From a purposive sample of thirty (30) previously disadvantaged learners sponsored by the Telkom Foundation and currently enrolled at an elite private secondary school in South Africa. this study unde1iook a baseline survey of the participants writing and comprehension skills. The pen and pencil survey. including a questionnaire, identified their competency levels and the gaps in the participants· language skills. Over a three-year period. the study examined and extended the participants· writing styles in their comprehension and composition scripts on three genres - expository, narrative and descriptive. From the three genre texts, it was established that their sentence structures ranged from the simple, compound to the complex variety. Using the Hypotaxis Index as a quantitative measure to analyse the written texts, which is the cow1t of subordinated clauses. appropriate linking devices and the successful co-ordination of ideas in sentences calculated as a percentage of the total clauses making the composition. it was established that the higher the Hypotaxis Index, the more accomplished and successful the writing (Horning, 1998: Balfour, 2007; Allison, 2002). Discursive and expository compositions that displayed the characteristics of appropriately projected thoughts, and an awareness of the perceived audience, were more successful than those that relied on simple subject and verb concord sentence structures. A major challenge in the analysis of the compositions stemmed from incidents where incomplete clauses were used, with no evident subject-verb pattern or concord. There were also some relatively successful compositions that depended on simple and compound sentence structures only. It was derived from this three-year longitudinal study that an attempt to improve the writing quality and strength of the secondary school learners would be through a deliberate focus on dc,·eloping their cognitive academic literacy (CALP) skills through the design. development and implementation of a task-based syllabus based on the specifications of Breen ( 1999). Long and Crookes (2006) and the ecological factors of the International School of South Africa. Explicit grammar instruction, particularly the structural patterning of the sentences that learners used in their writing. v•as decided upon as a practical reinforcement for language skills that the learners needed in order to develop academic literacy proficiency skills in English. The Hypotaxis Index, if correctly calculated, should be a significant indicator of what intervention could be effected in order to improve learner's skills. / Thesis (PhD.(English) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2012

Twenty normally developing boys between the ages of 4:4 (years:months) and 5:7 were presented with stories designed to teach novel vocabulary and morphological inflections. A multiple regression analysis assessed the extent to which selected verbal and nonverbal skills contributed to the prediction of their performance on the inflection stories (INFL). Current inflection skills, as measured by the Grammatic Closure subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, accounted for nearly half of the INFL variance. In addition, performance on a posttest of vocabulary learning significantly (p .05) contributed to the prediction of INFL performance. None of the three nonverbal measures was a significant contributor, although closer analysis of these findings indicates that the relationship between nonverbal rule learning and inflection learning warrants further investigation. The results suggest that inflection learning is a language-specific phenomenon more tied to vocabulary skills than to nonverbal cognitive skills.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-80).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the question of age in relation to second language learning aptitude. Foreign language proficiency involves many skills; two of these skills are listening and speaking. This study tested an aspect of listening, auditory discrimination, and an aspect of speaking, oral production. Both tests were given to a group of children and a group of adults to determine if both tests taken together would show one group to have a higher foreign language aptitude than the other group.Both tests were constructed for this study. The auditory discrimination test consisted of 22 minimal word pairs which differed by one distinctive feature; 8 minimal word pairs which had no differences were used as control items. Subjects listened to the pairs and answered "same" or "different." The oral production test consisted of 40 words which each subject heard twice and repeated once into a microphone. Both tests were recorded; the answers to the auditory discrimination test were recorded by the examiner, and the answers to the oral production test were recorded on tape and later evaluated by trained judges.A group of 50 children and a group of 50 adults participated in the study. Children were defined as first graders, and adults were defined as twelfth graders. Subjects were randomly chosen from the total first-grade population of 898 and the total twelfth grade population of 909 from the Muncie Community Schools in Muncie, Indiana. Fifteen elementary schools and three high schools were involved in the study. All subjects were native speakers of English and the language used for testing was Spanish. All subjects were tested individually.A two group multivariate analysis of variance was used to compare the vector of means of both tests for one group with the vector of means of both tests for the other group. Following a determination of significance, a univariate analysis of variance was used to determine the relative contribution of each measure to the overall results. A post hoc modified Hotelling's critical T2 was used to determine a more conservative value of T. The relationship between the two measures in this study was determined by a Pearson product-moment correlation.A moderate correlation between the two measures was found indicating some connection between auditory discrimination and oral production. These measures are conceptually related, but somewhat independent aspects of foreign language perception.While it was hypothesized that children would perform much better than adults, it was the adults who performed significantly better on both tests. The multivariate analysis of variance indicated that with both tests taken together, adults were superior in auditory discrimination and oral production. A univariate analysis indicated that adults also performed better on each test than the children. The null hypothesis, that there is no difference between groups, was rejected at the .0001 level.The findings of this study support the idea that adults, because of their cognitive advantage and maturity, are more efficient and successful in these two aspects of foreign language learning. Children did not exhibit the facility in foreign languages which early foreign language learning advocates have postulated.A number of studies which bypassed age as a critical factor in foreign language performance attributed differences between language learners to affective and environmental factors and to individual differences. In the experiment, the adults as a group performed significantly better than the children, but certain children as individuals were excellent in their performance just as certain adults as individuals were poor in their performance. However, the data from this study indicated that adults were generally superior to children on measures of auditory discrimination and oral production of foreign language sounds.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 36-40).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-57).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-205).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-196).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, June 30, 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 28-30). Also available in print.