Spontaneous Language Use Research Articles

The contribution of the amount of linguistic exposure to bilingual language development: Longitudinal evidence from preschool years.

This study examined the influence of linguistic input on the development of productive and receptive skills across three fundamental language domains: lexico-semantics, syntax, and phonology. Seventy-one (35 female) Basque-Spanish bilingual children were assessed at three time points (Fall 2018, Summer 2019, Winter 2021), between 4 and 6 years of age, by specifically examining language knowledge and spontaneous language use in each language. A direct impact of the amount of linguistic exposure on the longitudinal growth of lexico-semantic and syntactic abilities was observed in both languages. While phonological skills were not directly influenced by exposure, they were more proficient in the more exposed language. The use of lexically diverse and syntactically rich utterances developed relatively later than language knowledge, both supported by the amount of linguistic exposure.

Word usage as measured by parental checklists and language samples: trends, comparisons, and implications.

Although parental checklists are well-known for their potential in indexing young children's lexicon size, they can also be used to track children's acquisition of individual words. Word-level data can be used to identify the checklist words most and least commonly employed across groups of children. Like parent-completed vocabulary checklists, samples of spontaneous language use collected from multiple children can also generate measures of word commonality, concerned with the numbers of children producing individual words. To our knowledge, comparisons of word usage as determined by parental checklist and language sample data obtained in parallel from the same children have not been carried out. Also scarce in the empirical literature are item-level analyses of early bilingual lexicons that explore word usage across two emerging languages. The present study aimed to contribute toward bridging both gaps through the analysis of data generated by a bilingual Maltese-English adaptation of the vocabulary checklist of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences (CDI: WS) and spontaneous language samples for the same children. An additional objective was to derive implications for revising the current version of the vocabulary checklist, in preparation for its eventual standardization. For 44 Maltese children aged 12, 18, 24, and 30 months, the words reported by their main caregivers on the vocabulary checklist were identified, along with their respective semantic categories. For the same children, 20-min language samples obtained during free play with the caregiver were transcribed orthographically. Words identified through parental report and language sampling were analyzed for commonality, i.e., the number of children producing each word. Comparison of the word usage patterns obtained through both methods indicated differences in the words most commonly sampled and those most commonly reported, particularly in relation to grammatical categories. Notwithstanding these differences, positive and significant correlations emerged when considering all grammatical categories and languages across commonality levels. The commonality scores based on parental checklist data have implications for reconsidering the length and language balance of the Maltese-English adaptation of the CDI: WS vocabulary checklist. Sampled word usage patterns can contribute additional objectivity in updating the reporting instrument in preparation for its eventual standardization.

“Whoa! Incredible!:” Language Learning Experiences in Virtual Reality

Recently, immersive virtual reality (VR) environments for language learning have garnered interest from researchers and practitioners alike, based on their realistic imitations of environments where target languages might be used for “authentic-like” interactions (with other learners, bots and avatars). However, the majority of research thus far has focused on university-level students’ perceptions of VR and there is a critical need for research examining how these environments can be used effectively with kindergarten to grade 12 students. This article discusses a pilot study that aims to fill this gap in research through a three-month-long VR study conducted with 10- to 11-year-old students in Spain ( n = 24) studying English as a foreign language (EFL). VR lessons were taught using the VR language learning platform Immerse and Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets. The data corpora consist of recordings of the VR activities, comparable non-VR classroom activities and teacher-directed student output (pre-VR and post-VR activities focused on the target language). Fragments of interactions during activities in both VR and the classroom were selected and transcribed. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment Companion Volume (CEFR-CV) illustrative descriptors were then used to map the participants’ language performance to the CEFR-CV scales. Findings indicate that production of the target language is less controlled and less accurate in VR compared to face-to-face “traditional” oral activities in the classroom. However, there are more examples of spontaneous language use, more examples of mediation between the learners and even moments of higher than expected levels of production and comprehension, equivalent to English language level B1 descriptors in VR.

TEACHING METHOD IN DELIVERING SPEAKING MATERIAL FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADE

Speaking is one way to communicate which ideas and thought as a message orally. This study focused on teaching method that implemented by a teacher while teaching speaking skill in senior high school. The research applied interview and observation method to conduct this study. The finding of this research was the teacher often implement the role play method while delivering speaking material since its really appropriate to the situation class and student interested. Furthermore role play was variety of activities in which students are provided with information presented in role cards that guide them to simulate real world given the freedom to choose the language they use and develop the personalities and the situations as they wish to make the activity enjoyable and successful as much as possible. Clearly, role play has many advantages, such as; acting requires the use of language. Hence learners will develop their ability of communicating and it provides spontaneous use of language during interaction

Mourning the lost: A social actor analysis of gender representation in the @FacesofCovid's tweets.

When COVID-19 swept the world at the end of 2019, it changed life as we knew it. With about 600 million positive cases (both recovered and active) and approximately 6.5 million deaths due to the disease, people worldwide have been affected physically, psychologically, economically, and socially by the pandemic. Amid such difficult times, @FacesofCovid-a Twitter account with more than 150,000 followers-was launched in March 2020 with the mission of honoring the lives of those lost to COVID-19 instead of presenting them as mere statistics. The account is a demonstrative example of the mourning genre as primarily exhibited through concise tweets grieving the deceased. As such, it offers a novel case of a public online mourning platform through microblogging, an understudied research area that merits further examination. A self-built corpus of 280,536 words was built from more than 7,000 tweets on the public account. The analysis presented in this paper focused on how people are constructed in the language of their loved ones as they are mourned through these tweets. Drawing on insight from van Leeuwen's social actor representation and corpus linguistics, the analysis was conducted using the #LancsBox corpus processing software package. The findings indicated that gender asymmetry persists within this corpus. Therefore, this paper adds to the rich body of literature documenting gender imbalance across different genres and domains. Men are far more present than women and are constructed through functionalization for the most part, whereas women are less functionalized and represented primarily through relational identification. In light of this, it is argued that while sometimes, gender asymmetry can intentionally be ideologically loaded and may serve hidden agendas, at other times, it may inherently and subconsciously be passed on through spontaneous language use.

Task-Based Language Learning and Beginning Language Learners: Examining Classroom-Based Small Group Learning in Grade 1 French Immersion

Elementary French immersion (FI) language arts teachers often organize instruction around small learning groups. Students rotate through learning stations/centres and work independently with their peers on L2 literacy skills. This study examined how principles of task-based language teaching (TBLT) can be used and/or adapted to further support beginning L2 learners working independently at various literacy stations. This classroom-based study employed a pragmatic ‘research design’ methodology. Researchers worked alongside Grade 1 FI teachers (n=3) in the development and classroom implementation of language/literacy tasks designed around TBLT principles for use in literacy centres. Data collected included classroom observations in two Grade 1 FI classrooms, samples of students’ work, teacher interviews, and task-based lesson plans. Findings suggest that integrating/adapting TBLT principles to small group independent learning stations was particularly impactful in supporting young beginning language learners with extended language output, peer interaction, learner autonomy, emerging spontaneous language use, and student engagement. Additional instructional focus on corrective feedback, oral communication skills, and focus on form and function were also reported.

КОМУНІКАТИВНИЙ ПІДХІД ДО ФОРМУВАННЯ ГРАМАТИЧНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ МАЙБУТНІХ УЧИТЕЛІВ ІНОЗЕМНОЇ МОВИ

The article deals with peculiarities offorming future foreign language teachers’ grammatical competence in realization of communicative approach. The notion "future teacher’s grammatical competence" and its constituents are specified. The constituents offoreign language teachers’ grammatical competence comprise grammatical knowledge, grammatical skills (receptive and reproductive) and grammatical awareness (students' ability to register and recognize grammatical phenomena in oral and written speech, features and patterns of their formation and functioning). The types of communicative exercises, characteristic for the formation of grammatical competence of future foreign language teachers in the process of realization of the communicative approach, are offered and substantiated. The grammatical competence of the future foreign language teacher as a component of professional competence can be defined as intuitive (determining the creative and spontaneous use of language) and intellectual (which can be manipulated consciously) knowledge and ability to use grammatical resources of the language which can be achieved due to the integrated approach to learning grammar material, which provides an organic combination of conscious and subconscious components in the learning process, which will ensure their success in further professional activities. While communicative approach realization communicative (linguistic) tasks are prioritized. After all, it is the latter that bring the development of grammatical skills and abilities closer to the conditions of real communication - motivated and purposeful. Each grammatical structure can be carefully processed and automated thanks to the creative approach of the teacher to the selection of tasks.

Spontaneous Expressive Language Profiles in a Clinically Ascertained Sample of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have varying degrees of language impairment across multiple domains, which may include deficits in syntactic, pragmatic, and/or semantic skills. The heterogeneity of language profiles within ASD, coupled with the limited scope of existing standardized language measures, makes a comprehensive assessment of language impairments in ASD challenging. The Observation of Spontaneous Expressive Language (OSEL) is a new measure developed to capture children's spontaneous use of language in a naturalistic setting. The current study used the OSEL to examine the patterns of spontaneous expressive language abilities of 87 clinically ascertained children with ASD from 2 to 12 years. As expected, children with ASD were significantly more impaired in their spontaneous use of language compared to typically developing peers. Syntax and narrative skills continued to increase with age from toddler to elementary school years in cross-sectional comparisons. Pragmatic skills improved form toddler to preschool years but remained stable from preschool to elementary school years. Preliminary data also demonstrated significant improvements in OSEL syntax scores over time for a subset of children followed longitudinally (n = 8). Children with ASD consistently showed more impairments in spontaneous expressive language captured on the OSEL compared to language skills measured by other more structured standardized assessments, despite moderate convergent validity among those measures. Results suggest that impairments in the spontaneous and functional use of expressive language persist into middle childhood for many children with ASD, and a comprehensive assessment approach can lead to more precisely targeted treatment addressing specific language profiles. LAY SUMMARY: This study aimed to examine the variable language profiles in children with ASD. Children with ASD were shown to have impairments in the structure, meaning, and social use of language. These challenges were captured best by a measure that was created to assess the spontaneous use of language in a naturalistic environment. The results of this study emphasize the importance of a comprehensive assessment of language in ASD to inform treatment. Autism Res 2021, 14: 720-732. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Knowing me, knowing you: Spontaneous use of mentalistic language for self and other in autism.

Autistic people can have difficulties in understanding non-autistic people's mental states such as beliefs, emotions and intentions. Although autistic adults may learn to overcome difficulties in understanding of explicit (overt) mental states, they may nevertheless struggle with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. This study explores how spontaneous language is used in order to specifically point to this implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states. In particular, our study compares the spontaneous statements that were used in descriptions of oneself and a familiar other person. Here, we found that autistic and non-autistic adults were comparable in the number of statements about physical traits they made. In contrast, non-autistic adults made more statements about mentalistic traits (about the mental including psychological traits, relationship traits and statements reflecting about these) both for the self and the other. Non-autistic and autistic adults showed no difference in the number of statements about relationships but in the number of statements about psychological traits and especially in the statements reflecting on these. Each group showed a similar pattern of kinds of statements for the self and for the other person. This suggests that autistic individuals show the same unique pattern of description in mentalistic terms for the self and another person. This study also indicates that investigating spontaneous use of language, especially for statements reflecting about mental states, enables us to look into difficulties with implicit (indirect) understanding of mental states.

Towards a usage-based model of early code-switching: Evidence from three language pairs

AbstractUsage-based studies trace children’s early language back to slot-and-frame patterns which dominate spontaneous language use. We apply the Traceback method to data from three bilingual children with English as one of their languages and Polish, German, or Finnish as the other to examine what these children’s code-switching has in common and how it differs in light of the genealogical distance between the languages used. Their bilingual constructions are derived from individual corpora of naturalistic interactions of each child respectively and traced back to monolingual language produced previously to establish whether they are unprocessed chunks or partially schematic units. Based on this, we propose a model of switching which helps us to distinguish between the qualitative aspects of bilingual use in these two types of combinations. Our results show that all three children filter out some mixing occurring in chunks before these give basis to longer units. Whatever bilingual combinations remain frozen in those units can be explained by phonological overlap of the children’s two languages, which is highest in the acquisition of English-German due to their genealogical proximity.

Living Newspaper in the English Discussion Classroom

Since 2003, the Japanese government has been urging universities to improve and reform the way they teach English to develop young people who can actively and immediately work in global contexts after graduation (MEXT, 2003). Some universities are using drama in the English language classroom to nurture students’ creativity, cooperation, and confidence. As has been shown, drama brings a multitude of psychological and communicative benefits – it helps students think about pronunciation, meaning, emotion, motivation, cooperation, confidence, and active participation, all of which can help to promote language acquisition and the spontaneous use of language (Miccoli, 2003; Ranzoni, 2003; Sato, 2001; Shapiro & Leopold, 2012; Zyoud, 2010). With a background in theatre and some useful drama resources at my disposal, I have been seeking ways to give my English classes a communicative and performative edge, and this article examines how I tried to incorporate a drama activity into my university discussion class.

Technology as an Educational Equalizer for EFL Learning in Rural China? Evidence from the Impact of Technology-Assisted Practices on Teacher-Student Interaction in Primary Classrooms

Based on a conversational analysis (CA) of eight videoed EFL lessons from technology-enhanced primary classrooms in a rural suburb of a major city in China, this study examines the nature of technology-assisted practices and their influence on teacher-student interaction in the target language. The analysis revealed that the technology-assisted practices mainly served as an alternative presentation tool to meet a range of traditional pedagogical goals and facilitated minimal spontaneous language use among the students. The findings call for research to explore better pedagogical use of technology to promote students’ active language production to truly achieve educational equalization for rural students.

Inferential language use by school-aged boys with fragile X syndrome: Effects of a parent-implemented spoken language intervention

This study examined the impact of a distance-delivered parent-implemented narrative language intervention on the use of inferential language during shared storytelling by school-aged boys with fragile X syndrome, an inherited neurodevelopmental disorder. Nineteen school-aged boys with FXS and their biological mothers participated. Dyads were randomly assigned to an intervention or a treatment-as-usual comparison group. Transcripts from all pre- and post-intervention sessions were coded for child use of prompted and spontaneous inferential language coded into various categories. Children in the intervention group used more utterances that contained inferential language than the comparison group at post-intervention. Furthermore, children in the intervention group used more prompted inferential language than the comparison group at post-intervention, but there were no differences between the groups in their spontaneous use of inferential language. Additionally, children in the intervention group demonstrated increases from pre- to post-intervention in their use of most categories of inferential language. This study provides initial support for the utility of a parent-implemented language intervention for increasing the use of inferential language by school aged boys with FXS, but also suggests the need for additional treatment to encourage spontaneous use.

Analysing cinematic discourse using conversation analysis

The following paper examines how a conversation analysis (CA) approach to the investigation of spoken dialogue can be applied to analysis of the verbal and non-verbal (prosodic and paralinguistic) features of film discourse. In doing so, we wish to make a valuable contribution to the debate in the field between ‘pure’ (see Schegloff, 1988; Emmison, 1993) and ‘applied’ CA scholars (e.g. ten Have, 2007). Researchers belonging to the former grouping argue that CA should only be used to investigate naturally occurring language use (i.e. spontaneous language use), while those who position themselves as ‘applied’ CA scholars maintain that it is an approach that can be applied to institutional and semi-scripted instances of spoken dialogue. We begin by outlining the principles of CA and the type of data and contexts in which it has been used to analyse spoken interaction in previous research; we then analyse and discuss findings from our own study into the verbal and non-verbal features of segments of film discourse. These segments comprise selected interactions that occur in three different scenes from three different films by Woody Allen (“Husbands and Wives”, 1992; “Melinda and Melinda”, 2004 and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”, 2010). These interactions have been transcribed using CA conventions and then analysed in terms of four key conversational features that have been identified by CA scholars: turn-taking, adjacency pairs, gaps and overlaps. Our findings indicate that the interactants in our study do indeed make use of these conversational features in their spoken dialogues and that they are purposeful and meaningful. We conclude therefore that CA offers a valuable tool for examining key verbal and non-verbal features of film dialogue and paves the way for further analyses of this kind.

Fuzzy Grammaticality Models: A Tool for Web Language Analysis

In this paper, we highlight the need to propose formal models that consider grammaticality as a gradient property instead of the categorical view of grammaticality defended in theoretical linguistics. Given that deviations from the norm are inherent to the spontaneous use of language, linguistic analysis tools should account for different levels of grammaticality. Fuzzy grammaticality models may be a way to solve the problem that the so-called “noisy text” poses to parsing mechanisms used in Web language analysis–especially social networks language.

A sociolinguistic analysis of borrowing in weak contact situations: English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in a Dutch reality TV show

This paper presents a quantitative corpus-based variationist analysis of the English insertions used by Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch participants to the reality TV show ‘Expeditie Robinson’. The data consist of manual transcriptions of 35 hours of recordings for 46 speakers from 3 seasons of the show. Focusing on the expressive utterances in the corpus, we present a mixed-effect logistic regression analysis to pattern which of a variety of speaker-related and context-related features can help explain the occurrence of English insertions in Dutch. The results show a strong impact of typical variationist variables such as gender, age and location; but features that are more situational, such as emotional charge and topic of the conversation, also prove relevant. Overall, in its combined focus on (a) oral corpora of spontaneous language use, (b) social patterns in the use of English and (c) inferential statistical modeling, this paper presents new perspectives on the study of Anglicisms in weak contact settings.

Mejora de la comunicación y del lenguaje oral con la ayuda visual de los signos manuales en alumnos con discapacidad intelectual. Estudio de casos

The research reported herein is the result of a systematic intervention with an augmentative communication system based on bimodal or simultaneous communication.A longitudinal-observational study was performed with collection of data on the development of communication and language in 3 participants with intellectual disabilities (ID) in 4 academic years, by applying an observational record based on quarterly assessments and analysis of changes reflected in the pedagogical reports of the participants throughout the study.The results of the study are consistent with those obtained in previous studies and show that the intervention accelerated and increased vocabulary acquisition and spontaneous use of sign language by participants and, consequently, improved their communication. Equally, reinforcing the syllables of words through hand signs improved the students’ oral production.The discussion examines how far the changes in the students could be the result of the bimodal intervention and how far they may be the result of development. Also discussed is whether the changes reflected in the participants depended on the student's cognitive profile, with students with higher cognitive abilities showing greater change and whether the good results obtained were due to application of the communicative intervention in a natural context.

Initial Efficacy of Project ImPACT: A Parent-Mediated Social Communication Intervention for Young Children with ASD

Project ImPACT is a parent-mediated social communication intervention for young children with ASD that was developed in community settings to encourage dissemination. A single-subject, multiple-baseline design was conducted across 8 preschoolers with ASD and their mothers to examine the efficacy of the model for improving parent intervention fidelity and child spontaneous language. Multilevel modeling was used to examine the relationship between parent fidelity and child language within session. All parents increased their use of the intervention techniques. Improvements in spontaneous use of language targets were observed for 6 of the 8 children. There was a significant association between parents' use of the intervention strategies and their child's spontaneous language use.

A corpus-based analysis of language ideologies in Hungarian school metalanguage

The main goal of this paper is to present a recently built interview corpus called Corpus of Hungarian School Metalanguage – Interview Corpus (CHSM-IC) and its potential in language ideology studies. This corpus was compiled during a broad survey on Hungarian school metalanguage carried out in 2009 and was recently made available for a wider research community within the CESAR (Central and South-East European Resources) project. The study investigates interactional routines used in metadiscourses on language use. Printed texts cited from prestigious handbooks and interview data from CHSM-IC are compared. Thus, widely used, culturally-inherited text fragments are detected and confronted with the interviewees’ narratives on their own communicational experiences. A case study on the discourse marker hát (‘so’, ‘well’) illustrates that there is a conflict and often a controversy between language ideologies disseminated by the Hungarian school system and the linguistic self-representation in the interviewees’ narratives. Combining Language Ideology, Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Discursive Social Psychology frameworks, the paper presents a detailed description on the emergence of metadiscourses in a school setting. The paper concludes that metalinguistic utterances (e.g., answers on grammaticality, statements on linguistic accuracy, etc.) and observable, spontaneous (or semi-spontaneous) language use patterns are regularly not in accordance with each other.

A grammatical analysis of the spontaneous L2 English use of schizophrenic bilinguals compared to typical bilinguals1

The study reported in this paper aimed to investigate whether the grammatical errors made by schizophrenic bilinguals in their spontaneous second language (L2) use are typical L2 learner errors, as reported previously. Southwood et al. (2009) report on a case study of a schizophrenic patient who expressed a preference for his L2 when he started presenting with psychotic symptoms. Southwood et al. (2009) note that the majority of the grammatical errors made by this patient in his spontaneous L2 use are typical of L2 learner language use. To determine whether the grammatical errors made by schizophrenics are similar to or different from those made by typical L2 English speakers, we employed Morice and Ingram's (1982) assessment tool for the grammatical analysis of the spontaneous L2 speech of four schizophrenics and four (non-psychotic) controls who were matched to the schizophrenics in terms of age, gender and first language (L1) and L2 dialects. Following a comparison of the types and frequency of the two groups’ phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic errors, it was found that the two groups differed significantly only in terms of their semantic errors. It is, therefore, concluded that semantics is the locus of language-related problems in schizophrenia.