Graduate

A study submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2011. / This study focuses on the negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English. The study was conducted in Empangeni District (Ngwelezane Ward) in KwaZulu-Natal. The negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English was identified as the main cause of the high failure rate, especially at matric level. Second language learners of English in rural and some township schools end up unemployed and not in tertiary institutions as most teachers are not adequately trained to detect, explain, diagnose and try to remedy the problems these learners encounter when they are taught in English. This study highlights the negative impact of learning in English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English that result on the high failure rate in rural and some township schools. Challenges facing the different stakeholders that are affected by this problem are outlined. Suggestions towards alleviating the negative impact of English on the cognitive development of second language learners of English are also provided.

No description available.

No description available.

Given the multicultural, multilingual character of Canadian society, it is no surprise that second-language programs were implemented in our elementary schools. The need and demand for such programs were acknowledged by politicians when French Core Programs were introduced at the elementary level in the late sixties and foreign language programs (Heritage Language Programs) were introduced after school hours in the mid-seventies. The topic was selected primarily to examine how adequately our elementary schools are fulfilling the need and demand for second-language learning. At present, there is strong evidence to support the claim that these programs are failing to motivate students to pursue further studies in a second language or to produce students who are fairly fluent in a second language. These claims arouse concern and controversy as to the effectiveness and perhaps the validity of such programs as they exist today in our elementary schools. It is imperative that elementary second-language programmers examine what is happening in this area. They have to deal with the factors influencing the effectiveness of their programs. It is my view that a number of changes have to be introduced into second-language programs at the elementary level if they are to survive at this and other levels and if they are to support the multilingual, multicultural identity of Canada. / Thesis / Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT)

No description available.

Many students around the world have a strong desire to study in the United States, and in recent years international students in the United States have enrolled at an all-time high. There is a significant need to learn more about these students' needs and strategies to identify the most effective practices to improve their academic life and life quality. The demand for overcoming life challenges in a new country and achieve high academic performance with their second language creates high stress for these international students. One of the groups among these international students that has been understudied is the Turkish students. The purpose of this research is to explore the academic and second language-related stress of Turkish international students, in addition to investigating students' self-reported stress management strategies. This study uses a case study methodology to thoroughly understand the impact of the second language of participants' reported stress and how they manage their life and academic performance. The researcher collected interviews from three Turkish-International students who study in a graduate school in the US. The researcher conducted inductive coding and created themes from the qualitative data. The results of the study indicate that students experience challenges due to their second language which creates stressful situations. One of the most critical areas that participants emphasized is the difficulties that they experience while they speak. Participants indicated that the challenges of speaking tasks affect their self-confidence and they tend to speak up less. One of the other critical findings of the study that participants highlighted is that they need to spend more time studying just to be able to survive in a highly competitive academic life as it is challenging to comprehend content knowledge with a second language. The obligation of studying in long hours affects their social and family life. The researcher explored the coping mechanisms that participants found effective and a summary related to the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacted these students' stress.

The purpose of the study was to analyze the self-reported experiences of Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) pre-service teachers with listening comprehension skills in their teaching classroom as university students and in their learning classroom as EFL students. Currently, Japanese EFL education is changing rapidly and focusing on developing overall English skills that include listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, pre-service teacher EFL education in Japan does not stress the importance of listening comprehension pedagogy. Moreover, there have been few studies about listening pedagogy from the perspective of preservice teachers. Through analyzing pre-service teacher's self-reported listening learning experiences, the current study aimed to analyze the current listening pedagogy targeting elementary, junior, and high school EFL preparation. Three participants responded to an interview conducted in Japanese regarding their experiences with the EFL listening pedagogy experiences in their teaching classroom as university students and in their learning classroom as EFL students. The interview data were transcribed, translated into English, and analyzed through a qualitative research approach. The findings revealed that the pre-service teacher training track focused mostly on developing the pre-service EFL teachers' language proficiency rather than their pedagogical knowledge. Several possible explanations for this trend that were Japanese-context specific were provided, as well as directions for future research on the topic.

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and classified into a particular difficulty level, called graded readers. Previous studies of the language in these texts have been limited in size and scope, often including books from a single publisher or series. However, if these books are meant to serve as the primary source of input for students in extensive reading programs, it is important to not only better understand the language in them, but to understand how the books within different series and made by different publishers compare with one another. Therefore, in this study I investigated the single- and multiword expressions present in graded readers for three purposes.First, I wished to better understand the difficulty of the texts by analyzing the vocabulary within them and learning how much vocabulary knowledge is required to reach 95% and 98% lexical coverage thresholds. Second, I wished to investigate the multi-word expressions (MWE) present in graded readers to better understand what MWEs students are exposed to when reading these books. Third, I investigated how the use of MWEs differs between graded readers at each level of text difficulty, as defined by reading levels defined by the Extensive Reading Foundation (ERF). In order to address these problems, I utilized a large corpus of 1,872 graded readers containing 16,448,662 tokens. Using this corpus, I calculated the coverage figures for all texts within each level to determine the vocabulary required to reach 95 and 98% levels of coverage. These coverage figures were calculated using two kinds of lists, frequency- and difficulty-based, each meant to represent learner word knowledge. The frequency-based lists were the New General Service List (New GSL; Brezina & Gablasova, 2015), another list by the same name, which I refer to as the NGSL (Browne, 2014), and Nation’s BNC/COCA list (2020) based on the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The difficulty-based list was the Scale of English Word Knowledge–Japanese (SEWK-J), a word list designed to estimate vocabulary difficulty for Japanese learners of English (Mizumoto et al., 2021; Pinchbeck, 2019). The results of the single-word analyses showed that graded readers start to be become available at the minimum 95% threshold of known vocabulary of around the 1,700 rank in the lemma-based New GSL, the 1,250 rank for the flemma-based NGSL, and the first 1,000-word level for the level-6 word family-based BNC/COCA lists (based on the 25th percentiles for ERF level 1 using those lists). Studying beyond those ranks and levels should give students access to a wide range of graded readers, both at the 95% and 98% coverage thresholds, unless using the New GSL, which was much more limited in its ability to provide coverage. The median rank needed for sufficient coverage rises with each ERF level, no matter what list is used. There is also considerable overlap between levels, allowing learners to move between levels easily, as far as lexical requirements are concerned. These findings indicate that ERF levels incrementally guide learners towards more and more authentic language and texts. Similarly, the SEWK-J provides coverage of the majority of books, making it suitable for comparing a wide range of books together under the same framework. Differences between ERF levels in the SEWK-J ranks required to reach 95% and 98% were more less noticeable than those for the pedagogically focused frequency-based lists. Next, I investigated the degree to which publisher-declared headword counts are representative of the number of headwords in each graded reader. Using the headword ranges provided by publishers tends to overestimate the number of word types needed for 95% coverage, except at the lowest ERF level. If 98% coverage is expected, then a general trend towards underestimation was found at the lowest ERF levels. Following up on these single-word analyses, I then investigated the MWEs within the graded reader corpus to produce a list of the most frequent MWEs, which I compared with a large comparison corpus, the COCA. These results indicated that graded readers are a good source of 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-grams, with more occurring in graded readers than the COCA. Next, I examined the degree to which the most useful MWEs were included, defined as being MWEs in the Phrasal Expressions List (PHRASE) (Martinez & Schmitt, 2012) list and Phrasal Verbs Pedagogical List (PHaVE) (Garnier & Schmitt, 2015). Graded readers tended to include the most pedagogically important MWEs and phrasal verbs at all ERF levels. Those PHRASE and PHaVE list items that were most common in the large reference corpora used in their creation were also found to be most common in the GRC, suggesting that graded readers are a good source of comprehensible input using these forms. Finally, using studies of L2 speaking and writing at different levels of proficiency as a guide (Siyanova-Chanturia & Spina, 2020; Tavakoli & Uchihara, 2020), I conducted an exploratory investigation into whether MWE usage in graded readers follows similar trajectories as graded reader difficulty levels increase. It was found that 2-grams that are infrequent and strongly associated in unsimplified text tend to become more common as ERF levels increase. / Applied Linguistics

No description available.