention. However, the divergences observed between monolingual and bilingual acquisition had not been a matter of any theoretical discussion until Hulk and Muller (2000) and Muller and Hulk (2001) proposed that the languages acquired by bilinguals could influence each other provided some language internal constraints were met. Cross-linguistic influence is expected to occur:1. In the syntax-pragmatics domain if2. the languages at stake differ in structural terms but share some superficial properties.Based on these premises, a great deal of research in various language combinations (Basque- Spanish, German-French, Spanish-English, German-Italian and German-English bilingualism to quote the most well-known combinations) has been conducted, which was able to show that crosslinguistic influence in the alluded domain exists and, more importantly, is attributable to the other language being acquired (Kupisch, 2008; Larranaga & Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012; Muller & Hulk, 2001, to cite but a few). …

The role of hypercorrection in the acquisition of L2 phonemic contrasts

This article reports empirical findings from an ongoing investigation into the acquisition of second-language (L2) phonemic contrasts. Specifically, we consider the status and role of the phenomenon of hypercorrection in the various stages through which L2 learners develop and internalize a target language (TL) contrast. We adopt the prevailing view in both sociolinguistics and second language acquisition studies that hypercorrection results from a certain amount of linguistic insecurity on the part of the speaker. Based on 53 Korean speakers’ production of English target phonemes, we conclude that a series of hypercorrection errors may well represent the final stage in the acquisition of a contrast, and further, that in order for hypercorrection to occur, there must be a formal connection between the TL contrast being acquired and the phonological structure of the learner’s native language.

Examining English Language Learning Motivation of Adult International Learners Studying Abroad in the US

The present study reports on the motivations of adult, international learners of English, studying English 20 hours a week in a US-based Intensive English Program (IEP). Though often used as participants in language acquisition studies, there are few studies of these learners’ motivational profiles. In the current study, a questionnaire designed to measure language attitudes, learning orientations, and learning confidence was administered to 131 IEP learners. Factor analysis of the responses revealed five motivation components: Learning Self-Confidence, Attitudes toward English Language Learning/Community, Personal English Use, Value of English Learning, and International Posture. The results attest to a dualistic nature of instrumentality and suggest that even in a study abroad setting, international English learners are less motivated by positive attitudes toward the English community and more motivated by a sense of personal pride in learning and using English, even when learning confidence is low.

R. Ellis: The study of second language acquisition

R. Ellis: The study of second language acquisition

CLIL and the Development of Emotional Competence

The broad spread of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) bilingual programs is being accompanied by a parallel development of research on the benefits of this platform. Initially, the research interest lay in the study of foreign language acquisition and the acquisition of content of non-language subjects taught in a foreign language. However, in recent times, new areas of the CLIL program’s potential are being discovered. A wide range of studies prove that CLIL implies new benefits: cognitive, social, economic, etc. The goal of this article is to demonstrate that CLIL programs contribute to the development of emotional competence by means of a study conducted with secondary school students of secondary education enrolled in a CLIL program in the Autonomous Community of Castilla La Mancha.

Erratum: Neural entrainment to rhythmically-presented auditory, visual and audio-visual speech in children

[This corrects the article on p. 216 in vol. 3, PMID: 22833726.].

A Comparative Study on the Grammar Items of Korean Elementary Chinese Textbooks: Focused on Darakwon Chinese Master and New strategy Chinese

The importance of textbooks is becoming greater and greater in Chinese class. Also, the demand for better textbooks is being required. The reason I am saying this is because I would like to come up with a good alternative to design a suitable book for a Korean learner. So I have studied two well-known textbooks 『Darakwon Chinese Master』 and 『New strategy Chinese』, which are used widely in Chinese teaching and learning from the writer’s view. As a result, these two textbooks are different on the part of Chinese grammar items selection, arrangement and explanation.<BR> The 『New strategy Chinese』 textbook is effected by the 『Chinese Level standard and Graded Grammar Syllabus』. This textbook is a little comprehensive to understand in detail. Also, It is lacking in understanding for foreign students who want to study with this textbook. It also does not have enough explanations for learners. These are the reasons why many learners consider this textbook not to be proper for studying grammar.<BR> On the other hand, in my opinion, for Korean learners it is much better to learn easily with 『Darakwon Chinese Master』. Also, I think this textbook is focused on learners and written with easy ways to understand. That’s because the result of second language acquisition studies is reflected in this textbook, I guess.<BR> If a textbook is published after due consideration to learning ability, I’m sure that it will be used efficiently.

O campo CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning): definições, escopo e abrangência

One of the only areas of study that has a specific field to study its relationship with technology is the language teaching area. This field is called Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). CALL is considered part of Second Language Acquisition studies (Blake, 2008; Chambers, 2010), i.e., it is a young branch of Applied Linguistics (Beatty, 2010; Chapelle, 2006). It is interdisciplinary in nature and it is influenced by and connected to many other fields and disciplines. Since it is a new field (Crystal, 2010), it is a sphere of language teaching which is somewhat fragmented and that moves simultaneously in different directions (Levy, 1997). The purpose of this article is to describe and specify the CALL field. First, it deals with the initial relationship between language teaching and technology describing the main perspectives under which technology is seen in the area. Following that, the acronym CALL and the opinions and controversies related to the use of this nomenclature are explained. Finally, definitions of what the field CALL is and what it embraces are provided. Researchers and work on CALL in Brazil are scarce (Reis, 2010). Therefore, it is clear the need to fill in this gap. It is essential that Brazilian language teaching professionals become aware of the existence of the field, its aims and scope. Key words: language teaching, technology, CALL.

A review of sign language acquisition studies as the basis for informed decisions for sign language test adaptation

Developing or adapting tests of sign language development requires knowledge about the emergence and mastery of the linguistic structures that should be represented in a test. As the structures and acquisition of many sign languages are rather under-documented, developing or adapting a test for a specific sign language poses a great challenge for test developers, especially with respect to the test’s reliability and validity. Deutsche Gebärdensprache This paper presents this review of the most recent acquisition studies of the linguistic structures mentioned above and represented in the BSL test. The main focus is on studies that covered the age range of 4 to 8 year-olds, the age group of the adapted DGS test. The argument will be made that — considering the current state of research for many sign languages — these acquisition studies from a variety of sign languages can serve as the basis for making informed decisions for test development and adaptation (for example, deciding which items should be represented in a sign language test), but only together with cross-linguistic and language specific studies.

Cognitivism, adaptive intelligence, and second language acquisition

AbstractThere is no doubt that the “cognitive revolution,” in tandem with a focus on second language teaching, gave birth to the organized study of second language acquisition (SLA). In this sense, SLA studies has always been a cognitive science, although calls have recently been made to reemphasize and strengthen the connection. This paper: 1) reviews the cognitivist vision of mind/brain which has historically dominated both cognitive science and SLA studies; 2) describes how cognitive science has changed in recent years; and 3) introduces an alternative paradigm in cognitive science, adaptive intelligence, which may help us to better understand SLA.

Relativization strategies in SLA

This article examines the process of acquisition of relative clauses in second language (L2) Italian. Despite the fact that linguistic research clearly evidences a distinction between restrictive relative clauses and non-restrictive relative clauses, second language acquisition studies have so far investigated the acquisition of relative clauses disregarding this fundamental and functional difference. Based on the analysis of oral data of 96 L2 Italian students of two different Common European Framework of Reference proficiency levels (B1 and C2), this study examines occurrences of target language relative clauses and of other strategies of relativization (i.e. coordinated sentences), analysing proficiency and first language (L1) influence on distribution. The significant differences in the distribution of alternative relativization strategies between the two groups and the non-restrictive function of coordinated sentences lead to the hypothesis that there are two distinct patterns of acquisition: one for restrictive and another for non-restrictive relative clauses.

A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Language Acquisition

A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Language Acquisition