This thesis begins with the premise that strategies are important if students are to learn effectively, and that this applies no less to language than to any other field of learning. After issues of terminology and definition are addressed, there is a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the language learning strategy concept. Since the concept of proficiency is also central to the thesis, issues relating to the definition and assessment of proficiency are considered before previous research in the language learning strategy field is reviewed. This research was carried out in three stages in a private language school in Auckland, New Zealand. Part A, Section 1 used the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford, 1990) as the basic instrument to investigate the relationship between language learning strategies and proficiency and to examine the strategy patterns used by more proficient students. Part A, Section 2 used the same data to investigate language learning strategy use according to learner variables (nationality, gender, age). Part B used interviews to investigate language learning strategy use by individuals and Part C used a classroom based programme to explore means of instructing students in language learning strategy use and also to construct an original questionnaire using student input (the English Language Learning Strategy Inventory or ELLSI). This questionnaire was used to further investigate the relationship between language learning strategy use and proficiency and also changes in strategy use over time as well as teachers’ perspectives on language learning strategy use. The results of the SILL phase of the study revealed a significant relationship between language learning strategies and proficiency (a finding supported by the results of the ELLSI study) and also significant differences in strategy use according to nationality, while the interviews revealed some useful insights regarding the use of language learning strategies by individuals. From the longitudinal section of the study it was found that those students who made the most progress were the ones who most increased the frequency of their language learning strategy use. The results of the teachers’ survey indicated that teachers regarded language learning strategies as highly important, an encouraging result in terms of positive implications for a good accord between teachers and students in the teaching/learning situation. The classroom programme, however, aimed at exploring ways to promote language learning strategy use among students, was only a lukewarm success and much work remains to be done to find ways of making insights regarding language learning strategies available to students. The thesis concludes by bringing together the key findings and suggesting areas for further research.

Master of Science / Psychological Sciences / Richard J. Harris / Figurative language use is not limited to poetry or literature but is a ubiquitous part of speech. Studies that looked at figurative language comprehension have shown that some cognitive mechanisms, such as working memory, may be involved in figurative language comprehension. For example, individuals with high working memory span tend to produce deeper metaphor interpretations. The current work was interested in how working memory is involved in a particular figure of speech comprehension: idioms. An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be simply deduced from the literal meanings of the words that comprise that idiom. Idioms can vary according to their compositionality, which refers to the extent with which meanings of the idiom constituents provide cues for the idiom's idiomatic meaning. A number of researchers agreed upon certain idioms being decomposable and other idioms being fixed. The two different types were used in the Main Study. Models of idiom comprehension also vary from traditional "lexical look-up" models that consider idioms as multi-word lexical units stored as such in speakers' mental lexicons to "nonlexical" models, such as the Configuration Hypothesis, that states that an idiom as a whole does not have a separate lexical representation in the mental lexicon. Both models are considered in this work. Finally, understanding idiomatic expressions may require inhibiting irrelevant literal information. For example, literal meanings of the words dogs and cats in an idiom it is raining cats and dogs have to be inhibited in order to gather the figurative meaning of the expression. Thus, the main objective of the current work was to assess the role of working memory in idiom comprehension, as well as to explore whether idiom compositionality had an effect on how fast idioms were interpreted, while also considering implications for the two main models of idiom comprehension. A Preliminary Study narrowed down the list of idioms to the 26 that were used in the Main study, ensuring that both types of idioms did not differ in familiarity or length. The Main Study consisted of four tasks: working memory (Operation span task), inhibition (reading with distractions), idiom comprehension, and familiarity. Seventy-three general psychology students participated in the Main Study. The data were analyzed by several regression analyses and t-tests. The main finding was that there seems to be a difference in a way the two accepted types of idioms are interpreted: fixed idioms were interpreted faster than decomposable idioms. This is consistent with the lexical lookup hypothesis but only for fixed idioms and suggests that readers may not have to analyze the literal word meanings of fixed idioms when interpreting them, thus making their interpretation faster, since retrieving is faster than computing. Neither familiarity nor idiom length could account for this difference. On the other hand, neither operation span nor the number of critical errors committed by participants on the inhibition task predicted how long it took participants to interpret either type of idioms. Several possible explanations for such results are discussed, as well as the limitations and future directions.

Master of Arts / Modern Languages / Earl K. Brown / Considerable research exists on subjunctive versus indicative mood patterns of use by both native and L2 speakers of Spanish. Though intermediate level textbooks expose L2 learners to the various tenses of the subjunctive mood, literature has shown that students still struggle with its implementation in their discourse, and various reasons are offered. Little has been done to analyze the prescribed uses that textbooks offer to students regarding mood selection and how these prescribed uses may differ from what Spanish speakers do in real life. The paper first offers a brief explanation of L2 learners’ mood selection in Spanish, followed by a description of Spanish moods and the realis/irrealis dichotomy that is often placed at the center of Spanish mood selection in the literature. Following this, the study offers an analysis of six intermediate level Spanish textbooks’ prescribed uses of two past subjunctive tenses (present perfect and imperfect), as prior research has shown an overlap in the functions of their indicative counterparts. The textbook analysis is then compared to a corpus composed of messages sent on the social media platform Twitter, containing one of six emotive phrases as main clauses, with three in present, three in preterit. The results show that Spanish-speaking users of Twitter employ the prescribed subjunctive mood more often when the verb in the main clause is expressed in the preterit instead of the present, though no such tendency is discussed in the textbooks. The results also reveal an overlap in the functions of the past tense subjunctive moods. The present perfect subjunctive (i.e. haya trabajado ‘has worked’) is used in the subordinate clause nearly 40% of the time with emotive verbal main clauses expressed in the preterit, where the imperfect subjunctive would normally be expected according to prescriptive norms. This pattern of use is not discussed in any of the analyzed textbooks. A discussion of the limitations of the study, implications for textbook writers and further research then follow.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Mary T. Copple / Using the framework for politeness developed by Brown and Levinson (1987), this research evaluates the production of politeness strategies by sophomore and senior EFL learners in Afghanistan by focusing on the language used in letters of inquiry. Twenty eight letters emailed by Afghan students at Balkh University were surveyed by thirteen native American English speakers. Each letter was surveyed by six different American participants who gave their perspectives about the effectiveness and politeness of the language used in the letters by the students. The American participants’ evaluations of politeness were compared with actual linguistic features employed, including the word choice in the salutation and closing, the use of indirect language, and politeness markers (e.g. thank you or other expressions of appreciation). The results show that a relationship between proficiency and politeness exists, consistent with the findings of Tanaka and Kawade (1982) who found that second language learners acquire both linguistic and pragmatic knowledge as the learning of the target language progresses. In addition, this study describes the linguistic behavior perceived as most polite by the native speakers and reflects on possible instructional implications.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Janice McGregor / The current study investigates phrase-initial parts of speech as found in intermediate German textbooks and compares these findings to utterance-initial parts of speech as found in spontaneous speech in German-language interactions. This is important, because learning and using German word order appears to be a struggle for German learners whose first language is English. Research has shown that possible word order realizations in a language are partly restricted by the parts of speech system of that language (Hengeveld, Rijkhoff, & Siewierska, 2004; Vulanovic & Köhler, 2009). This is important because English and German have different parts of speech systems (Hengeveld et. al., 2004; Hengeveld & van Lier, 2010). Doherty (2005) analyzed English to German translations of an international science magazine and found that almost every second sentence begins differently. Instead, this study looks at talk in contexts of use and compares these findings with textbook language because, in recent years, communicative approaches to language teaching have been adopted by a large number of US German language programs. One would thus expect that textbooks used in these classrooms would contain at least some input with constructions that are typical to contexts of use. The results of the study indicate that construction-initial parts of speech in textbooks and in contexts of use are quite different. These differences imply that if it is a communicative approach that is being promoted, textbook authors and German educators would do well to expose students to actual talk from contexts of use so that they might learn to make meaning based on considerations of context.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Young-Ok Yum / Writing well, especially in English, is an asset to anyone who aspires to succeed in the academic or other professional fields in this age of English as a lingua franca. Numerous scholars have investigated errors committed by English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. However, to date there is no empirical study on the error patterns displayed in native Dari speakers’ EFL writing in English and in Dari. The present study investigates error occurrences in 20 native Dari speakers’ English and Dari writing. These participants were English majors attending Balkh University, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Most of the participants self-identified their English proficiency levels as “advanced.” The data were collected through convenience sampling of the students enrolled in EFL writing courses who voluntarily participated in two writing tasks of different levels of difficulty; they completed these first in English and then a week later in Dari. In order to observe any patterns, all spelling and word choice errors were identified by three independent judges (one Dari instructor at BU, one native-American-English-speaking graduate student in the English Department, and the author who is bilingual and works as an English instructor). All three worked separately initially and then discussed any discrepancies together in person (English) or via Skype (Dari), until they reached consensus. The analysis, concerning the three research hypotheses, supported these findings: (1) as predicted, the native Dari speakers committed a variety of errors similar to learners from previous studies; (2) as predicted, the participants made fewer errors in English than in Dari; and (3) counter to the hypothesis, the results indicated that the participants, when writing in Dari, demonstrated more errors in the simpler tasks; yet, the participants committed more errors in the more complex (versus simpler) English writing task, consistent with this hypothesis.