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No description available.

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No description available.

This study investigates Japanese high school teachers’ learning of grammar proceduralization strategies designed to promote oral fluency. It is a multiple case study of six Japanese EFL teachers who learn to use their declarative knowledge of L2 grammar while engaging in tasks that enable them to compare their oral output with a native English speaker’s reformulations of it. Past studies of language learning strategies have been primarily focused either on the learners’ general study habits toward the target language or on their skill-specific language learning strategies in the areas of listening, reading, speaking, writing, and vocabulary. Although the effectiveness of these strategies on learning outcomes is known to be highly constrained by learners’ prior linguistic knowledge, strategies to proceduralize grammar, a core component of one’s linguistic knowledge, have not been well researched. Therefore, little is known about how learners’ volitional efforts contribute to the proceduralization of L2 grammar. Research into oral fluency development has provided evidence that the use of formulas promotes fluency, but it has not revealed how formulas and other varieties of multiword units contribute to different aspects of oral fluency; namely, temporal, repair, and perceived fluency. This study fills these gaps in research by defining, investigating, and creating a set of grammar proceduralization strategies as a promising construct that sheds light on what learners can proactively do to proceduralize their knowledge of L2 grammar. The three main purposes of this study are to (a) investigate Japanese EFL teachers’ grammar proceduralization strategies for appropriating, refining, and using their grammar knowledge, (b) identify L2 morphosyntactic forms and multiword units that facilitate Japanese EFL teachers’ oral production during oral summary and personal anecdote tasks, and (c) investigate the possible relationships between the participants’ L2 grammar proceduralization strategies, their use of specific grammar forms, and their oral fluency development. The participants are six Japanese teachers of English who teach at public senior high schools in Japan. To gain a detailed understanding of the participants’ complex learning processes, their learning trajectories were investigated for a period of six months, using a longitudinal mixed-methods design, with detailed analyses of their English learning history, post-task protocols, linguistic measures, and rubric-based assessment of their oral fluency development. The results provide (a) a typology of L2 grammar proceduralization strategies created based on models of communicative competence and speech production, (b) 16 categories of grammar items that have potential impact on oral fluency development, with insights into factors that facilitate and debilitate the participants’ use of these grammar items, and (c) insights into how the participants’ goal orientation leads to their orchestration of L2 grammar proceduralization strategies, their use of 16 categories of grammar items, and to the different trajectories of their temporal, repair, and perceived fluency development. This study presents data to support the conclusion that a reverse-saliency strategy to learn L2 grammar in concepts, propositions, and discourse is a key to effective EFL pedagogy. / Teaching & Learning

Children with Tourette Syndrome (CWTS) frequently exhibit a high prevalence of disfluent speech behaviors which are often labeled stuttering. The present study analyzed the fluency characteristics of CWTS, in comparison to children who stutter (CWS) and typically developing peers (TDP). It was predicted that CWTS would be less fluent than TDP but more fluent than CWS. A related purpose was to explore whether differences existed in the pattern of disfluencies demonstrated by these groups. To this end, it was predicted that CWTS would demonstrate significantly lower proportions of stuttering-like disfluencies than CWS and significantly higher proportions of stuttering-like disfluencies than TDP. Participants included eight CWTS, eight CWS and eight TDP. Speech samples, collected during a narrative story telling task, were analyzed to determine whether significant differences in the type and frequency of disfluencies were evident between the groups. Results revealed that CWTS were significantly more fluent than CWS and that CWTS produced significantly lower proportions of stuttering-like disfluencies than CWS. Although not statistically significant, CWTS were twice as disfluent as TDP and CWTS produced significantly higher proportions of stuttering-like disfluencies than TDP. These findings confirmed that CWTS present with an atypical disfluency pattern which can be differentiated from that of CWS and TDP based on the total disfluency level and the proportion of stuttering-like disfluencies. / Communication Sciences

Clinicians are increasingly incorporating cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based approaches into fluency treatment for children and adolescents who stutter. However, minimal research examines the efficacy of such programs. The present study assesses the efficacy of a CBT-based, intensive, five-day summer camp that promotes self-acceptance and aims to improve the quality of life of adolescents who stutter. Specifically, this study examines whether the camp is effective in reducing state and trait anxiety, decreasing the negative impact of stuttering on daily life, and increasing fluency. A single-subject design on a 14-year old, male adolescent who stutters, LM, and personal interview data with LM’s mother, MM, are utilized. Post-treatment, LM’s scores reflect improvements in self-efficacy surrounding communication situations, as measured by the Self-Efficacy for Adolescents Scale (SEA-Scale), and improvements in overall speaking-related quality of life, as measured by the Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering – Teen (OASES-T). These improvements were maintained at one and three months follow-up. Nonetheless, a large degree of variation in percent syllables stuttered (%SS) and LM’s consistently low rates of state and trait anxiety, as measured by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC), suggest that additional study is warranted before conclusions can be drawn about the efficacy of the summer camp program on reducing stuttering severity and anxiety. / Communication Sciences

Executive functions, potentially including the regulatory control of emotions and expressive fluency (verbal or design), have historically been associated with the frontal lobes. Moreover, research has demonstrated the importance of cerebral laterality with a prominent role of the right frontal regions in the regulation of negative affect (anger, hostility) and in the generation or fluent production of designs rather than verbal fluency (left frontal). In the present research, participants identified with high and with low levels of hostility were evaluated on a design fluency test twice in one experimental session. Before the second administration of the fluency test, each participant underwent the cold pressor stressor. EEG data collection took place before and after each experimental manipulation. It was hypothesized that diminished right frontal capacity in high hostiles would be evident through lowered performance on this cognitive stressor. Convergent validity of the "capacity model" was partially supported wherein high hostile men evidenced reduced delta magnitude over the right frontal region after exposure to a physiological stressor but failed to maintain consistent levels of right cerebral activation across conditions. The results suggest an inability for high hostile men to maintain stable levels of cerebral activation with stress after exposure to physiological and cognitive stress. Moreover, low hostiles showed enhanced cognitive performance on the design task with lower levels of arousal (heightened delta magnitude). In contrast, reduced arousal (heightened delta magnitude) yielded increased executive deficits in high hostiles as evidenced through increased perseverative errors on the design fluency task. / Ph. D.

The influence of hostility on the lateralized tasks of cardiovascular regulation, verbal fluency, nonverbal fluency, and dichotic listening was assessed. Twenty-four subjects divided into two groups, high- and low-hostile men underwent physiological measurements of SBP, DBP, and HR before and after verbal and figural fluency tasks, which were used as stressors. In addition, subsequent to the administration of each fluency task, dichotic listening performance was evaluated across unfocused, focus left, and focus right trials. It was expected that high-hostile men would produce results indicative of differential right hemisphere activation when compared with low-hostile men. In addition, it was predicted that high-hostile men would display a weakness in both the performance of the right-frontal nonverbal fluency task and in their ability to maintain relative cardiovascular stability subsequent to the presentation of that stressor. As predicted, high-hostile men produced more perseverative errors than did low hostile men on this task. Further, subsequent to administration of the nonverbal fluency task, high-hostile men produced a reliable increase in blood pressure when compared to baseline and to low-hostile males. Differences in dichotic listening performance were also expected as a function of the fluency tasks. It was predicted that high-hostile men would evidence a priming effect in that a left-ear bias would be detected after the nonverbal fluency task but not the verbal fluency task. This was indeed the case. However, interestingly, the low-hostile men also displayed a priming effect at the left ear during the nonverbal fluency condition. Results are discussed within the context of the functional cerebral systems of emotion and arousal. Implications for further research are explored. / Ph. D.