Second Language Teaching Research Articles

Citizenship and race in second-language education

This article explores the links between citizenship and race in second-language education through an examination of the ways in which citizenship is linked to English language proficiency within a key Canadian federal adult English as a Second Language assessment document, the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). It uses data and updates the analysis from a previously treated study that compared the way in which citizenship was conceptualised within that document with a sampling of adult second-language learners in a federally funded ESL programme. The participants in the study from which these data are drawn described becoming Canadians predominantly in terms of human rights, multicultural policy, and the obligations of being citizens. The CLB, however, rarely referred to citizenship in these terms. Instead, it described being Canadian in terms of normative standards, including various forms of social behaviour, which implied the existence of a dominant and singular culture to which second-language learners had to conform. This article argues that these normative standards have the effect of racialising second-language learners in this context.

Theoretical syntax in second language acquisition research and in second language classroom research

Second language teaching practicioners have tried to a greater or lesser extent in the past to apply the insights of linguistic theories to teaching methodology and curriculum design. A diverse range of sub·disciplines within the global field of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse theory and pragmatics are generally considered to be relevant. This gives evidence of the widely-held view that second language acquisition is an extremely complex phenomenon of a multi-faceted nature. (See the Appendix to this paper for a list of some recent works within the general field of second-language learning and teaching.) The purpose of this paper is to review the issues that are generally acknowledged to be relevant to theories of second language acquisition, to outline the riature of second language classroom research, and in particular to deal with the insights that the Universal Grammar approach can provide as regards the development of the second language grammar of learners. The Universal Grammar perspective of second language acquisition will then be discussed with respect to its implications for teaching practice, and more specifically for the role of grammar in instruction and input.

Metaphor instruction in the L2 Spanish classroom: theoretical argument and pedagogical program

In this article we argue that figurative language, specifically realized as metaphor, must become an essential aspect of any pedagogical program. The ability to understand and produce appropriate metaphors in a second language can no longer remain on the margins of linguistic proficiency; on the contrary, without such ability a speaker cannot effectively express him or herself or comprehend fully what a native interlocutor may be intending to communicate. That is, to genuinely achieve an advanced level of proficiency it is necessary that a speaker develop a metaphorical capacity in the second language. We begin the article with a discussion of the theory of metaphor proposed by Lakoff and his colleagues. We explain the principal concepts of the theory that we believe to be relevant to second-language pedagogy. We then present some examples of materials from a pedagogical program that we have developed to teach metaphors that commu-nicate emotions and that use colors, animals and sports as source domains. Included among the materials are a dictionary of metaphors, classroom activities, and a teacher's guide to help instructors implement the activities.

Using Websites to Promote Intercultural Competence – Case Study with Albanian Students Practicing Listening Skills

Are virtual environments conducive to the promotion of intercultural competence among foreign language students? The present study seeks to give a substantiated answer to this question by presenting and analyzing the results of a project carried out with the first year students of English language in the University of Korҫa, Albania. The project involves the employment of a dedicated class website as a tool and medium in the teaching of listening skills with a view to determining its impact in the development of the students’ intercultural competence. An analysis of how the different intercultural components are realized within the framework of the class website serves to throw light on the above-stated query. Methodologically speaking, the results of our study follow from applying the critical tool of discourse analysis to the listening texts themselves and to the comments the students have posted on our website forum. The detailed examination of linguistic and stylistic features together with that of other elements that belong to the content of the text leads to the conclusion that the use of websites in SLT (Second Language Teaching) serves the students to improve their intercultural knowledge, attitudes, values and skills. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p343

Bilingual Language Profile in Children with Mental Retardation

A few controlled studies and numerous anecdotal indications suggest that many mentally retarded children display real, even if limited, bilingual and sometimes multilingual abilities. The paper discusses the problems and limitations of second language learning in mentally retarded subjects on the basis of data on first language acquisition in these individuals. Recommendations are made as to planning second-language exposure and teaching in school contexts with mentally retarded pupils.

Using Unscripted Spoken Texts in the Teaching of Second Language Listening

Most spoken texts that are used in second language (L2) listening classroom activities are scripted texts, where the text is written, revised, polished, and then read aloud with artificially clear enunciation and slow rate of speech. This article explores the field's overreliance on these scripted texts, at the expense of including unscripted spoken texts that have very different textual and phonological characteristics. It describes how scripted and unscripted texts differ and examines why textbook publishers might avoid using unscripted spoken texts. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for incorporating unscripted spoken texts into the teaching of L2 listening comprehension, with the goals of making learners aware of the textual and phonological characteristics of unscripted texts, preparing L2 learners to be able to comprehend real-world spoken language, and promoting learners' communicative competence.

Integrating Websites in Second Language Teaching (SLT)

This study aims to explore the nature of websites and their practical integration in a specially conceived English class - a radically new approach in the context of Albanian teaching traditions. The comparative analysis between two classes based on a broad range of data on the relative merits of traditional and innovative teaching methods leads to the conclusion that websites serve as a catalyst in the process of acquiring the various language skills. They are particularly helpful in integrating these skills as organic parts of a solid linguistic competence and contextualizing them in the ever-broader framework of intercultural communication - a distinctive feature of contemporary global society. Notwithstanding the drawbacks and difficulties that attend the application of web-based methods in SLT, the resulting advantages are so great as to constitute a paradigmatic shift in teaching practice and a qualitative leap forward in the promotion of autonomous and content-based learning. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n11p577

Learning Linguistics by Doing: The Secret Virtues of a Language Constructed in the Classroom

The teaching of second languages in school classrooms is often conducted through the use of ‘direct’ and ‘immersion’ methods, while grammar is reserved for the first language. However, pupils spontaneously raise important questions for general and theoretical linguistics which could be better addressed through an interlinguistic comparison of first and second language grammars in the pupils’ repertoires. This paper explains the method used in a pilot experiment in fieldwork. The experiment was conducted in the fourth class of a Montessori primary school, where pupils constructed from scratch a posteriori language to be used for secret communication among themselves―but not to be used with the rest of the school. During the process of the construction of this language, all aspects were discussed in the class: phonetics and writing systems, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The main educational result was the increase in pupils’ metalinguistic awareness, as well as the confidence that they gained in their own language proficiency.

Resistance by L2 writers: The role of racial and language ideology in imagined community and identity investment

In the contexts of global English language learning, the ability to use Standard Written English usually symbolizes affluence, good education, and high social class—important social capital (Bourdieu, 1991). As a result, in these contexts language learners desire to acquire such a powerful discourse. This desire to belong to an imagined community (Norton, 2001) of prestige usually encourages L2 students to invest in forms of writing in a second language that reconstruct their identities in the pursuit of symbolic value in U.S. classrooms. The purpose of this study is to show how certain forms of racial and language ideology (i.e., English language privilege and White Prestige Ideology) among Taiwanese students influence their way of learning academic English writing. Adopting a qualitative research paradigm, we share data collected through classroom observations, qualitative interviews with students and teachers, and an examination of student papers from two Taiwanese ESL writers (drawn from a larger study in Liu, 2010) in an intensive English program in the U.S.Results of this qualitative research indicate that multilingual writers in this study exhibit agency through resistance to the practices of the American writing classroom. These strategic choices often involve identity investment with ideological implications about ethnicity, race, and class. This article argues that certain writing practices might be in danger of perpetuating racial ideologies and inferiority if teachers of second language writing ignore the intricate relationship often hidden within the taken-for-granted ideologies student writers bring to the classroom and the impact or reaction the classroom process promotes in the construction of their identities, especially when it creates an identity of inferiority among student writers. It concludes that L2 writing professionals need to be proactive and raise critical language and race awareness with students in both Taiwanese and U.S. writing classrooms.

Pronunciation challenges of open and distance learning students in the B.A English programme at the National Open University of Nigeria

This paper analyzes some pronunciation challenges of English learners newly admitted into the B.A English programme at the National Open University of Nigeria, Lagos. It was discovered that factors leading to these problems are interference of the students’ mother tongue, their ages, attitudes and their insufficient knowledge of sounds and the sound system of English. From this study, we could reiterate that having a clear understanding of the distinctions between phonetics as the general science of speech sounds and phonology as the sounds systems of particular languages can help to clarify what it is we have to deal with when we teach and learn pronunciation in the Open and Distance Learning environment. In the course of this study, it was subsequently discovered that the contrastive analysis of the target language and the learners’ Mother Tongue can greatly facilitate the second language acquisition. This is why we advocated that it is necessary to make learners in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) system know the phonological differences between their languages and English and consciously compare the two languages themselves during the learning process. From the various observations acquired through this study, we postulated that in order to learn English well, the second language teachers and learners in the ODL system should pay attention to the need to learn English pronunciation effectively. Key words: Mother tongue interference, pronunciation, English sound system, open and distance learning (ODL).

Enhancing L2 interaction in avatar-based virtual worlds: Student teachers' perceptions

<p>Three-dimensional (3-D) multi-user virtual environments (3-D MUVEs) have been used to provide language learners with realistic scenarios in which verbal and non-verbal interactions are simulated. However, little is known of the underlying factors that shape interaction in avatar-based virtual worlds. This study examined the perceptions of 38 student teachers of second language (L2) interaction in relation to the learning and teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) by using 3-D MUVEs. The data that were collected through reflection reports and interviews revealed that the key to the success of promoting L2 interaction may be contingent on the access to realistic scenarios and the presence of non-verbal cues. The participating teachers also offered suggestions regarding the future use of 3-D MUVEs to foster L2 interaction in the learning and teaching of CFL. Overall, the teachers considered this unique platform to be a promising venue where enhanced interaction may contribute to the understanding of target linguistic input, as well as the communication of the learners. This study has provided insight into the dynamic forces that mediate L2 interaction in 3-D MUVEs from the viewpoints of CFL teachers.</p><br />

Receptive vocabulary size of secondary spanish efl learners

This paper responds to the need of research on vocabulary knowledge in foreign language in secondary education in Spain. Thus, this research aims at investigating (i) the receptive vocabulary knowledge of 49 girls and 43 boys, Spanish students learning English as a foreign language in a secondary school located in the north of Spain, and (ii) its pedagogical implications for students’ understanding of written and spoken discourse in English (Adolphs & Schmitt 2004; Laufer 1992, 1997; Nation 2001). We used the 2,000 frequency band of the Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) (Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001, version 2) as the instrument to measure students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge. Our results reveal that the means of girls’ receptive vocabulary size is below 1,000 words, which agrees with the estimates proposed by López-Mezquita (2005) for Spanish students of the same age and educational level. On the contrary, the means for boys is slightly above 1,000 words, being the differences between boys’ and girls’ performance in the VLT statistically relevant. Our data also indicate that most of the students analysed in the present study could have problems to understand written and spoken discourse due to their low scores in the receptive vocabulary level test.

Pronunciation teaching practices in communicative second language classes

The objective of this research was to provide longitudinal, corpus-based evidence of actual teacher behaviour with respect to the teaching of second language (L2) pronunciation in a communicative language learning context. The data involved 40 hours of videotaped lessons from three experienced teachers recorded four times at 100-hour increments during the 400-hour programme for grade six (11- to 12-year-olds) francophone learners in Quebec, Canada. The videotaped lessons were initially transcribed and coded for individual pronunciation teaching episodes, then analysed in terms of their type, linguistic target and impact. Results demonstrated that pronunciation teaching episodes were infrequent (accounting for 10% of all language-related episodes), that pronunciation teaching targeted individual sounds (to the exclusion of other aspects of pronunciation) and that most pronunciation teaching episodes were not incorporated into lesson plans but instead involved various kinds of corrective feedback in response to individual student errors. These findings, which clarify results of previous survey-based studies of teachers' in-class behaviour, provide evidence that might be used to address teachers' concerns regarding the place, scope and role of pronunciation instruction in L2 teaching and teacher training.

Designing Online Strategy Instruction for Integrated Vocabulary Depth of Knowledge and Web-based Dictionary Skills

This paper describes the development of a CALL resource that combines a novel goal with an innovative method. The goal is to establish L2 learners’ knowledge of English word patterns (Hunston, Francis, & Manning, 1997) in the form of a complex cognitive skill that integrates conceptual understanding with related text-analysis and dictionary referencing skills to facilitate self-directed use of these common lexical features. The method consists of an automated, online form of strategy instruction that can be delivered outside class, facilitating self-paced learning with sufficient practice and feedback. In addition to the L2 vocabulary and strategy literatures, the project is informed by instructional design principles aimed at 1) managing cognitive demands on L2 learners’ working memories; 2) differentiating materials so as to appropriately target declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, or the orchestration of the two; and 3) harnessing the computer’s multimedia capabilities in principled ways. It also seeks to address longstanding issues in second-language instruction, including: the challenge of providing strategy training cost-effectively and efficaciously; the apparent lack of understanding of collocational relationships among many L2 learners; and the embarrassment of riches that modern, corpus-based ELT dictionaries represent insofar as they are powerful, freely available resources that go largely under-exploited.

Form-focused Interaction in Online Tandem Learning

Tandem language learning a configuration involving pairs of learners with complementary target/native languages is an underexploited but potentially very powerful use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in second-language pedagogy. Tandem offers the benefits of authentic, culturally grounded interaction, while also promoting a pedagogical focus among participants. CMC-based tandem promises, in addition, those benefits believed to accrue from text-based interaction, in particular, promotion of conscious attention to language forms in the course of meaningful communication. This paper presents data from a study based on the spontaneous interactions of tandem partners during a weekly, term-long synchronous exchange based in a MOO (Object-Oriented Multi-User Domain). It begins with an introduction to the concept of tandem language learning. The theoretical background, sketched briefly, is a model of instructed second-language acquisition that emphasizes the role of metalinguistic awareness. The empirical section examines negotiation of meaning, a discourse phenomenon held to bring about metalinguistic focus, and, more specifically, signal form and focus. The study analyzes learner interactions along the parameters of home country (Ireland or Germany), current tandem role (NS or NNS), and utterance language. It is suggested that the behaviors observed in this project have their roots in both the tandem learning setup and the text-based medium.

National Policy on Education: Problems and Prospects for Teaching and Learning of Igbo as a Second Language in Nigerian Secondary Schools

This study looks into the teaching and learning of Igbo as second language in some selected secondary schools in Lagos State, Nigeria against the background of the Nigerian National Policy on Education (2004) which established the teaching of second Nigerian languages in secondary schools. Survey research design involving questionnaire, observation and oral interview was used to obtain data from eighty junior secondary school students and four Igbo language teachers from four secondary schools. Based on the findings of the study, suggestions and recommendations were proffered for the concerned stakeholders to enhance the successful teaching of Igbo L2 in order to fulfill the recommendations of the Nigerian Policy on Education pertaining second language education. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n2p371

Competencias clave del profesorado y la Parrilla del perfil del profesor de Idiomas (EPG): dos documentos de referencia para el desarrollo profesional del docente de lenguas extranjeras

LAS COMPETENCIAS CLAVE DEL PROFESORADO DE LENGUAS SEGUNDAS Y EXTRANJERAS AND EUROPEAN PROFILING GRID (EPG): TWO REFERENCE DOCUMENTS ON THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR THE TEACHERS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
 This article presents two reference documents on the professional development of practising language teachers: Las competencias clave del profesorado de lenguas segundas y extranjeras (Key competences of teachers of second and foreign languages) published by the Instituto Cervantes, and the European Profiling Grid (European EPG Project) for European teachers. This article focuses exclusively on the role of these documents in teachers’ professional development, thus excluding all other ways in which other professionals might use them. As a starting point, a reflection on the meaning of professional development will be presented.

The use of first language in developing ideas in second language writing according to Siti Hamin Stapa and Abdul Hameed Abdul Majid

The role of the student’s native language (L1) in second language (L2) instruction has changed over time in significance and scope. It has also been a matter of contention among teachers. While some teachers believe that L1 plays a facilitative role in L2 learning and confidently translate their belief into classroom action, others stand contrary to this view and practice. And, a third group of teachers remain ambivalent about the role of L1 in L2 classrooms, perhaps because they feel that the research is not conclusive yet, or the peculiar characteristics of their contexts do not allow them to advocate a particular thought. This article reviews the work of Stapa and Abdul Hameed, which focuses on the use of first language in developing ideas in second language writing. The review begins with a brief introduction and then moves on to analyzing the research design adopted and the arguments forwarded by these researchers. Key words: First language/L1, second language/L2, native language, target language.

Do second language teachers need to know about parameters?

I shall build my argument on a linguistic claim, viz. the claim that acquiring a language entails the triggering of appropriate values for the parameters associated with universal linguistic principles.

Social Media's Learning Outcomes within Writing Instruction in the EFL Classroom: Exploring, Implementing and Analyzing Storify

Research has frequently demonstrated the positive impact of Web 2.0 tools on writing education in foreign-language classrooms. However there is limited research on the use of social media (e.g. Facebook) in teaching practices in general, and writing instruction in second-language teaching in particular. This paper presents an experiment to examine the effectiveness of social media on writing activities within the EFL classroom. We focused on Storify, which stands out amongst social media, as it collects content from existing multiple social networks, and creates the possibility to write your own memorable story by adding text. Furthermore, it is a community of practice with authentic learning material. A specific lesson (2 x 50min) was designed which benefited from the social media potential of Storify. The lesson was taught to 5 different classes (n=80), after which a survey was given to the students to detect their attitude towards this new teaching tool. The products of the students were analysed qualitatively to explore new possibilities in writing instruction. Finally, a focus group of teachers was organized. Results indicate that using social media in EFL writing instructions affects students’ learning process as it enhances student involvement. Students feel they can improve their writing performance, thus improving learning outcome. Additionally students believe Storify to be useful in EFL practices.