Not available / text

Not available / text

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to identify the differences in the reading behaviors of subgroups of learning disabled children and of normal children.The null hypothesis tested in this study explored differences in the performances of learning disabled subgroups and normal children in the following areas: graphic similarity, sound similarity, grammatical function, comprehension pattern, grammatical relationships and retelling score. These areas were measured by the use of the Reading; Miscue Inventory and the Analytical Reading Inventory.Ninety students were chosen to participate in the study. Fifty-eight learning disabled students were classified either Learning Disabled - No Discrepancy or Learning Disabled - Discrepancy according to scores obtained on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised. Thirty-two average students were chosen by a teacher questionnaire.Multivariate analysis of variance was used to assess between group differences. Since the null hypothesis was rejected, pest hoc pairwise comparisons were conducted tc determine which pairs of means were responsible for the overall rejection. Only the difference in the Sound Similarity measure for the normal group and the LD-N subgroup emerged as clearly contributing to that rejection. Although the Retelling measure was also found to contribute significantly, this difference was not explained by any of the pairwise comparisons.

No description available.

In recent decades, autonomous learning has been a hot issue in the field of second language teaching and learning and the previous studies on autonomous learning have made great progress. However, the researches on the individual efforts affecting achievements of major English language proficiency tests from the cognitive perspectives of autonomous learning are still relatively rare. On the basis of the review of literature on learner autonomy at home and abroad, the present study aims to investigate Chinese learners’ IELTS preparation efforts under the guidance of the cognitive theory with the participants of English-medium tertiary institutions for graduate or undergraduate degrees who got high score(at least 7 or above) in IELTS within 2 years and answer what these Chinese learners have done to maximize their IELTS scores to apply for postgraduate programmes in English medium universities autonomously and why they could undertake these efforts to maximize their IELTS scores. Semi-structure interviews on autonomous learning were conducted to find out IELTS preparation experiences. In terms of the data analysis results, the dissertation tries to provide the present or future graduate degree applicants during their IELTS preparation with some suggestions and implications for enhancing recognition on IELTS taking and help language educators better advise these students on undertaking proper preparations for the language challenge in their overseas studies. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

In recent decades, the field of assessing speaking has seen an increasing emphasis on ‘interaction’. In defining the construct of interactional competence (IC), both the theoretical formulation and empirical evidence suggest that the competence is coconstructed and context-specific. This poses a multitude of conundrums for language testing practitioners and researchers, one of which is the extent to which we can extrapolate candidates’ performance in the target non-testing context from their performance in a test. This thesis considers these questions in the case of the Group Interaction (GI) task in the School-based Assessment (SBA) for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE). Validation studies on the SBA Group Interaction task to date have generated somewhat contradictory results as to whether the task elicits authentic oral language use. Moreover, studies to date have not compared students’ interactions under different task implementation conditions (such as the amount of preparation time), or have investigated in detail what exactly students do during preparation time and how that might impact on their subsequent assessed interaction. This study explores what kinds of interactional features constitute interactional competence; how IC is co-constructed in discourse, and what complexities there might be in assessing the competence through a group interaction task. It also investigates whether the SBA GI task elicits authentic oral language use, and how the task implementation condition of preparation time might influence the validity of the task. Video-recordings of the assessed group interactions were obtained from two schools, with students given extended preparation time in one school but not the other. The assessed group interactions are analyzed using a Conversation Analytic approach, supplemented by data from mock assessments and stimulated recall interviews with student-candidates and teacher-raters. This study contributes to the construct definition of interactional competence – its components and the specific ways they are performed in discourse. Drawing on findings about students’ overhearer-oriented talk, it also problematizes the assumption that a group interaction task is necessarily eliciting and assessing candidates’ competence for interacting in a peer group only. More specifically to the SBA GI task, this study has produced evidence that group interactions with and without extended preparation time are qualitatively different, and has identified some of the ways in which extended preparation time might compromise the task’s validity in assessing interactional competence.

In 1971, Lee and Canter developed a systematic tool for assessing children's expressive language: Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS). It provides normative data against which a child's delayed or disordered language development can be compared with the normal language of children the same age. A specific scoring system is used to analyze children's use of standard English grammatical rules from a tape-recorded sample of their spontaneous speech during conversation with a clinician. The corpus of sentences for the DSS is obtained from a sample of 50 complete, different, consecutive, intelligible, non-echolalic sentences elicited from a child in conversation with an adult using stimulus materials in which the child is interested. There is limited research on the reliability of language samples smaller and larger than 50 utterances for DSS analysis. The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a significant difference among the scores obtained from language samples of 25, 50, and 75 utterances when using the DSS procedure for children aged 6.0 to 6.6 years. Twelve children, selected on the basis of chronological age, normal receptive vocabulary skills, normal hearing, and a monolingual background, were chosen as subjects.

No description available.

No description available.