This study investigates the use of authentic subtitled similar task videos (ASSTVs) and their relationship to second language negotiation of meaning and language production among non-native speakers of English in an online task-based language learning (TBLL) environment. Over the course of two weeks, twenty intermediate nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English from the English Language Institute at Texas A&M University engaged in four communicative tasks in pairs using an online TBLL environment designed specifically for this study, and a chat tool in WebCT Vista, a course management system provided by the university. ASSTVs were videotaped and integrated into the online TBLL environment. Participants were divided into two groups, each of which consisted of five dyads, to test the effects of ASSTVs. Five dyads were provided with the ASSTVs and the remaining five dyads were not provided with them before the task completion process. The first section of this study examines the effects of ASSTVs on negotiation of meaning, and the second section examines the effects on language production. The amount of negotiation of meaning was calculated through the negotiation of meaning sequences model developed by Gass and Varonis and revised for online communication by Smith. Language production was investigated in terms of fluency and complexity with regard to lexical and syntactic complexity. A detailed analysis of the data from the chat-scripts showed that NNSs engage in more negotiation of meaning and produce more fluent and lexically diverse language when provided with the ASSTVs than NNSs who were not provided with them. Based on these findings, this study concludes that using ASSTVs in an online TBLL environment is a viable and effective tool for promoting negotiation of meaning and language production in terms of fluency and lexical complexity.

The purpose of this study is to investigate disfluency and gesture in the second language under specific conditions such as familiarity vs. non-familiarity, concrete topic type vs. abstract topic type and speaking with native speaker vs. speaker with non-native speaker. The sample of this study was sixteen students from the Department of Basic English in Middle East Technical University (DBE), three instructors from DBE and one instructor from Modern Language Department in Middle East Technical University. Two of the instructors are native and the rest of them are non-native speakers of English. With an assigned instructor each student spoke on the following topics: making spaghetti, giving directions, spring festival and clashing midterms, and effects of religion on our life. The conversations on each topic were recorded audio-visually. Then the audio-visual data was annotated in terms of linguistic and gestural elements. In order to explore the relation among disfluency, gesture and controlled variables, quantitative data analysis methods were used. Levelt&rsquo / s speech production and Krauss&rsquo / s gesture production model were used as a basic framework. Dual Coding theory and Metalinguistic Awareness Theory was used to explain intricate results of the present study. As a result of the study, it was found that in the concrete topic condition, learners speak more fluently because of time and topic effects. Similarly, in the condition of familiar addressee and native speaker, learners speak more fluently than they do when speaking with a non-familiar or a non- native speaker.

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Background speech is annoying and distracting when working on tasks that require focus, and according to previous research, background speech is a common cause of reduced work performance. According to the interference-by-process theory, distraction is a function of the similarity between the processes involved in the involuntary analysis of the background speech and the voluntary processes involved in the task. In view of this theory, a similarity in language—between the produced language and the language that is listened to—may increase the magnitude of distraction by background chatter in comparison with when the language which is produced is different from the language that is perceived. The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether work performance—as indexed by writing fluency (WF)—varies depending on the similarity between the language that is heard in the background and the language that is produced. The experiment had a within-participants design with two factors: language to-be-produced (Swedish vs. English) and language of the background speech (Swedish vs. English). The sample constituted of 43 university students, with Swedish as native language. The result showed a main effect of language to-be-produced: WF increased when the participants produced text in their native language compared to text production in their second language. No main effect of language of background speech was found, and no interaction between these two factors was revealed.

Although language usually occurs in an interactive and world-situated context (Clark, 1996), most research on language use to date has studied comprehension and production in isolation. This thesis combines research on comprehension and production, and explores the links between them. Its main focus is on the coordination of visual attention between speakers and listeners, as well as the influence this has on the language they use and the ease with which they understand it. Experiment 1 compared participants’ eye movements during comprehension and production of similar sentences: in a syntactic priming task, they first heard a confederate describe an image using active or passive voice, and then described the same kind of picture themselves (cf. Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland, 2000). As expected, the primary influence on eye movements in both tasks was the unfolding sentence structure. In addition, eye movements during target production were affected by the structure of the prime sentence. Eye movements in comprehension were linked more loosely with speech, reflecting the ongoing integration of listeners’ interpretations with the visual context and other conceptual factors. Experiments 2-7 established a novel paradigm to explore how seeing where a speaker was looking during unscripted production would facilitate identification of the objects they were describing in a photographic scene. Visual coordination in these studies was created artificially through an on-screen cursor which reflected the speaker’s original eye movements (cf. Brennan, Chen, Dickinson, Neider, & Zelinsky, 2007). A series of spatial and temporal manipulations of the link between cursor and speech investigated the respective influences of linguistic and visual information at different points in the comprehension process. Implications and potential future applications are discussed, as well as the relevance of this kind of visual cueing to the processing of real gaze in face-to-face interaction.

This research involved two observational studies. It explored the scaffolding processes as part of classroom pedagogy. The research shed light on the way a teacher's instructional methodology took shape in the classroom. The target event for this study was the time in which a novice learner was engaged publically in uttering a sentence in Arabic in response to a task posed by the teacher. The central question was: What does the teacher do to assist and support this interactive sentence production process? It was decided to label this assistance and support as "scaffolding," i.e., temporary support to help a learner accomplish a challenging task slightly beyond his or her current level of proficiency. The research involved detailed descriptions and analysis of videotaped classroom episodes conducted in first-year Arabic language classrooms at a private liberal arts college during a three-month period. A central finding in this study was that oral Arabic sentence production was achieved through several related steps. These steps involved providing the students a pattern to follow, subsequently removing the pattern, and asking the students to produce sentences after explaining the grammatical rules. The teachers differed in the extent to which they launched models and patterns for students to follow.

This thesis explores the mental representation of subject-verb agreement, and the factors that can affect the determination of agreement in language production. It reports nine experiments that used a task in which participants produced sentence completions for visually presented complex subjects such as “The greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting”. Such completions typically agree with the head noun (greyhound) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting is jumping” but sometimes agree with the local noun (rabbits) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting are jumping”. The first experiments examined the value of the concept of markedness in subject verb number agreement to see whether it has explanatory power for languages like Slovene with more than two number values. Results from two experiments employing complex sentence preambles including a head noun post modified by a prepositional phrase or a relative clause (e.g., “The nudist(s) near the sand dune(s)”) show that Slovene number agreement differs from number agreement in languages with no dual, but that it is not possible to simply state that the singular is the least marked and the dual the most. I argue that using languages with more complex number systems allows greater insight into the processes of correct and erroneous subject-verb agreement, and shows that it is necessary to dissociate susceptibility to agreement from error-causing status. To conclude, the concept of markedness seems unable to explain my results. Semantic effects in agreement are then examined using two comparison experiments in English. Experiment 3 shows that although English has only a two value system, speakers are sensitive to semantic differences in number. Experiment 4 explores the possible influence of speakers’ native language three-value number system on their two-value second language system. It shows that native speakers of English are more sensitive to semantic number differences in English than Slovene speakers of English. Experiment 5 explores gender agreement in Slovene (which has three genders) and shows that there is a complex pattern of agreement. As with number, there is not just one number value which is problematic: neuter and masculine are most confusable, but masculine errors are also common when feminine agreement would be expected, thus suggesting that speakers revert to two different defaults, masculine and neuter. Finally, the results of four experiments examining number and gender agreement in coordinated phrases are presented. Agreement in such phrases may be resolved (i.e. the verb agrees with the whole subject) but may instead agree with one conjunct. Agreement with one conjunct is affected byword order (agreement with the nearest conjunct is most common), coordinator (e.g., single-conjunct agreement is more common after “or” than “and”) and the gender or number of the conjuncts (e.g., dual number is associated with single-conjunct agreement). Taken together, my results suggest that agreement is affected by a complex interplay of semantic and syntactic factors, and that the effects of a three-valued system are quite distinct from those of a two-valued system.

No contexto de ensino e aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira, o dicionário bilíngue aparece como um instrumento linguístico que se propõe a auxiliar os aprendizes na construção do conhecimento em relação à língua de aprendizagem. No entanto, esse instrumento tem apresentado muitas lacunas, o que resulta em dificuldades aos aprendizes no que concerne à compreensão e, sobretudo, à expressão em língua estrangeira. Tais lacunas se referem ao conteúdo informacional contido na sua microestrutura, que apresenta geralmente uma quantidade reduzida de definições, as quais não são acompanhadas de exemplos de uso na maioria dos casos. Por isso, este trabalho considera a descrição do item lexical BEM em obras lexicográficas, tanto monolíngues como bilíngues, com o objetivo de verificar se os conteúdos informacionais, sua estruturação e organização são funcionais para os consulentes em contextos de ensino e aprendizagem. Além disso, propõe uma descrição baseada em corpora do mesmo item lexical realizada com auxílio do instrumental da Linguística de Corpus, utilizada como metodologia neste trabalho. Consideramos a hipótese de que a descrição lexicográfica baseada em corpora pode se constituir num diferencial para a compreensão de uso de itens lexicais em situação de ensino e aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira. Este estudo se justifica pela necessidade que observamos na prática docente de fornecer aos estudantes instrumentos linguísticos que possam lhes melhor auxiliar na compreensão do uso das lexias em francês, especialmente em situações de produção oral e escrita. / In the context of teaching and learning a foreign language, bilingual dictionaries appear as a linguistic tool that aims to assist learners in constructing knowledge related to language learning. However, this instrument shows many gaps, which results in difficulties for learners to understand and speak in a foreign language. Such gaps generally refer to the informational content contained in its microstructure, which offers a reduced amount of definitions that, in the majority of cases, are not followed by examples of their use. Therefore, this work considers the description of the lexical item BEM in lexicographical works, both monolingual and bilingual, with the goal of checking whether the informational content, its structure and its organization are functional for users in the context of teaching and learning. It also proposes an approach based on corpora of the same lexical item performed by using the tools of Corpus Linguistics, which comprises the methodology of this work. We consider the hypothesis that the lexicographical description based on corpora may constitute an increase in the understanding of the use of lexical items when teaching and learning a foreign language. This study was justified by the need to provide students with linguistic tools that can help them better understand the use of words in French, especially in speaking and writing situations.

<p>This essay attempts to investigate the use of lexical chunks in an empirical way. It tries to probe into the possible relationship between L2 learners competence of lexical chunks and their language production through analysing results from a multiple-choice chunk test and a writing test.</p>

<p>Denna studie undersöker om dold språkförståelse i ett andraspråk kan synliggöras vid återberättande på förstaspråket. Det kan vara svårt att skilja språkutvecklingen hos barn med typisk språkutveckling med svenska som andraspråk från språkutvecklingen hos flerspråkiga språkstörda barn om man testar dem på andraspråket. Därför behövs det referensdata för normalspråkiga barn. Sexton barn i femårsåldern med normal språkutveckling, åtta enspråkiga barn med svenska som första språk och åtta flerspråkiga barn med arabiska som första språk och svenska som andraspråk, testades med <em>Buss-sagan</em> (<em>Buss Story Test</em>, BST) och TROG (<em>Test for Reception of Grammar</em>). De flerspråkiga barnen fick sagan uppläst på svenska och återberättade först på svenska och sedan på arabiska. Resultatet i den kvantitativa analysen visade att de enspråkiga barnen fick signifikant bättre resultat för parametern information på BST och bättre resultat på TROG. Däremot skiljde sig resultatet för parametern information i berättelserna på arabiska inte signifikant från resultatet i de flerspråkiga barnens berättelser på svenska. Den kvalitativa analysen visade att de flerspråkiga barnens återberättelser på svenska och arabiska jämfört med de enspråkiga barnens framför allt lexikalt och diskursivt var mindre komplexa och korrekta. Detta kan till viss del bero på testsituationen, men också på brister i språkförståelse och uttrycksmedel. Slutsatsen man kan dra är att man som logoped behöver vara medveten om att olika språkliga strukturer utvecklas i olika takt både i första- och andraspråket, och att det behövs anpassat inflöde på alla språk för att underlätta språkförståelsen och den lexikala utvecklingen.</p> / <p>This study examines if language comprehension which may be concealed in a second language can be made visible by retelling in the first language. It can be difficult to separate the language development of typically developed children with Swedish as their second language from that of multilingual children with language impairment. Therefore, reference data for multilingual children with typical language development are needed. Sixteen five-year-old children with normal language development, eight monolingual children with Swedish as their first language and eight multilingual children with Arabic as their first language and Swedish as their second language, were tested with <em>Buss Story Test</em> (BST) and TROG (<em>Test for Reception of Grammar</em>). The multilingual children got the story of <em>Buss Story Test</em> read to them in Swedish and then retold the story first in Swedish and then in Arabic. The result of the quantitative analysis showed that monolingual children achieved significantly better results for the parameter information on BST and better results on TROG. On the other hand, the result of the parameter information in the children’s Arabic retellings did not differ significantly from that in the multilingual children’s Swedish retellings. The qualitative analysis showed that the multilingual children’s retellings in Swedish and Arabic compared with the monolingual children’s retellings were less complex and correct in regard mostly to lexical and narrative structure. This can, to a certain extent, be due to the testing situation, but also due to deficiencies in language comprehension and means of expression. The authors conclude that speech therapists need to be aware of the fact that different linguistic structures develop at a different rate both in the first and the second language, and that tailored input in all the children’s languages is needed in order to facilitate comprehension and lexical development.</p>