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

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

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

Under the background of booming demands in international school programmes provided for heritage language Chinese speakers, teaching Chinese has become a challenge in balancing between promotions of heritage understanding and incorporation of international awareness, so as to comply the aims of International Baccalaureate curriculum. The research initiates with reviewing a series of literature related to interpretation of international mindedness and cultural understanding, international education and Chinese teaching in international context. This qualitative research specifically focuses on teachers and students in an IB diploma programme affiliated to a local Hong Kong school, aiming to find out the practice and perception of the participates in and towards Chinese as a heritage language teaching and learning down to the implementation of international mindedness. Student questionnaires, interviews and observation are included into methods of data collecting. In conclusion, international mindedness is seen as a pathway rather than a goal in Chinese lessons, and one important concept in thinking. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

This study investigates the effects of cultural background on reading comprehension of ESL learners. Theoretically, this study emanates from schema theory. That is, the readers' comprehension is believed to be affected by background knowledge. Forty-eight ESL students, sorted into three groups (beginning, intermediate and advanced), were randomly assigned to the treatment, which was the reading of a familiar and unfamiliar, high difficulty and/or low difficulty passages. Procedures included a survey, a pre-test, passages and a post-test. The survey was used to select the two topics for the passages. The pre-test consisted of questions based on both passages. The passages were one familiar and one unfamiliar, and each type was written on two difficulty levels. The post-test was the same test given to the students as a pre-test. The dependent variable was the 20-item multiple choice test based on two passages, "The Weekend" and "Groundhog Day". Two question types were included: (1) literal, and (2) inferential. The data were analyzed using several analyses of variance, t-tests and, for post hoc testing of significance, the Scheffe was utilized. Results indicate that the reading level has an effect on the ESL students' comprehension when reading a culturally different passage. However, passage type (familiar-unfamiliar) and passage difficulty (high difficulty-low difficulty) did not have effects on ESL readers' comprehension.

The aim of linguistic theory is to explain what knowledge of language consists of and how this knowledge is acquired. Generative linguistics, which had set out to achieve this goal, has recently seen the development of two main approaches to Universal Grammar (UG). One is the Minimalist Program (MP) and the other is Optimality Theory (OT). In the MP framework, language is claimed to be acquired through parameter setting, while in OT language acquisition is viewed as a constraint reranking process. In this study, I compare the two evolving linguistic theories in relation to child L2 acquisition phenomena; that is, how and whether the two different approaches to UG could be used to account for language development in real time. The database for this study was a corpus of natural and elicited-interview speech collected by the National Center for Bilingual Research from six Korean children learning English as an L2 in a bilingual education school program. Two constructions, null arguments and wh-questions produced by the Korean children in their developing L2 English, were chosen for in-depth investigation. The data analysis shows that (1) the children dropped few subjects from the early stages, (2) the children dropped more objects than subjects, (3) the children did not apply subject-verb inversion in why -questions, and (4) of the wh-questions, when-questions were one of the last to appear in the children's developing English. It was examined whether these four findings could be explained within the MP and the OT frameworks. The MP and OT in their present forms, however, do not seem to be able to fully account for the data. I have proposed some adaptations of the theories and explored plausible explanations. The overall picture emerging from the study is that the gradual nature of language development can best be explained as being a result of the incremental acquisition of the lexicon. The relationship between linguistic theory and acquisition studies, especially second language acquisition studies, has been unidirectional, from theory to acquisition (SLA) studies. It is to be hoped that this study may contribute to connecting the gap between linguistic theory and SLA studies, and making their relationship more bidirectional.

The investigator evaluated a commercially available Spanish word recognition ability test. The material consists of four lists of fifty bisyllabic tetraphonemic Spanish words available from Auditec of St. Louis as: "Spanish speech discrimination lists 1-4". Interlist equivalence, word difficulty, speaker's intelligibility, and P/I functions' slopes were investigated. Taped lists were presented to 16 normal hearing native Spanish speaking adults at four presentation levels. Statistical analysis indicated that the intelligibility of list three is significantly different than the other lists at the.05 level. At the low presentation levels, subjects of Mexican origin obtained better scores than subjects of other nationalities. The P/I functions' slope (4.3%) was comparable to that obtained by investigators of English tests. Most frequently missed words have as common denominators: presence of the /s/ sound, and are words that retain their meaning even after deletion of final /s/. Talker's speech intelligibility was judged to be very clear.

College composition students and graduate assistant teachers were tested for their perceptions of coherence, focus, organization, and overall quality of essays written in the Japanese Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu rhetorical pattern of organization as opposed to the English Five Part Essay style of organization where the experimental essays were otherwise identical. These perceptions were measured on a 4-point Lykert scale. The composition students were also tested for their total recall of the essays. The data were analyzed by ANOVA, and no significant effect for treatment was observed. The results of this study suggest that for the Japanese Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu/English Five Part Essay pair the negative effects of native language rhetorical pattern on readers of the second language may be less important than the theory of contrastive rhetoric would suggest. Consequently, alternative forms of possible cultural interference such as cultural background knowledge (content) and the role played by writing in a culture warrant greater scrutiny.

This paper presents an analysis of the errors in the use of prepositions made in written English by Brazilian students.The errors shown here are the basis for explaining the difficulties Brazilian-Portuguese speakers have in selecting the correct prepositions according to the context. This analysis will account for the causes of errors such as interference, false analogies, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge of the English grammar.The data used for this study was collected in three Brazilian schools: a state high school and a private College in Barbacena, Minas Gerais, and a BI-National Center in Rio de Janeiro (Insituto Cultural Brasil-Estados Unidos).A total of 48 compositions were analyzed. Three topics were selected to provide the students a chance to use a great number of prepositions& "A Day in My Life", "People of Rio", and "My Last Trip".The errors encountered were classified according to the possible cause for errors. This classification shows the basic reasons for difficulties in using prepositions in English by Brazilian-Portuguese speakers, which was the first concern of this paper.The final results of this analysis show that interference of the mother tongue, either under the form of pure interference, the form of translation, or the use of other grammatical facts constitutes the greatest factor responsible for errors. The conclusion shows that the high percentage of 59.5 percent of errors is due to pure interference, 18.1 per cent is due to translation, 4.9 per cent to the use of the possessive form 's, and 9.9 per cent to the use of the article. On the whole, 92.4 per cent of the errors are due to some form of interference.Besides these numbers, the final conclusions also show that prepositions cannot be analyzed as isolated units, for the errors were-greatly influenced by other aspects of the target language such as the use of two-word verbs, expressions used with certain prepositions, grammatical facts, and vocabulary influences.

The aim of this study is to investigate the motivational orientations affecting ESL learers in learing English and to identify learners' learning strategies when dealing with CALL instruction at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Specifically, the study seeks to investigate: Cl) Motivational orientations when learning English in a conventional classroom, (2) Motivational orientations when learning English in a CALL classroom, and (3) Learners' strategies when learing English using computers. The data for the study were collected using two research tools: questionnaires and interviews. Two types of analyses, that is a Crosstabs and a Chi- Square tests were applied to the data. This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter One presents the research context of the study. It also describes the significance of the study by addressing major questions concerning students' motivation when learning English at UTM. Chapter Two reviews the literatue on motivational orientations and learning strategies to put the study in the broader research context. Chapter Three describes the sampling, research instruments and data collection procedures employed in the present study. Chapter Four analyses and presents the findings in relation to students' motivational orientations when learning English in a conventional classroom and in a CALL classroom. Chapter Five describes the findings in respect of students' learning strategies specifically when dealing with CALL tasks. Chapter Six presents a summary of the major research findings and ilustrates how the findings of the investigation relate to previous research findings. The chapter also indicates the implications of the findings for pedagogy, discusses the study limitations, and finally offers suggestions for future research. The research results provide evidence that students put effort into learning English, showed a positive attitude, a strong desire, low anxiety, and high expectations when learning English using computers. The results also show that students used a wide range of strategies when working with computers, that is, metacognitive, affective, cognitive and social strategies. Based on the results of the study, the recommendation is made that if CALL is to be integrated in the English language curriculum at UTM, students' motivational orientations and learing strategies should be considered for effective teaching and learning.