Second Language Acquisition

A notable body of research in English Language Teaching shows that not all Strategy-Based
Instruction (SBI) studies have been successful in a true sense of the word. Some SBI programs
have been effective in various skill areas but not in others, even within the same study (Oxford,
1989). The current study investigated the effect of vocabulary learning strategy instruction on
the depth of vocabulary knowledge among a group of low intermediate Iranian EFL students. To
achieve this purpose, a language proficiency test of PET (Prelimenary English Test) was
administered to ninety-three students of Islamic Azad University of Arak in Iran. Sixty one
students whose scores fell between one standard deviation below the mean and one standard
deviation above the mean were selected as the participants of the study. The selected
participants were randomly divideded into two groups and were randomly assigned to control
group and experimental group. Both groups worked on the same reading passages and textbook.
The students in experimental group were also instructed in vocabulary learning strategies and
the use of vocabulary learning strategies while the students in control group received
conventional teaching vocabulary training without any treatment for 13 sessions. The result of
the data analysis indicated that vocabulary learning strategy instruction had positive impact on
depth of vocabulary knowledge of students. The results of the study from the theoretical point of
view may lead to a better undrestanding of the nature of language learning in general ,especially
in foreign languagage learning contexts.Moreover,the findings may be found useful for the
practitioners involved in the area of curriculum planning,material development and syllabus
designing.

The present study investigates Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) and Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) in the classroom. Participants were 1746 current FL learners from around the world. We used a measure of FLE, based on Likert scale ratings of 21 items (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014), and a measure of FLCA based on 8 items extracted from the FLCAS (Horwitz, Horwitz, & Cope, 1986). Statistical analyses revealed that levels of FLE were significantly higher than those of FLCA. FLE and FLCA were linked to a number of independent variables: participants’ perception of their relative level of proficiency within the FL classroom, number of languages known, education level, number of FLs under study, age group and general level of the FL (ranging from lower-intermediate to advanced). Female participants reported both more FLE and more FLCA. Cultural background of participants also had a significant effect on their scores. Participants’ views on episodes of enjoyment in the FL class revealed the importance of teachers’ professional and emotional skills and of a supportive peer group. Many participants mentioned the moment at which they realised that their long effort in mastering an aspect of the FL paid off.

In recent second language (L2) research it has been proposed that unlike linguistic phenomena pertaining to internal interfaces, those at external interfaces pose greater difficulty to adult L2 learners and may not be fully acquired. It has further been pointed out that such problematic acquisition at the interface level should not be attributed to the entire interface and requires a more nuanced examination, and this is what the current article aims to provide. An empirical study reported here investigates whether Russian-speaking learners are able to acquire Chinese wh-topicalization that lies at the syntax–discourse interface, an instance of the external interface. The results indicate that although very advanced Russian speakers can acquire wh-topicalization in their L2 Chinese, the ability of wh-elements to topicalize in Russian–Chinese interlanguage grammars seems to be determined by an internal structure underlying Chinese wh-elements, and this is likely to be a variable that affects the linguistic behaviour at the interface level in the L2.

International Conference on Language education and Research CLEAaR2014 for experts, academics and teachers of languages, literatures and cultural studies held in Trencianske Teplica Spa, Slovakia. Working language: English.
The special section on German language, literature and culture (in German).
Special social event: the Vienna Christmas Markets and the Trencin castle

This essay review discusses Everett (2012), Language: The Cultural Tool, with particular emphasis on implications for educators. While Everett does not belong to the discourse of pedagogy and policy for classrooms, his findings and arguments resonate powerfully with the contemporary challenges of PK-12 classrooms and teacher preparation.

Students who are English language learners (ELL) are becoming a greater part of our school culture Classroom teachers need to be ready and able to teach children whose first language is not English.  But often, without some professional development it is unfair to expect that general education teachers will have the necessary knowledge and skills to work effectively with this group of students.  This article describes some very simple strategies that general education classroom teacher can used for the teaching of literacy. 

In a companion paper (Carranza et al.) submitted to this conference we discuss the importance of collecting specific L1-L2 speech corpora for the sake of developing effective Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) programs. In this paper we examine this point more deeply by reporting on a study that was aimed at compiling and analysing such a corpus to draw up an inventory of recurrent pronunciation errors to be addressed in a CAPT application that makes use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In particular we discuss some of the results obtained in the analyses of this corpus and some of the methodological issues we had to deal with. The corpus features 8.9 hours of spontaneous, semi-spontaneous and read speech recorded from 20 Japanese students of Spanish L2. The speech data was segmented and transcribed at the orthographic, canonical-phonemic and narrow-phonetic level using Praat software [1]. We adopted the SAMPA phonemic inventory for the phonemic transcription adapted to Spanish [2] and added 11 new symbols and 7 diacritics taken from X-SAMPA [3] for the narrow-phonetic transcription. Non linguistic phenomena and incidents were also annotated with XML tags in independent tiers. Standards for transcribing and annotating non-native spontaneous speech ([4], [5]), as well as the error encoding system used in the project will be addressed. Up to 13410 errors were segmented, aligned with the canonical-phonemic tier and the narrow-phonetic tier, and annotated following an encoding system that specifies the type of error (substitutions, insertion and deletion), the affected phone and the preceding and following phonemic contexts where the error occurred. We then carried out additional analyses to check the accuracy of the transcriptions by asking two other annotators to transcribe a subset of the speech material. We calculated intertranscriber agreement coefficients. The data was automatically recovered by Praat scripts and statistically analyzed with R. The resulting frequency ratios obtained for the most frequent errors and the most frequent contexts of appearance were statistically tested to determine their significance values. We report on the analyses of the combined annotations and draw up an inventory of errors that should be addressed in the training. We then consider how ASR can be employed to properly detect these errors. Furthermore, we suggest possible exercises that may be included in the training to improve the errors identified.

The aim of this research is to determine whether a prosodic training could improve the ability of French‐speaking listeners to identify the stressed syllable in Spanish words. For this, native speakers of French and native speakers of Spanish performed a pre‐test and a post‐test, involving a stress identification task. Between both tests, some of the French speakers participated in a training session, in which they were trained to perceive Spanish accentual contrasts, while the others received no training. Firstly, results show that, although their performance does not reach those of native speakers of Spanish, French‐ speaking listeners are able, after a short training, to learn to perceive Spanish accentual contrasts. More interestingly, results also reveal that the improvement from pre‐ to post‐test does not depend on the mere fact of receiving training, but rather depends on the French‐speaking listenerʹs learning ability in the training session.

Although metadiscourse has been examined in different genres, such as academic papers, newspaper editorials, school textbooks, and the like, still relatively little attention has been given to the discourse of cyber-genres, particularly blogs or weblogs.  Using Hyland’s (2005) model, this paper examined the interactive and the interactional metadiscourse in Philippine investigative journalism blogs where English is used as a second language or L2.  The corpus analyzed was taken from 20 investigative journalism blogs published in http://pcij.org/blog/, the official website of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) blogs.  Based on the findings of the study, it can be inferred that there is much evidence in the use of metadiscourse in Philippine investigative journalism blogs; thus, the use of metadiscourse as an appropriate linguistic resource is supplemental and essential.  The data revealed that the investigative journalism blogs have a higher frequency of use of interactive resources, allowing writers to organize and structure their propositions so that the text becomes more coherent to the readers.  Among the five categories of interactive resources, the use of evidentials has the highest frequency.  As regards the use of interactional resources, hedges are the most frequent.  The findings of the study likewise provide pedagogical implications for ESL writing. 

In recent years, collaborative filtering, a recommendation algorithm that incorporates a user’s data such as interest, has received worldwide attention as an advanced learning support system. However, accurate recommendations along with a user’s interest cannot be ideal as an effective learning environment. This study aims to develop and evaluate an online English vocabulary learning system using collaborative filtering that allows learners to learn English vocabulary while expanding their interests. The online learning environment recommends English news articles using information obtained from other users with similar interests. The learner then studies these recommended articles as a method of learning English. The results of a two-month experiment that compared this system to an earlier collaborative filtering system called ‘‘GroupLens’’ reveal that learners who used the collaborative filtering system developed in this study read various news articles and had significantly higher scores on topic-specific vocabulary tests than did those who used the previous system.