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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2288. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 340-355).

This thesis investigates the acquisition of the spatial and figurative meanings of five Spanish spatial particles, namely sobre, encima, debajo, bajo and en, by a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language at intermediate and upper-intermediate language levels. More specifically, this study aims to answer two questions. The first question considers the order of acquisition of prepositional meanings, that is, whether this is similar to a native language, with literal and more primary meanings acquired first and figurative ones later or, conversely, whether the pattern of acquisition is different to that found in a first language (Kemmerer, 2005; Lam, 2010). The second question of this research is to determine whether there are observable differences between the degree of acquisition and use of these prepositions in English compared to Spanish, and if so, what the characteristics of these differences are. To try to answer these questions, the performance of this group of participants in four behavioural tests is compared. The tests were a lexical identification task, a picture fill-in-the- blank task, a sentence generation task and a truth value judgment task. These tests were conducted both in Spanish, which the participants had begun to study at undergraduate level and English, which they had first been exposed to in school in a pre-puberty period. The results of this study indicate, first, that the acquisition of the literal and figurative meanings of the spatial particles in this study does not follow a pattern similar to that found in a native language. That is, meaning acquisition in a foreign language occurs in a parallel or simultaneous pattern. Furthermore, in a non-immersion context such as that of this study, the age at which students begin the study of a foreign language is not a decisive factor in determining the degree of mastery that students can obtain. The quantity and quality of the input students are exposed to; together with an appropriate methodology appear to be the most important factors in predicting the level of proficiency that can be reached.

The purpose of this study is to understand the factors behind Chinese student’s English-speaking proficiency. The hypothesis formed to answer this issue follows: “Large factors influencing Chinese students’ English speech proficiency is an examination-oriented education system, degree of childhood exposure to English and motivational, stress-free learning environments.”  Data has been collected by sending out an anonymous online questionnaire to Chinese students at Swedish Universities, asking about their learning experiences. A criterion for participation was to have taken either the IELTS or the TOEFL. Stephen Krashen’s theories on second language acquisition was used as source material because of its reliability and well-established ideas. Additionally, previous research and data from the IELTS or the TOEFL has also been included. The participants were also asked to include their results from the IELTS or the TOEFL for the purpose of comparing the different categories of reading, writing, speaking and listening ability, with focus placed on factors affecting speech proficiency. Our study found some support for our hypothesis. The results showed that the Chinese English education system places a lot of attention on reading which might deprioritize other parts of language learning such as speaking. The system also promotes examinations, which shapes curriculum into focusing on test results. In short, the testing-based system influence the way students are taught. Participants considering “speaking” to be highly important, but many received low speaking scores.  Our questionnaire showed that many students experienced nervousness when speaking English, the reason for this might be that they have not received comprehensible input and sufficient time to acquire the language, meaning that they are not yet ready to produce natural speech.  Ideally, a larger sample of participants, more survey questions and an in-depth interview with the students would have been preferable and resulted in more reliable results, which can be taken into consideration for future research.

Information exchange is increasing rapidly with the advent of globalization. As the language spoken by the most people in today's world, Chinese will play an important role in information exchange in the future. Therefore, we need an efficient and practical means to access the increasingly large volume of Chinese data. This thesis describes a target-dominant Chinese-English machine translation system, which can translate a given Chinese news sentence into English. We conjecture that we can improve the state of the art of MT using a TDMT approach. This system has participated in the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) 2004 machine translation competition. Experimental results on Penn Chinese Treebank corpus show that a machine translation system adopting a target-dominant approach is promising.

The purpose of the study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the emotional expression in the narration of autobiographical stories of Chinese international students in their respective languages (i.e., Mandarin and English). It addressed the methodological limitations of previous research on bilinguals' emotional expression and autobiographical memory recall. A phenomenological approach with Conversation Analysis was used to examine the bilingual lived experience of 8 graduate students from mainland China through an individual 60-minute bilingual semi-structured interview. The participants were asked to share stories before and after their arrival in the United States, as well as to self-reflect on their use of their respective languages during the interview and in their daily life. Several strategies were employed to establish four areas of trustworthiness in the qualitative data. Four major themes and related sub-themes emerged from the bilingual interview data including Mandarin as the Base Language, Affective Repertories of Mandarin (Use of Chinese Idioms and Proverbs, Use of Analogy, and Use of Repetition), Code-Switching as an Additional Communication Resource (Mixed Attitudes Towards Code-Switching, Non-Affective Functions of Code-Switching, and Affective Functions of Code-Switching), and Emotional Representation of the Bilingual Self (Open versus Reserved and Formal versus Casual). Finally, research limitations, future directions, and implications for bilingual counseling are discussed.

本研究旨在探討「中英文段落翻譯策略」對於高職學生在英文寫作中習得篇章連貫性的效用。本研究以新竹市新竹高商二年級，三十七位學生為研究對象， 每位寫四篇英文寫作及修改兩篇前測作文; 以148篇作文以及74篇修改後之作文為分析樣本; 並採用量的分析方法來驗證其效用。 本研究以兩階段驗證假設 : 第一階段以SPSS 10.0中之成對樣本T檢定(paired-samples t-test)來分析74篇前測與74篇後測英文作文; 第二階段用同樣的方式來分析74篇前測寫作與74篇學生修改前測後之作文。本研究結果顯示：（一）中英文段落翻譯練習，有助於學習者習得並運用凝結性(cohesion)技巧來提升寫作上篇章之連貫性(coherence)。（二）中英文段落翻譯練習，有助於學習者習得並運用凝結性(cohesion)技巧來修改寫作上缺乏篇章連貫性之部分。 總言之，本研究中所設計之中英文段落翻譯練習，能夠幫助高職學生習得篇章的連貫性並提升其寫作能力。翻譯練習中的凝結性技巧的設計，為學習者奠定了在寫作上習得篇章連貫性的基礎。本研究在最後，針對研究主題提出一些在英文寫作教學上的建議。 / This study aims to explore the effectiveness of Chinese-English paragraph translation device for vocational senior high school students in acquiring the coherent writing expertise. Subjects in this study are thirty-seven second-graders in Hsin-chu Commercial Vocational Senior High School in Hsin-chu city. Participants are required to finish four English compositions and two revision compositions. In total, 148 compositions and 74 revision compositions are analyzed to test the effectiveness on the basis of quantitative research. There are two stages of verification procedure. First, paired-samples t-test of SPSS 10.0 for Windows is used to analyze the seventy-four pre-test and seventy-four post-test compositions. Second, it is also used to analyze the seventy-four pre-test and seventy-four post-test revision compositions. Findings are summarized as follows: First, Chinese-English translation practice helps learners perform better in coherent writing. They acquire cohesive devices and better apply them to promoting their writing coherence. Second, Chinese-English translation practice helps learners perform a good job in revising incoherent parts of compositions. They acquire cohesive devices, apply them to revising compositions and thus promote writing coherence. To sum up, the findings show that Chinese-English paragraph translation practice in this study is effective to vocational senior high school students in acquiring coherent writing expertise and promoting their writing proficiency. The translation practice of the cohesive devices functions as a basis of acquiring coherent writing expertise for learners. Finally, some pedagogical suggestions based on this study are provided.

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