In recent years, KSL (Korean as a second language) education has developed together with the rising status of Korea in the international community. In the context of KSL, the number of foreign students has increased dramatically by virtue of Korea??s growing status. Most learn the Korean language for academic purposes and successful reading is an important key to success in their academic setting. The purpose of this study is to examine the types of reading strategies employed by intermediate KSL learners when reading Korean texts. The study also attempted to examine similarities and differences in the use of reading strategies according to the variables of gender, nationality, text genre, and reading proficiency and to investigate the results of data analysis by multiple research methods, namely, reading strategies questionnaires/follow up interviews, think aloud protocols, and diary studies. The results of the study indicated that the participants employed all of the defined reading strategies. In particular, participants concentrated on dealing with cognitive strategies and support strategies. Furthermore, most participants employed ??focusing word?? strategy frequently owing to the effect of orthographic similarity. In addition, some participants used multiple reading strategies simultaneously rather than a particular single strategy to cope with a breakdown in comprehension. This study found no meaningful overall differences in strategy use according to the variables of gender, nationality, and text genre. However, skilful readers employed every reading strategy actively compared with less skilful readers with regard to the variable of proficiency. There were some discrepancies of results among multiple research methods. These differences are due to the characteristics of each research method. This finding suggested that in fact the multiple research methods serve to complement each other. Implications are discussed in relation to the significance of multiple research methods as well as the construction of KSL reading strategy training programs.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

A case study of American Sign Language (ASL) acquisition revealed an emerging phonological system influenced by biological, cognitive, and linguistic factors. A hearing child (SJ), acquiring ASL from her Deaf parents, was videotaped over seven sessions between the ages of 1:0 and 2:1. Of the 1,699 manual behaviors observed, 804 were lexical items, or signs. All signs were phonetically coded. Detailed analyses were undertaken to discover acquisition patterns for the three major parameters of ASL signs (handshape, hand location and movement). / Overall, SJ's signs were well-formed and adhered to ASL phonological constraints. Location primes were produced accurately, due to SJ's knowledge of the structure of her body. Errors occurred with body parts that were not perceptually salient. Movement parameters were not mastered by SJ during the period of study; no systematic set of substitutions was observed. Handshapes were produced with low accuracy. SJ relied on a small set of maximally contrastive handshapes (i.e., (5,1,A)). These handshapes represent the convergence of ease of production, distribution in the target language phonology, and perceptual salience. SJ used three processes to fit target handshapes to her emerging phonological system: spreading of selected fingers, changing of selected fingers from a marked to an unmarked set, and changing to an open position. These processes reflect anatomical and perceptual preferences as well as linguistic influences. / SJ's sign production showed a small improvement in accuracy and a marked reduction in variability between the ages of 1:0 AND 2:1. Visual feedback did not affect the sign accuracy. A passive hand was more likely to be added to one-handed signs produced outside the visual field, possibly increasing tactile feedback. Path movement and horizontal-place primes were more accurate when tactile feedback was present. There was no evidence that SJ used lexical selection or imitation as strategies for phonological acquisition. / Finally, many of the same factors that influence phonological acquisition in speech guided SJ's acquisition of handshape primes. Her acquisition of location primes, by contrast, did not resemble processes observed in phonological acquisition in speech.

This thesis investigated how a third-born female child acquired the deictic meaning of feminine third-person pronouns in English. The child began producing feminine third-person pronouns at 24 months of age and made few production errors. In contrast, she made systematic comprehension errors between 24 and 36 months of age and did not master the correct comprehension until 40 months of age. Analysis of the child's person errors indicated that she held the proper name interpretation that the feminine third-person pronoun her referred to herself. In production, however, the child rarely called herself with feminine third-person pronouns because she had already mastered the correct use of first-person pronouns in self-reference. The issues of why the child made systematic person errors for such a long period of time and how she corrected the errors are discussed with regard to Oshima-Takane's (1985, 1998) pronoun-learning model.

In recent years, KSL (Korean as a second language) education has developed together with the rising status of Korea in the international community. In the context of KSL, the number of foreign students has increased dramatically by virtue of Korea??s growing status. Most learn the Korean language for academic purposes and successful reading is an important key to success in their academic setting. The purpose of this study is to examine the types of reading strategies employed by intermediate KSL learners when reading Korean texts. The study also attempted to examine similarities and differences in the use of reading strategies according to the variables of gender, nationality, text genre, and reading proficiency and to investigate the results of data analysis by multiple research methods, namely, reading strategies questionnaires/follow up interviews, think aloud protocols, and diary studies. The results of the study indicated that the participants employed all of the defined reading strategies. In particular, participants concentrated on dealing with cognitive strategies and support strategies. Furthermore, most participants employed ??focusing word?? strategy frequently owing to the effect of orthographic similarity. In addition, some participants used multiple reading strategies simultaneously rather than a particular single strategy to cope with a breakdown in comprehension. This study found no meaningful overall differences in strategy use according to the variables of gender, nationality, and text genre. However, skilful readers employed every reading strategy actively compared with less skilful readers with regard to the variable of proficiency. There were some discrepancies of results among multiple research methods. These differences are due to the characteristics of each research method. This finding suggested that in fact the multiple research methods serve to complement each other. Implications are discussed in relation to the significance of multiple research methods as well as the construction of KSL reading strategy training programs.

This study investigated lexical extension and overextension by three blind children, ages 1;8, 2;1 and 2;5, who had vocabularies of at least 50 words but did not yet produce two-word utterances. Theories of semantic development take it for granted that vision provides the child with access to a great deal of the information necessary for the development of meaning, including much of the knowledge about size, shape, and movement of referents. Through vision, the child is able to form concepts on which word meaning is based, and extend the domain of application of words from original referents by recognizing other instances of that word. Despite this, surprisingly little research has focused on semantic development by blind children. Results of the few relevant studies indicate that blind children rarely extend or overextend their words, and attribute this inability to either (1) a lack of experience with other similar referents, or (2) an inability to form categories that underlie lexical extension and overextension. The blind children were given objects to name during a play session. These objects were (1) new examples of an item the child already named, providing opportunity for the child to extend known words to proper, novel referents, or (2) members of a different nominal category, but differing from an item the child already named in one or two criterial features, thus providing opportunity for the child to overextend. Data on spontaneous extension and overextension was also collected through analysis of utterances produced during experimental sessions and reported in parental diaries. Results indicated that all children extended and overextended their words, both spontaneously and in experiments; visual impairment did not prevent the children from recognizing other exemplars of a referent, or from applying words they knew to objects similar to original referents but, on the basis of criterial features, members of other nominal categories. Performance during two sorting tasks indicated that the children did not have impaired ability to form categories—all three children displayed classificatory behaviour during the sorting activities. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1984 S323 / Master of Arts

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English