This study reports information received from basic writing instructors at colleges in the Christian College Coalition, a group of 77 Christian, liberal arts colleges in the U. S. and Canada. Respondents completed a questionnaire and submitted sample syllabi and writing assignments. The study compares data from the respondents to current theories of basic writing instruction, most notably those of Andrea Lunsford and Mike Rose. It also compares the results to a similar study of all colleges by Joe Trimmer.The study found that the Christian College Coalition population was similar to the national population with regard to placement methods, textbook choice, and course goals. However, the study showed that a significant portion of basic writing courses are taught by tenure track English department faculty members. This finding represents a strength of this population as the national study showed that almost no basic writing courses were taught by tenure track faculty. In addition, the atmosphere of the small, Christian liberal arts colleges encourages low teacher/student ratios and more contact between faculty members and students in writing classes. These are areas of strength the Coalition schools should develop further.This study also reports and analyzes actual writing assignments and syllabi, some of the course materials Stephen North calls "lore." The examination of these materials shows more clearly than survey responses the types of writing students are actually doing in basic writing classes. / Department of English

Learning a second language (L2) is essential in today’s globalized world. However, learners generally have low sensitivity to grammar, as L2 acquisition proceeds largely through functions. Thus, pedagogical assistance appears to be necessary to trigger learners’ attention to L2 grammar, but research shows no consensus on which type of instruction best promotes it. Moreover, few empirical studies have examined 'acquisition' of target constructions, which entails mappings between form, meaning, and function. To address this gap, the present study investigated the effects of implicit and explicit instruction on L2 acquisition of the English passive. The passive was chosen as the target construction due to the intricate mappings between form, meaning, and function encompassed in it. The study employed an experimental design including a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest, with five treatment sessions between the pretest and posttests. Participants were 99 Korean English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners, randomly assigned to two experimental groups that received implicit or explicit instruction, respectively, or a control group. Implicit instruction comprised typographically enhanced passive constructions to increase perceptual saliency; explicit instruction comprised a grammar activity to raise the participants’ consciousness about the passive construction. Five measurement tasks were employed to examine any changes in the participants’ knowledge of, and ability to use, the passive: a grammaticality judgment task (GJT), a sentence pair task, a closed discourse completion task (DCT), and spoken and written production tasks. Results from quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data yielded three main findings. First, implicit instruction had a more significant, beneficial effect than explicit instruction on the overall mappings between the form, meaning, and function of the passive. Second, the difference appeared to be more salient for meaning and function, whereas both types of instruction had almost equal benefits for form; yet, the production tasks seemed to exhibit a greater score decrease as for meaning and function over time in both treatment conditions. Finally, each type of instruction had similar effects on the performance of high- and low-level learners. Overall, these findings suggest that both types of instruction are beneficial for L2 acquisition but implicit instruction is more effective than explicit instruction.

This study investigated the effect of first language (L1) transfer on Arabic ESL learners' acquisition of the relative clauses, the passive voice and the definite article. I used Contrastive Analysis (CA) and Error Analysis (EA) to analyze 50 papers written by Arabic ESL students at the ACTFL Advanced Mid proficiency level. The analysis was paired with interviews with five advanced students to help determine whether L1 transfer was, in fact, influencing students' errors predicted by CA. Students in this study made L1 errors along with other errors. Although no statistical difference was found between the frequency of transfer and other (non-transfer) errors, L1 transfer errors were still common for many learners in this data. The frequency of the relative clause L1 transfer errors was slightly higher than other errors. However, passive voice L1 errors were as frequent as other errors whereas definite article L1 errors were slightly less frequent than other errors. The analysis of the interviews suggested that L1 still played a crucial role in influencing learners errors. The analysis also suggested that the frequency of transfer errors in the papers used in this study might have been influenced by CA-informed instruction students received and students' language level. Specifically, learners reported that both factors helped them reduce the frequency of L1 transfer errors in their writing. The teaching implications of this study include familiarizing language instructors with possible sources of errors for Arabic ESL learners. Language instructors should try to identify sources of errors by conducting their own analyses or consulting existing literature on CA paired with EA. Finally, I recommend adopting a CA-informed instruction to help students reduce and overcome errors that are influenced by their L1.

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It has not been my aim to provide conclusive evidence for or against anyone hypothesis regarding Time and Tense. I have simply attempted to collect together and collate much of what has been written on the topic of tense in English, in order to show what the current trends of thought are. In Chapter One I presented a brief survey of some of the more basic notions associated with time and tense, in order to provide a background for the more linguistic approach to follow. I therefore examined such issues as the difference between time and tense, the problem of the passage and directionality of time, of the present moment, time and space , tense as a universal, "and various features of tense systems. I sketched Bull's system of scalars, vectors and axes as representative of our English tense system. Chapter Two dealt with time and logic, but as I am a mere layman in matters logical, I refrained from discussing any individual logical system in depth, and rather discussed various problems which appear to confront the logician in formulating a tensed or tenseless logic. This chapter aimed at providing a better understanding of the linguistic issues to follow, for time and logic are intimately connected with language. Chapter Three was more linguistically oriented, and in it I attempted to provide a broad outline of the development of thoughts about tense before the Transformationalist period (pre 1960). Because of the vast scope involved, I had, perforce, to be brief at times. I gave attention to tense in classical grammatical studies, and summarized how it was seen from about 1500 to 1800. I gave more detailed treatment to the twentieth century, focussing specifically on grammarians like Jespersen (1933), Twaddell (1960), Ota (1963), Palmer (1965) and others - all, writers typical of the structuralist era. At the end of Chapter Three I provided an overall summary of ideas on the main tenses by the end of the structuralist period - ideas which were to change radically within the next few years. In Chapter Four I discussed the ideas of tense of some of the main transformationalist/generativists - Diver (1964), Crystal (1966), Huddlestone (1968), Gallagher (1970), McCawley (1971) and Seuren (1974), in an attempt to show how theories on tense were becoming increasingly abstract, and how most data indicated that it is highly probable that tense is an abstract higher predicate of the sentence in which it appears in surface structure, closely related to temporal adverbs. Chapter Five continued in the same vein. I tried to show, using syntactic tests, that tense is a higher predicate, and used arguments involving Conjunction Reduction (based on Kiparsky (1968)), VP Constituency, Sequence of Tense, Pronominalization, and Quantification. In Chapter Six I focussed more closely on tense-time adverbials, in order to show that they have the same syntactic properties as tense, are also probably deep superordinate predicates, and are closely related to tense. My suggestion was that either tense is derived from temporal adverbs or vice versa, as this would simplify the grammar. The derivation procedures at the end of the chapter (6.8) were largely based on Hausmann (1971). I made no detailed reference to extralinguistic matters which affect tenses, in this study - such factors as are diScussed by G. Lakoff (1971) (presuppositions and relative well-formedness) and by R. Lakoff (1975). Tense is not a matter of pure Structuralism, just as language is not - extralinguistic factors ought to be accounted for before any study can claim to be conclusive. For this reason I do not in any way claim to have made an exhaustive study of time and tense - I have simply attempted to summarize and coordinate thoughts on the subject, and to suggest tentatively that the most adequate grammar of English would probably derive tense from underlying temporal adverbs.

Previous research has established the importance of the nouns and noun modification in academic writing because of their commonness and complexity. However, little is known about how noun modification varies across the rhetorical sections of research articles. Such a perspective is important because it reflects the interplay between communicative function and linguistic form. This study used a corpus of empirical research articles from the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching to explore the connection between article sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion; IMRD) and six types of noun modification: relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, ed-clause postmodifiers, prepositional postmodifiers, premodifying nouns, and attributive adjectives. First the frequency of these six types of noun modification was compared across IMRD sections. Second, the study also used a hand coded analysis of the structure and structural patterns of a sample of noun phrases through IMRD sections. The results of the analyses showed that noun modification is not uniform across IMRD sections. Significant differences were found in the rates of use for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrase postmodifiers. There were no significant differences between sections for relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, or ed-clause postmodifiers. The differences between sections for attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and prepositional phrases illustrate the way the functions of these structures intersects with the functions of IMRD sections. For example, Methods sections describe research methods, which often have premodifying nouns (corpus analysis, conversation analysis, speech sample, etc.); this function of Methods sections results in a higher use of premodifying nouns compared to other sections. Results for structures of noun phrase across IMRD sections showed that the common noun modification patterns, such as premodifying noun only or attributive adjective with prepositional phrase postmodifier, were mostly consistent across sections. Noun phrase structures including pre-/post- or no modification did have differences across sections, with Introduction sections the most frequently modified and Methods sections the least frequently modified. The different functions of IMRD sections call for different rates of usage for noun modification, and the results reflected this. The results of this research benefit teachers of graduate students of applied linguistics in students' research reading and writing by describing the use of noun modification in the sections of empirical research articles and aiding teachers in the design of materials to clarify the use of noun modification in these IMRD sections.

The purpose of this two-phase, explanatory mixed methods study was to understand the benefits of teaching grammar from three different learning methods: face-to-face, online personalized learning lab and a blended learning method. The study obtained quantitative results from a pre and post-tests, a general survey and writing assignment rubrics from three English 1301 classes and then follow-up interviews with focus groups from each class to explore those results in more depth. In the first phase, quantitative research questions addressed the relationship of grammar teaching methods and grammar acquisition with students at a two-year technical and academic college. In the second phase, used focus groups to perform qualitative interviews to better explore the quantitative results.

Purpose of the project is to determine whether Merit Software program, "Write it right" could be effective in a whole class setting (using one computer) rather than in a computer lab. The further purpose was to identify if this strategy was more effective than the use of the traditional textbook method of grammar study in the ninth grade. Lesson plans and a software description are included.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Because English is the most widely-spoken second language in South Africa, it is becoming increasingly important for learners to be able to master the English language, including English grammatical structures; not only to do well at their internal and external school examinations, but also to communicate effectively in a progressively anglicised educational, occupational and commercial society. Educators of English First Additional Language (FAL) often have to augment existing textbook material, especially in the field of grammar teaching and learning, as many of the more recent textbook publications do not make sufficient provision for the communicative teaching and learning of grammatical structures. One way in which textbook material could be augmented would be to develop interactive multimedia learning material for the teaching of grammar. However, many South African English FAL classrooms are underresourced in terms of computers and other technological tools needed to use such interactive computer assisted language learning (CALL) material. The learners being taught in these technologically barren classrooms may fall far behind their peers in terms of exposure to interactive educational technology, i.e. they may become victims of the digital divide. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the digital divide could be addressed with the development and use of computer assisted language learning material that makes provision for learner interactivity and could be used in classrooms with minimal access to technological tools. To determine the attitudes of educators with regard to grammar instruction in general, as well as the use of technology in the teaching and learning of grammar and the general accessibility of technology in English FAL classrooms, educators of English FAL at nine rural, Afrikaans-medium schools situated in low-income communities in the Western and Northern Cape were asked to complete a questionnaire. The results of this survey were used to ascertain what kind of multimedia learning material would be suitable for use in technologically challenged English FAL classrooms. As part of this study, exemplar material has been developed to make a recommendation regarding the type of multimedia material that could be used in technologically under-resourced classrooms. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Aangesien Engels die taal is wat die meeste as tweede taal in Suid-Afrika gebesig word, raak dit toenemend belangrik vir leerders om die Engelse taal, insluitende die grammatikale strukture van Engels te bemeester; enersyds om goed te doen in hulle interne en eksterne skooleksamens en andersyds om effektief te kan kommunikeer in ’n toenemend verengelsde onderwys-, werks- en ekonomiese gemeenskap. Opvoeders van Engels Eerste Addisionele Taal (EAT) moet baiekeer bestaande handboekmateriaal aanvul, aangesien baie van die nuwe handboeke nie voldoende voorsiening maak vir die kommunikatiewe onderrig en leer van grammatikale strukture nie. Een manier waarop handboekmateriaal aangevul kan word, is om interaktiewe multimedia-leermateriaal te ontwikkel om grammatika te onderrig. Baie Suid-Afrikaanse klaskamers is egter nie voldoende toegerus met rekenaars en ander tegnologiese materiaal wat nodig sou wees om sodanige interaktiewe rekenaar-ondersteunde leermateriaal te gebruik nie. Leerders wat onderrig word in sulke tegnologies swak toegeruste klaskamers mag dus toenemend tekort skiet in vergelyking met hulle meer bevoorregte tydgenote. Die hoofdoel van hierdie studie was om te ondersoek of hierdie digitale skeiding aangespreek kan word deur die ontwikkeling en gebruik van rekenaar ondersteunde leermateriaal wat, terwyl dit voorsiening maak vir leerder-interaktiwiteit, ook gebruik kan word in klaskamers met minimale toegang tot tegnologie. Om die houdings van opvoeders ten opsigte van grammatika-onderrig in die algemeen, sowel as die gebruik van tegnologie in die leer en onderrig van grammatika; en die algemene beskikbaarheid van tegnologie in Engels EAT klaskamers te ondersoek, is opvoeders aan nege plattelandse, Afrikaans-medium skole geleë in lae-inkomste woonareas in die Wes- en Noord-Kaap gevra om ’n vraelys te voltooi. Die uitslag van hierdie ondersoek is gebruik om vas te stel watter tipe multi-media leermateriaal geskik sou wees vir gebruik in tegnologies swak toegeruste Engels EAT klaskamers. As deel van hierdie studie is voorbeeld-materiaal ontwikkel om ’n aanbeveling te maak rakende die tipe materiaal wat onder hierdie omstandighede gebruik sou kon word.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of normal instruction supplemented by the computer-assisted instruction English program Grammar Game on achievement and attitude scores of vocational-technical students in Thailand. The experimental design was a 2 x 2 factorial ANOVA design. One hundred seventy-eight students at the Lanna Polytechnical College in Thailand were randomly selected from the population of 10 classrooms. Four classes were intact groups, with two classes randomly assigned to the experimental groups which received Lecture/CAI and the other two as control groups which received Lecture. The 89 students in each group were divided into high- and low- ability, based on their previous English scores. Subjects received treatment for nine weeks. Pre-test and post-test instruments on achievement and attitude were administered to both groups. The Statistical Analysis System (SAS), and the General Linear Model (GLM) package computer program yielded the MANOVA results. Based on data analysis, the findings were as follows: (1) There was a significant difference between the students in a Lecture/CAI English program and the students in a Lecture English program when they were compared simultaneously on the achievement and attitude scores, F(l, 176) = 18.97, p < .05. (2) There was no significant interaction between the types of teaching methods and levels of ability when achievement was used as the dependent variable, F(l, 174) = .48, p > .05. (3) There was no significant interaction between the types of teaching methods and levels of ability when attitude was used as the dependent variable, F(l, 174) = .06, p > .05. The conclusion was that normal instruction supplemented by CAI improved achievement and attitude scores. On the other hand, the effect of two types of methods on achievement remained the same for high- and low-ability students and so did the effect of two types of methods on attitude. Future research should examine different CAI software packages, CAI within a full year, the effects of ability on achievement and attitude, background knowledge, more levels of independent variables, characteristics of an effective CAI program, and a case study with larger population in Thailand.