The purpose of the research was to develop a test of oral communicative competence for English as a Second Language (ESL) students at the college level. This research first reviewed the current literature on the topic of communicative competence from the perspectives of linguistics and sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and speech communication. The 1iterature on testing for communicative competence within the ESL and foreign language teaching fields was also reviewed. A 7-minute oral semi-direct taped test was then developed and administered to a trial group of 5 ESL students and a final group of 25 ESL students at Portland State University. The test consisted of 5 short information questions and 10 social situations to which the subject was requested to respond. The test was rated for three separate criteria: intelligibility, grammatical correctness, and appropriateness. Two different raters were used for each criterion; another rater rated for all criteria. A reliability study was conducted on the raters wherein the reliability of the raters was shown to be significantly high. The validity of the test was established by conducting face-to-face interviews with the trial and final subjects prior to their taking the taped tests. The results showed that the degree of association between the overall ratings on the taped test and the overall ratings on the interview was significant, though not significant for individual criteria. A correlation with the CELT listening comprehension test was not significant.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第20507号 / 情博第635号 / 新制||情||110(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 石田 亨, 教授 矢守 克也, 教授 吉川 正俊 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DGAM

<p>This study examines the interpretation and production of inalienable possession among heritage speakers and L2 learners of Spanish. Inalienable possession lies at the syntax-semantics interface and has previously been found to be challenging among bilingual populations (Giancaspro & Sánchez, 2019; Montrul & Ionin, 2010, 2012; Pérez-Leroux et al., 2002). In particular, this study explores the extent to which Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners exhibit knowledge of Spanish inalienable possession with pronominal verbs requiring the use of the clitic <i>se</i>. Results from an Elicited Production Task and a Contextualized Preference Task administered online showed that the L2 learners followed a distinct pattern of response compared to the native speakers in the production and interpretation of inalienable possession. This pattern was characterized by the preference of possessive determiners over definite determiners. Heritage speakers, on the contrary, were not found to differ from the native speakers of Spanish. They behaved similarly to the control group as they followed the continuum that emerged for inalienable possession. That is, both groups were more accepting of definite determiners, while they showed less preference for structures with possessive determiners. The findings are discussed in terms of current debates on the role of factors involved in language acquisition such as maturational issues, learning experience, patterns of language exposure and usage, cross-linguistic influence, and the grammatical structure itself.</p>

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The application of advanced communication technology holds promise for distance learning in general and language distance learning in particular. Technology has allowed second and foreign language programs to be included in many distance learning programs worldwide. The purpose of this study was to provide an overall evaluation of an EAP writing course, taught via distance, and the technologies used in it as well as challenges and issues that could be accompanied by using these technologies. Data was collected for an EAP writing course and from a MBA course using the same technology for comparison. Interviews were conducted with instructors and students to get their feedback and help assess the course. Results indicated that there are other elements besides technology that have to be taken into account to assure the proper use of the available technology by the instructors and the students.

The purpose of this study was to explore how syntactic skill was maintained or lost by L2 Mandarin Chinese learners over time. In addition, this study endeavored to discover how a learner's L1 affects the attrition process of word order in Mandarin Chinese. To find out how certain Chinese syntactic structures were subject to attrition over time and how syntactic errors could be attributed to L1 transfer, five types of Chinese syntax that either resembled English, were very different from English, or had no counterpart in English were selected. They included subject-verb-object sentences, modifiers before modified, time and other adverbial clauses, and object-raising in Chinese specific ba construction. Twenty-four university students of Chinese-as-a-second-language speakers, who intensively learned and used Mandarin Chinese in a host culture setting for 16-22 months, participated in this study. By the time participants were tested a second time, they had discontinued regular usage of the L2 for 12 to 17 years. To find out how L2 syntactic attrition developed over time, participants were divided into three groups according to the year of departure from the L2 environment. They were also grouped into two groups by the length of time in the L2 setting to examine whether exposure time to the L2 affected the maintenance of overall L2 syntactic skill. The results indicated that the subjects retain a fair amount of their language education within the first couple years of discontinued regular L2 usage. In the meantime, it was found that the extra six months exposed to the L2 does not extend the long-term maintenance of overall L2 syntactic skill. The results did not show that the distance of structural properties between the learner's L1 and L2 necessarily predicted patterns of regression towards L1 syntactic ordering. Instead, the frequency of use, how often the structure appears in daily interaction with the target society and how well the syntactic structure was acquired in the first place, played a greater role in predicting whether the structure will likely be forgotten.

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