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This essay aims to investigate Swedish upper secondary school students' perceptions about their attitudes and motivation towards extensive reading in English. Further, this essay also aims to investigate students' attitudes towards self-selected reading as a potentially more motivational classroom strategy in comparison to teacher-selected reading. The main research questions addressed are 'What are Swedish upper secondary school students' attitudes to extensive reading in English?' and 'Do the students perceive self-selected reading to be more motivational than teacher-selected reading?'. The hypothesis is that students recognize learner autonomy to have a positive effect upon their reading attitudes and therefore prefer self-selected reading materials. Through collecting data using mixed methods consisting of 40 questionnaires and seven interviews, and further analyzing this data using qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics, this study presents several findings. The results show that students’ attitudes are mixed: students are both more positive and negative towards extensive reading in English than for reading in general. Through further comparing the students' attitudes regarding the two reading selection practices—self-selected or teacher-selected reading—this study shows that 90% of students believe that self-selected reading would positively impact their reading enjoyment. Additionally, the results also imply that it is not necessarily learner autonomy that students perceive as likely to improve their reading attitudes, but that they rather just want their reading materials to align with their personal interests. This degree project essay concludes that many of the students are not feeling intrinsically motivated to read in their English class, and are thus relying on extrinsic factors for motivation instead, such as grades, which leaves them with negative reading experiences and attitudes. Finally, some pedagogical implications in relation to this study's findings are discussed.

This study examines (1) whether L2 learners’ oral fluency and accuracy improve through conversation practice with AI tutors in a Japanese language learning app, (2) when fluency increases, and (3) which learning cycle is most effective. Ten participants joined the study and practiced conversations with Kaizen Languages’ AI tutors for three weeks. Learners selected their preferred learning cycle: a group with fewer lessons to complete per day but more practice days per week or a group with more lessons to complete per day but less frequent practice days per week. After three weeks of self-study, participants took an oral test to show how much they improved their fluency and accuracy in new contexts. The results of this study show that not only did learners’ oral fluency improve with the use of the Kaizen app, but their oral accuracy also increased. In addition, learners who improved their fluency practiced repeatedly, and their fluency improved until three or four repetitive practices. Although this study did not find an effective learning cycle, it implies that the ideal learning cycle requires at least three times of practice to improve fluency, while five to six times of practice produces higher accuracy.

Developing syntactic complexity in writing is an important goal for many adult language learners. However, little is known about the effect of different writing practice tasks on the development of syntactic complexity. Furthermore, it is unclear to what degree syntactic complexity is related to writing quality. The main purpose of this study was to compare the longitudinal effects of three types of writing tasks on the development of syntactic complexity and writing quality. In order to investigate these relationships, a mixed-methods design was used. A quantitative component that was a quasi-experimental, longitudinal investigation was combined with an embedded qualitative component which involved eliciting stimulated recalls from participants from two of the experimental groups in the study. For the quantitative component, the participants (N = 105) were first-year, non-English majors at a four-year, co-educational university in western Japan. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: a sentence-combining group and a translation group. These two experimental groups were compared to an intact timed-writing group, which served as a comparison group. Writing samples were collected at three points throughout the year and analyzed based on five measures of syntactic complexity: mean length of sentence, mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit, and T-units per sentence. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were used to analyze the five measures to investigate statistical differences across time for each group. One-way ANOVAs were used to analyze the five measures to ascertain differences between groups at each time. Furthermore, all the writing samples were evaluated by human raters for writing quality using an analytic rubric. Ratings were analyzed and investigated for changes in quality across time and between groups, as well as to examine the overall relationship between syntactic complexity and quality. For the qualitative component, seven participants were selected from the experimental groups to participate in stimulated recalls. The data were analyzed and coded to investigate the cognitive processes underlying each task. The results of the quantitative study indicated that the participants in the translation and sentence-combining groups made small, but significant gains in syntactic complexity across time. The translation group made significant growth on clauses per T-unit while the sentence-combining group made significant growth across time on mean length of sentence, mean length of T-unit, and T-units per sentence. The timed-writing group was not able to sustain significant growth across time. In the between-groups analyses, there were significant differences between the sentence-combining group and the other groups on mean length of sentence and T-units per sentence, indicating that the participants in that group demonstrated more coordination, and to a lesser degree, more subordination in their writing. In terms of quality of writing, the results indicated an overall weak, statistically significant positive correlation between measures of syntactic complexity and human rating judgments. Among all of the syntactic measures, T-units per sentence correlated the strongest with rating scores. The results of the qualitative component indicated that the participants practicing sentence-combining tasks focused most of their attention toward syntactic aspects of language while the participants in the translation group focused their attention on lexical aspects of language while performing the tasks. The findings of this study show that the development of syntactic complexity is influenced by writing practice tasks and that tasks that direct learners’ attention toward features of the language are more likely to hasten the development of syntactic complexity. Among the tasks, sentence-combining showed the most potential in developing syntactic complexity, particularly for increasing the use of compound sentences. However, none of the writing practice tasks led to significant gains in writing quality, in part because syntactic complexity was shown to have a moderately weak relationship to overall writing quality. / Teaching & Learning

In a series of studies using semantic relatedness judgment response times, Jiang (2000, 2002, 2004a) has claimed that L2 lexical entries fossilize with their equivalent L1 content or something very close to it. In another study using a more productive test of lexical knowledge (Jiang 2004b), however, the evidence for this conclusion was less clear. The present study is a partial replication of Jiang (2004b) with Japanese learners of English. The aims of the study are to investigate the influence of the first language (L1) on second language (L2) lexical knowledge, to investigate whether lexical knowledge displays frequency-related, emergent properties, and to investigate the influence of the L1 on the acquisition of L2 word pairs that have a common L1 equivalent. Data from a sentence completion task was completed by 244 participants, who were shown sentence contexts in which they chose between L2 word pairs sharing a common equivalent in the students' first language, Japanese. The data were analyzed using the statistical analyses available in the programming environment R to quantify the participants' ability to discriminate between synonymous and non-synonymous use of these L2 word pairs. The results showed a strong bias against synonymy for all word pairs; the participants tended to make a distinction between the two synonymous items by assigning each word a distinct meaning. With the non-synonymous items, lemma frequency was closely related to the participants' success in choosing the correct word in the word pair. In addition, lemma frequency and the degree of similarity between the words in the word pair were closely related to the participants' overall knowledge of the non-synonymous meanings of the vocabulary items. The results suggest that the participants had a stronger preference for non-synonymous options than for the synonymous option. This suggests that the learners might have adopted a one-word, one-meaning learning strategy (Willis, 1998). The reasonably strong relationship between several of the usage-based statistics and the item measures from R suggest that with exposure learners are better able to use words in ways that are similar to native speakers of English, to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts and to recognize the boundary separating semantic overlap and semantic uniqueness. Lexical similarity appears to play a secondary role, in combination with frequency, in learners' ability to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate contexts when using L2 word pairs that have a single translation in the L1. / CITE/Language Arts

Building upon current research in native-speaker (NS) perception of L2 learner phonology (Zielinski, 2008; Derwing & Munro, 2009), the present investigation analyzed multiple dimensions of NS speech perception in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the specific linguistic elements and attitudinal variables that contribute to perceptions of accent in learner speech. In this mixed-methods study, Spanish monolinguals (n = 18) provided information regarding their views of L1 American English (AE) speakers learning Spanish and also evaluated the extemporaneous production of L2 learners from this same population. The evaluators' preconceived attitudinal notions of L1 AE speakers learning Spanish negatively correlated with numerical accentedness ratings for the speech samples, indicating that evaluators with more positive perceptions of the learners rated their speech as less accented. Following initial numerical ratings, evaluators provided detailed commentary on the individual phonological elements from each utterance that they perceived as "nonnative." Results show that differences in the relative salience of the nonnative segmental productions correspond with certain phonetic and phonemic processes occurring within the sounds, such as aspiration, spirantization and lateralization. / Spanish

Academic writing in U.S. higher education often involves textual borrowing, referred to as the integration and documentation of reading sources and carried out with summaries, quotes and paraphrases. Second language (L2) English students are likely to use sources inappropriately and consequentially are accused of plagiarism based on a moral judgment. A body of research on textual borrowing including this study has provided strong evidence that these students' inappropriate source use does not result from their intention to steal other's intellectual property and language, but from their cultural backgrounds or situated factors in their U.S. academic contexts. Few research studies, however, offer a thorough view of how both cultural backgrounds and situated factors are associated with L2 students' textual borrowing practices; much empirical attention has focused on a more limited examination of Chinese student populations. In this respect, this study explores the complex and dynamic nature of Korean graduate students' source use by investigating faculty expectations both in Korea and in their L2 academic setting and these students' perceptions and practices of textual borrowing. For these investigations, a qualitative research study was conducted, and multiple sources of data were analyzed: (a) interviews with two faculty informant groups and the student participants, (b) observations of the Master's meeting and group study meetings, (c) tutoring sessions at the Writing Center, and (d) written texts, including institutional and instructional documents, email messages, and multiple handouts, outlines, and essays. These sets of data were analyzed using two different methods: content analysis and text analysis. The findings of this qualitative research revealed that both cultural and situated factors were associated with the Korean students' understandings of and changes in textual borrowing practices. With regard to their initial understandings, the results showed that although the participants understood textual borrowing in terms of citation methods and writing skills, their practices were not aligned with their perceptions nor with faculty expectations. However, I noted that in the process of the research period, most of them were able to achieve the textual purposes by utilizing reading sources strategically and appropriately and thus fulfill the academic goals required in the situated context. Based on these findings, pedagogical implications are discussed. / CITE/Language Arts

This paper presents a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews investigating 1) How teachers in the course English 6 interpret the terms "relatively varied" and "well-grounded and balanced", and how their interpretations differed, 2) How do the teachers interpret the terms in relations to the National Agency for Education’s commentary material?, and 3) What kind of resources do the teachers use to understand those terms? The reason for conducting this research is to gain a greater understanding of how teachers in the course English 6 in upper secondary school interpret the terms in the requirements. The terms in our requirements leave a lot of room for interpretations, and I want to find out how teachers with experiences of teaching interpret the terms in order to better understand how they can be interpret. My finding revealed that three out of four of the interviewed teachers did not mention the terms in their description of them, they brought in other aspects from the requirements, and did not address neither of the terms clearly. This applied to all the teachers, except for T4. The teacher that did address the terms was the only one who read the National Agency’s commentary material, therefore T4’s interpretations of the term aligned closest to the description in the commentary material. From the answers the teachers provided me with, they seemed to interpret the requirements in their own way and this is a validity and reliability issue when assessing the students’ texts. The teachers answers are also discussed from a norm-referenced perspective.

Motivation has been shown to be critical for L2 language development and it is thus imperative that teachers consider how classroom methods and tools contribute to student’s motivational state. One such tool, formative feedback, has been shown to help motivate students to complete tasks, and yet formative feedback may also potentially demotivate students under certain conditions. The current study uses semi-structured interviews of five 7-9 grade English teachers in the south of Sweden to investigate some teachers’ views and experiences of written formative feedback and its effect on facilitating or hindering student motivation in the L2 classroom. Regarding usage patterns, we found that teachers generally implement formative feedback in accordance with what is promoted in recent research literature. Furthermore, we found that teachers consider formative feedback to positively affect students in terms of increased motivation and positive academic outcomes. However, teachers also stress the importance of providing the right amount of formative feedback in a timely manner to preclude potentially negative effects such as students not understanding the feedback and thus, becoming demotivated and unable to learn from the feedback provided. Our study indicates that teachers in the Swedish L2 classroom context implement formative feedback to facilitate motivation, since they believe the concept helps students develop their knowledge, furthers engagement, creates awareness of development and provides a driving force within students to work harder.