Simultaneous bilingual and early sequential bilingual children are exposed to two languages while acquiring the sound system for the first time. In bilingual children who are identified with speech sound delay or disorder, the question arises of how to approach intervention in the most effective way. In monolingual English learning children, some strong within syllable patterns of coronal consonant and front vowel, labial consonant and central vowel, and dorsal consonant and back vowel that are based on rhythmic mandibular oscillations without independent movement of the tongue have been identified as occurring more frequently. No information is available on children learning Spanish or on children who are early bilinguals relative to the presence of these patterns in output. Consideration of the presence of these patterns, typical of early development in English learning children, would help to plan remediation more precisely for bilingual speech delayed children. If the patterns are present, they should be accounted for as basic aspects of the production system output available to young children that might need to be assessed and incorporated into early intervention protocols for bilingual children. The present study tests the hypothesis that significant similarities between performance-based, consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence patterns produced in Spanish and English can provide greater efficacy for assessment and intervention practices for bilingual Spanish-English children. Within syllable CV co-occurrence patterns were observed from 66 months to 81 months of age in six bilingual Spanish-English speaking children. Consonants were categorized into labial, coronal, and dorsal place of articulation while vowels were categorized by front, central, and back dimensions to evaluate co-occurrences. Predictions based on the Frame then Content (FC) theory (MacNeilage & Davis, 1990) were evaluated relative to intrasyllabic combinations of consonants and vowels. Results confirmed the prediction that CV co-occurrence patterns produced by bilingual Spanish-English speaking children share significant similarities with those produced by children in previously researched languages. These results show that the production based hypothesis of the FC theory of speech production, tested previously on English learning children is also characteristic of bilingual children learning Spanish and English. These findings suggest that consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns are impacted by the capacity of the production system to produce different sounds in combination in diverse language learning circumstances, even when children are simultaneous bilingual learners. Mandibular oscillation without independent tongue movement within syllables is responsible for early intrasyllabic patterns produced by children. The FC theory supports the role of performance-based assessment and intervention for future practices in the field. / text

There is a documented need for appropriate language assessment measures for Spanish-English bilingual school-age children in the United States. The Bilingual English Spanish Assessment- Middle Extension (BESA-ME), the Test of Narrative Language (TNL), and the Test of Narrative Language- Spanish experimental version (Spanish TNL) were administered to 129 children ranging in age from 7;0 to 8;11. Convergence between the measures was examined. The results indicated a strong correlation between measures, as well as significant correlation between each measure and children’s ability level (i.e. classification as typically developing or with language impairment). These results present the BESA-ME and the TNL in Spanish and English as promising tools to assess language impairment in a population that traditionally has been a challenge to evaluate. / text

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

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Some second language learners are more successful than others. Students in the University of British Columbia/Ritsumeikan Joint Academic Exchange Programme, a sheltered English-as-a-second-language (ESL) immersion program, have in the past exhibited varying degrees of gain in English proficiency in their writing, reading, speech, and academic achievement during their stay in Vancouver. The explanation of why some learners become proficient in a second language may lie in our understanding the interactions of such individual attributes as the learner's age, language aptitudes, autonomy and motivation, attitudes, personality, cognitive style, learning strategies, background in language and knowledge of other languages. In this study the gain in English proficiency of all the students in the program was examined first and then the gain of two different groups of students who were categorized and "low" and "high" on the basis of their entry level scores on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The standardized tests used in this program were supplemented with two additional tests to measure gain in proficiency. A language experience questionnaire was given to all students and interviews of selected students from each group were conducted. The results of the standardized tests were analyzed and a significant difference in the gain of English proficiency between these two groups was found. An evaluation of the individual language learning histories and the interview data was conducted to further understand the language proficiency gains found from the psychometric measures. Implications for instruction and further research were reached.

The purpose of this study was to investigate changes in the pronunciation and intelligibility of instructed and uninstructed second language (L2) learners over time, and to identify instructional, environmental, and methodological factors playing a role in pronunciation and intelligibility. / Seventeen L2 graduate students at an English-medium university recorded three personal anecdotes over five months. The students also regularly logged their exposure to and use of English. Nine of the students (instructed group) were concurrently taking an oral communication course focussing on suprasegmental pronunciation. Classroom instruction was regularly observed and recorded. All 17 students were interviewed at the end of the study. / L1 listeners heard anecdotes from three instructed and three uninstructed students, matched for length of residence and first language (L1). Listeners also heard anecdotes from four L1 English speakers. One group of listeners retold each anecdote after hearing it (discourse-level task). The other group paused the recording of each anecdote whenever a word was unclear (word-level task). Each group of listeners also rated excerpts for accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency. / Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that: (a) no unambiguous changes in the pronunciation or intelligibility of either L2 learner group occurred over time; (b) word-level intelligibility measures more consistently differentiated L1 and L2 groups, and the instructed and uninstructed L2 groups; (c) compared to the instructed group, the uninstructed group logged relatively more English exposure/use for academic activities and relatively less for interactive social activities; (d) many instructed L2 learners did not believe that their pronunciation had noticeably improved, but almost all expressed satisfaction with their ability to communicate in English; (e) at the end of the study, many uninstructed learners reported persistent difficulties in communicating in English. / The results suggest that instruction in suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation sometimes may not lead to improved intelligibility or pronunciation. In addition, some L2 learners can be as intelligible as L1 speakers, depending on the listening task. Finally, results suggest that L2 learners' perceptions of their communicative ability and their patterns of L2 exposure/use are related. Implications for university preparation and support programs for L2 graduate students are discussed.

Educating language minority children in Canada is becoming increasingly challenging as our population becomes more and more diverse. Determining the best educational policy to help immigrant children learn English or French, while furthering their knowledge of core subject material has long been a difficult task for educators in the public system. This novel is a fictional account of an immigrant girl's first year in an Ontario elementary school. Through her experience, I describe a language policy whereby children have access to bilingual primary education no matter what their first language is. Two-way immersion is offered for language minority groups with significant numbers of students within a district. And, in collaboration with the community, first language support in school is given to students of all language backgrounds. I propose a teacher training programme that better prepares teachers for the linguistic diversity in their classrooms and promotes foreign language learning in teachers themselves. Children under this system are able to acquire the dominant language of society, learn the subject material, and continue to develop literacy skills in their first language. With such policies in place, I argue, Canada could be a world leader in bilingual education for diverse populations.

There has been some research in recent years which has attempted to demonstrate the effect of needs, attitudes and stereotyped beliefs on social judgements and perception (see, for instance , Secord,1959). One type of experimental design that highlights the role that such factors play in perception consists of observing and comparing the reactions of a subject when presented with the same stimulus under different labelling conditions .

There is an urgent necessity for good ESP textbooks. There are not too many around, and the few in existence appear very inadequate. Most of the time, ESL textbook writers feel that they should provide a basic framework and expect the classroom teacher to build lesson plans around it while adapting the material to suit the needs of a particular class. Writing a good textbook is a formidable and time consuming task. This creative project is a descrption of an ESP textbook. It sets out to provide a set of methodological guidelines and a number of teaching techniques to be used by the classroom teacher in dealing with a lesson. It discusses the four basic activities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing and how to approach them as a way to stress oral and written communication in the target language. Communicative competence is taken to be the objective of language teaching: the preparation of speakers competent to communicate in the target language. Communicative competence includes not only the linguistic forms of a language, but also the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. With this premise in mind this work sets out to discuss how to teach dialogues, structural patterns, pronunciation, reading and writing, all basic components of a typical language lesson. To wrap up the project, a typical ESP lesson on Tourism is included. Its organization is consistent with the methodological guidelines discusses earlier, it uses the techniques discussed in the main body of the work and represents a sensible approach to language learning.