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Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2003 / Refer to the document

Writing instruction and assessment in foreign language courses have traditionally relied on independent writing tasks, which require learners to compose essays in response to short prompts. Concerns with the limitations of independent writing tasks (e.g., inauthenticity) have resulted in increased interest in integrated/source-based writing tasks. Integrated writing tasks require learners to use sources in their writing and thus resemble academic writing more closely than do independent writing tasks. A review of the research literature has revealed a significant lack of studies investigating both composing processes and written products in response to integrated writing tasks, French as a second language writing, source-based writing on a computer, and the use of modalities other than print sources (e.g., visual and audio sources). This study addresses the identified research gaps by investigating French learners’ composing processes, written products, and perceptions in response to an integrated writing task in which the participants read a passage, visually examine a graph, listen to an audio recording, and then write a persuasive essay based on the three sources. Participants were 38 university students enrolled in third-year French language courses. Data included think-aloud protocols, screen recordings, notes, essays, questionnaire responses, and interviews. Data analysis focused on (a) composing processes and time allocated to them; (b) total amount, location, attribution, and degree of transformation of language integrated from the sources into the essays; and (c) perceptions of the integrated writing task and source use. Results indicate that the French learners actively interacted with the sources and integrated them into their writing in a variety of ways. Despite a relatively high percentage of the total amount of textual borrowing in the essays, the participants’ tendency to acknowledge and transform language from the sources pointed to their developing abilities and skills in appropriate source use. Most students liked writing an essay in response to the integrated writing task and viewed the three sources as valuable resources for language, content, and organization. Finally, pedagogical implications for student writing in upper-level foreign language courses are discussed. By incorporating integrated writing tasks along with traditional independent writing tasks, instructors can diversify their practices in writing instruction and assessment, increase the authenticity of writing tasks, and prepare students for their future foreign language courses, academic studies, and professional pursuits.

Using interpretive qualitative research methods, this dissertation study examines how a telecollaboration in a social networking site affects learners’ intercultural competence development. In particular, it explores the changes in learners’ understanding of the concept of culture, as well as their understanding of their own and target cultures. Additionally, this study investigates what role the medium of the exchange plays in the project. Finally, it analyzes three individual learners’ experiences in an online intercultural exchange. Two intact classes of college-level language learners—U.S. students learning Spanish and Colombian students learning English—participated in an eight-week telecollaboration using Facebook. Each week students shared information about their own culture and reacted to the posts about the target culture made by the students in the partner class. This study analyzed 14 U.S. students’ experiences and learning, based on their pre- and post-telecollaboration questionnaires, reflexive portfolios, and pre- and post-telecollaboration one-on-one interviews. Data analysis demonstrated that the participants experienced a notable development in their intercultural competence. In particular, participants showed a more detailed understanding of the concept of culture, as well as the reasons for cultural learning and awareness. The activity of explaining their own culture to foreigners led the participants to an ongoing analysis of their own culture and, therefore, facilitated development in their understanding of the home culture. Specifically, participants were able to take a critical stance in their analysis and evaluate their own culture from the position of an outsider. Finally, participants gained knowledge about Colombian culture and developed an ability to analyze cultural products and practices, as well as infer information about cultural perspectives from that analysis. In general, the telecollaboration enabled participants to develop critical cultural awareness and change their worldviews from more ethnocentric to more ethnorelative. In regard to the use of Facebook, this popular social networking site proved to be uniquely suitable for a telecollaboration. It gave the participants an opportunity to create a personal learning environment that was accessible whenever and wherever they needed it. It also facilitated a bridging between participants’ learning and leisure online activities. The three case studies demonstrated that while any type of learner can benefit from telecollaboration, their experiences and the degree of intercultural competence development are individual. In addition, the development of intercultural competence appeared to be non-linear, which demonstrates the difficulty of its assessment. Based on the findings, the researcher concludes that telecollaboration facilitates the development of intercultural competence and, thus, is an effective way of addressing the challenge of culture instruction in foreign language courses. Additionally, the unique properties of social networking sites make them an easily accessible platform for telecollaboration projects.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate similarities and differences in the listening behaviors of native speakers and learners of Japanese, focusing on the production of aizuchi and head nods. The term aizuchi is often interchangeably used with the word backchannel, and these are characterized as the listener's use of short utterances such as oh or uh huh in English or hai, un, or aa in Japanese. In this study, aizuchi is defined as a short verbal utterance that is produced in response to the primary speaker's speech in Japanese. A total of 14 NS--NS or 14 NS--NNS dyads were formed to elicit native speakers' and learners' aizuchi and head nods. With the exception of a few participants in their late twenties, most of the participants were female native speakers and learners of Japanese who were of college age. The learners of Japanese were native speakers of American English who had been labeled as intermediate/high-intermediate level learners of Japanese. Each interaction included a semi-free conversation and a narrative story-telling task, both of which were recorded and transcribed for analysis. The findings indicate that the differences in the use of aizuchi and head nods produced by native speakers and learners lie not mainly in their frequency, but in the types and functions. The results show that when the frequency of aizuchi and head nods was measured with a time-based scale, which was the frequency per 60 seconds, differences were found in the frequency of head nods and total frequency of aizuchi and head nods. However, no significant difference was found in the frequency of aizuchi and head nods based on the amount of speech the speakers produced. Aizuchi were categorized into 16 groups to investigate differences in their types. The results show that the learners were using less aa-group, hee-group, iya-group aizuchi but more soo-group aizuchi compared to the native speakers. The number of different aizuchi each participant used was also measured to examine the variety of aizuchi, and it was found that both the native speakers and the learners were producing a similar number of different aizuchi. Head nods were analyzed based on nodding count, and it was revealed that more multiple head nods were observed in the learner's behaviors. The functions of aizuchi and head nods were categorized into seven groups, and the distribution of the functions was analyzed. The results indicate that learners tend to use more aizuchi to express their understanding and reaction to their interlocutors' response solicitation, while the use of aizuchi that do not show their attitude was more frequent with native speakers. The distribution of the functions of head nods was similar between the two groups. By further examining the types and the function of aizuchi and head nods, the study sheds light on which types of aizuchi learners may be lacking or overusing. Pedagogical implications are drawn from the results.

This project deals with the sociocultural and pragmatic aspects of second language acquisition. Most current research in this field examines the ability of second language learners to produce socioculturally appropriate utterances in simulated speech settings. Researchers are interested in whether students can interact adequately within the confines of both their linguistic competence and the foreign culture's interactional norms. Analyses of learners' speech routines are quite valuable to our understanding of their ability to enact conversational routines. However, they do not indicate to use what the learners understand; that is, they do not tease apart what learners understand to be true about the language from what they can do under the pressure of performance. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine whether learners of Russian perceive the sociocultural weight of the two personal pronouns for 'you,' ty (informal/intimate) and Vy (formal/polite). In this project, the term understand is used in two ways, each of which is tested empirically. First, understanding implies knowledge about the pragmatic impact of the pronouns. Do learners correctly indicate which pronoun is appropriate in context? Second, understanding is listening ability. Do learners utilize their pragmatic knowledge when they listen to native speech? Or do proficiency factors, individual learner characteristics, syntactic saliency (overt pronoun vs. pro-drop), and overall attentional limitations affect their listening ability? Students at Middlebury College and at the University of Iowa participated in two experimental tasks evaluating their pragmatic knowledge and listening ability with the ty / Vy feature: (a) a metapragmatic judgment task and (b) a listening task using video clips from famous Russian films. Results indicate that pragmatic knowledge is not significantly different across proficiency levels, nor is perception of the pronouns in a listening task; that is, beginning learners and advanced learners demonstrate similar ability with the understanding of the feature. Furthermore, female learners outperformed male learners on the listening task, although performance on the pragmatic knowledge task did not vary by gender. These results add to the body of knowledge in second language acquisition and, more specifically, to our knowledge of how pragmatic features of a language are acquired.

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., a, an, the in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: *Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), *Overuse the (Huebner 1983, Master 1987, Parrish 1987, Tarone & Parrish 1988, Thomas 1989, Ionin 2003), or *Overuse a (Leung 2001). Previously proposed explanations of the causes of article errors include: *Learners have incorrect or incomplete semantic representations (Tarone & Parrish 1988, Hawkins & Chan 1997, Goto Butler 2002, Ionin 2003), or *Learners have complete, correct semantic representations for articles, but difficulty choosing the lexical form during production due to stress on mental processing or phonological limitations (Lardiere 1998, Bruhn de Garavito & White 2000, White 2003, Goad, White, & Steele 2003). Prior studies have focused on articles, which identify discourse relationships, but have not considered other morphemes that do so as well, such as pronouns and demonstratives. Furthermore, they have focused on L2 errors in isolation and not in the context of a full discourse or contrasted with first language (L1) input. This study examined the use of articles and other discourse morphemes in 20 L1 and 20 L2 English essays. L2 essays were produced by L1 Chinese and Korean writers at two proficiency levels. The essays' noun phrases (NPs) were marked for part-of-speech, co-reference, syntactic position, and other discourse-relevant features. L2 errors were identified and categorized. Frequency data showed that L2 proficiency level more often indicated significant differences in discourse construction than L1. No significant difference between L2 and L1 writers was when considering all articles together. Breaking this down, students used a/an significantly less than L1 writers, but the use of the was not significantly different. In contrast, the error analysis showed most L2 mistakes being made in the use of the, with almost none in the use of a/an. Together the frequency and error data give a richer understanding of discourse and article use in L2 production.

L2 learner's use of communication strategies (CSs) has received an attention since 1970s (Faech & Kasper, 1983; Tarone et al., 1983). Previous studies have focused on identification and classification of CSs, the effectiveness and teachability of CS, the uses of CSs by different proficiency levels in different tasks, and individual differences in CS use. In spite of the varieties in focus of the previous researches, no research has address whether the use of CSs affects L2 acquisition over and beyond the level of sustainment of communication. Recent studies in classroom acquisition have shown beneficial effects of negotiation during peer conversation on L2 grammar acquisition. However, previous studies in peer interaction focus primarily on how a listener's negotiation move or corrective feedback helps a speaker to repair his/her erroneous utterances. One the other hand, CS research concerns with a speaker's voluntary action to make him/her understood at the time of communication difficulty. In other words, both negotiation strategies and CSs occur in the same conversational context. Even so, no research has ever investigated the relationship between them. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between the use of CSs and negotiation strategies on L2 acquisition. Twenty four students enrolled in the intermediate and advance Japanese language courses are asked to engage in two types of communicative tasks, and their development of vocabulary and grammar knowledge are examined through pre- and posttests of the target linguistic items. Also, conversations during the tasks are transcribed and qualitatively analyzed to examine the pattern of CS use and the rate of successful repair moves. The results indicate that some CSs such as appeals and code switching are beneficial, with or without a negotiation move from the interlocutor, but others may be detrimental to L2 development.

Grounded in both interactionist and collaborative learning theories, this study empirically investigates the effects of interactive second language (L2) practice on subsequent individual L2 Chinese composition writing. In L2 classrooms, the learning of writing is often treated as an individual act. However, researchers (Hamdaoui, 2006; Susser, 1994; Weissberg, 2006) have argued that writing should be socially situated, and collaborative learning of L2 writing may generate the cognitive skills needed for the development of L2 writing ability. Two forms of interactive discussion were investigated: online text chat communication and face-to-face (FTF) oral discussion. Six third-year Chinese L2 learners participated in this study. The participants conducted five online-chat and five FTF pair discussion tasks. Upon completing each interactive task, students immediately wrote a 350-character composition independently on the topic that was addressed in the interactive session. Interviews were also conducted individually with the participants to elicit learner perception data. The primary results indicated that both mediums had benefits for the development of L2 Chinese writing in both cognitive and social dimensions, including improving L2 composition writing fluency and heightened motivation for learning Chinese writing. The collaborative pattern and the transfer process, however, differed between the two mediums. The collaborative pattern in the online chats was relatively equal, whereas the collaborative pattern in the FTF conversations was relatively unequal. The transfer process from the online chats to post-chat composition writing was more of a parallel process, whereas a more selective transfer pattern was seen from the FTF sessions to the post-FTF composition writing. The FTF conversations also stimulated a deeper thinking process and activated higher-level cognitive skills. In summary, the findings in this study support the integration of interactive practice in the learning of L2 Chinese writing.

Electropalatography (EPG) provides real-time visual biofeedback for linguapalatal contact during speech and swallowing. Historically, EPG has proved to be an effective tool for assessment and treatment of a variety of speech disorders across a wide age range. The present thesis is part of a larger study examining the effectiveness of using EPG in assisting second language (L2) learners to acquire the German fricatives , [x], and //. Real and nonsense word productions were collected from six native German speakers. Electrode activation levels were generally highest for and lowest for [x]. Even when considering the impact of vowel context, [x] consistently showed only trace linguapalatal contact. Further research regarding the use of EPG as a tool for second language acquisition may include the development of linguapalatal contact maps from which L2 learners can compare their production of , [x], and // to native production. It is hoped that the information contained in this thesis will expand the current uses of EPG as a tool to assist L2 learners in acquiring non-native speech sounds.