The study deals with English idioms from a pedagogical point of view. It draws attention to the fact that the use of idioms in a language is such a widespread phenomenon that we cannot continue to ignore them especially in disciplines such as language teaching and language learning. The study attempts to analyse the phenomenon of idioms diachronically and synchronically; to explain the process of idiom comprehension by foreign learners. The subjects of the study were Syrian undergraduates of English, who were largely unaware of the use of idioms among native speakers of English, since the foreign-language teaching system did not provide the chance where learners could be in frequent contact with the native speakers of the foreign idiom. The first stage of the research presents a brief swvey of some perspectives on idioms as a linguistic phenomenon. It begins with an examination of earlier views of idioms. At the end of this stage, a working definition of the idiom is suggested. The second stage smve)(S processes of idiom formation and explains how idioms have been dealt with in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, revealing the procedures for processing and understanding idioms. The third stage is empirical and the goal of which is to demonstrate how English idioms pose a problem in the process of teaching them to foreign learners. The fourth stage of the research is concerned with analysing idioms synchronically. The view maintained at this stage is that the relationship between idiomatic expressions and their meanings is not arbitrary, since these idiomatic meanings can be attained through an appeal to conceptual metaphor theories and the semantic constraint approach. The fifth stage is dedicated to the analysis of the findings which resulted from the investigation in the previous stages. Following on from this analysis, some suitable methods and effective activities for teaching English idioms to foreign learners are proposed. In brie£: the research on idioms in this study could prove fruitful in inspiring potential applications in pedagogy and language learning; in lexicography; in translation; and in computational linguistics.

This dissertation reports on the narrated experiences of nine adult ESL learners enrolled in an Intensive English Program (IEP) as they negotiated a sense of belonging to new linguistic communities of practice outside of their home countries. In this qualitative multiple-case study, I analyzed first-person accounts of the language socialization process by which the learners’ participation in new social communities resulted in shifts in their social positionings and changes in their self-concept. In my analysis, I drew upon theoretical frameworks that view learning as a situated social practice in which individuals form new identities as a result of their (non)participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In order to investigate the research problem, I conducted ethnographic forms of data collection over a six-month period. I became a participant observer in an advanced level Listening and Speaking course during one semester and conducted regular formal classroom observations. In addition to observations, I conducted individual in-depth interviews with the learners, and they participated in a photo-narrative assignment in which they documented their experiences through photography. This camera project culminated in a formal, narrative presentation to the class, which was recorded and used for analysis. The five women and four men who became the focal participants of the study were diverse in age, academic and professional ambitions, and cultural and linguistic background. The findings of the study presented in this dissertation represent my interpretive analysis of the participants’ narratives of departing their home countries and negotiating a meaningful sense of self vis-à-vis the host community as well as the various transmigrant communities that were important to them. The findings show that, through the process of L2 learning and transmigration, the participants constructed migrant identities (Block, 2007), and these identities could be both expansive and restrictive. Additionally, the findings show the ways in which these language learners were agentic in accessing L2 communities and forging attachments within them, and how these moves were designed as “answers” to how they were discursively positioned within the worlds that were important to them. / text

<p> The purpose of this study was to determine what instructional strategies expert teachers of English language learners (ELLs) in the primary grades perceive as most effective for teaching reading to ELLs. Another purpose of this study was to determine what expert teachers of ELLs in the primary grades perceive as the barriers to the reading achievement of English learners. The final purpose of this study was to determine what strategies expert teachers of ELLs in the primary grades recommend to overcome perceived barriers. Quantitative data were collected from effective teachers who taught primary grades in Riverside County, California, using an electronic format. The effective teachers were identified based on teaching at a school with an API of 800 or more with an ELL population of 40% or more and based on data criteria. Effective teachers in the primary grades were chosen based on student achievement, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessments, and site principal recommendations. A Likert scale was used for the survey. The effective teachers ranked effective instructional strategies in the five components of reading and had the ability to insert additional instructional strategies, barriers, and ways they overcame barriers in an open-ended question on the survey. The findings indicated the participants found the instructional strategies for teaching the five components of reading to be effective to teach ELLs in the primary grades to read. Based on the data analyzed, all teachers in the primary grades should be knowledgeable in the five components of reading as well as the effective instructional strategies for implementation. In addition to ensuring that teacher preparation programs and all current teachers in Grades K-3 are prepared for teaching reading to ELLs in the primary grades, this researcher also recommends that the leaders at the sites be well-versed in the five components of reading and effective instructional strategies. Additional research is recommended to identify leadership trends at the successful schools, such as accountability, data used to guide instruction, staff development planning, and student intervention programs.</p>

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence, both positively and negatively, the way L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations. The majority of these studies, however, involve language pairs relying on a Roman-based script. In comparison, the influence of a foreign or unfamiliar written representation on L2 phonolexical acquisition remains understudied. This dissertation aims to fill this gap. CHAPTER 2 considers the effects of multiple scripts (e.g. Arabic, Cyrillic, Roman-Maltese, etc.) on the acquisition of the Arabic voiceless pharyngeal fricative /ħ/ and the voiceless uvular fricative /χ/ word-initially. Monolingual native speakers of English participated in a set of five word-learning experiments where they were instructed to learn six pairs of minimally contrastive words, each associated with a unique visual referent. In each experiment, a different script configuration was manipulated. After an initial learning phase, participants were then tested on their phonological acquisition of these L2 minimal pairs. Results show significant differences in phonological accuracy between groups of learners exposed to varying degrees of script unfamiliarity. Specifically, complete script foreignness exerted an inhibitory effect on L2 phonolexical acquisition, while semi-foreign scripts exercised differential inhibitory effects based on whether grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) also activated L1 phonological units. Two follow-up spelling experiments were also conducted in an attempt to find a more intuitive, symbolic representation of these L2 phonemes. While spellers managed to find various ways to symbolically encode /χ/-words from /ħ/-words, when presented in minimal pairs (but not when presented randomly), no form-consistent pattern emerged from their spelling renditions. These spelling experiments nevertheless support the interpretation that L1 GPCs are likely activated in the course of L2 phonological processing. CHAPTER 3 examines the acquisition of another nonnative phonological contrast, that of Japanese singleton/geminate consonants word-medially. In another set of five word-learning experiments manipulating various aspects of unfamiliar scripts (e.g. Hiragana, Roman/Cyrillic blended), it was found that the acquisition of such a length-based contrast was significantly affected by the foreign written input only when the unfamiliar characters encoding the contrast were graphically highlighted (by way of font coloring and underline) or when they did not convey any information about the durational dimension of the L2 contrast (i.e. when both singletons and geminates were represented with a single character, instead of two for the geminates). These inhibitory effects show that learners are susceptible to be confused by small details featured in unfamiliar written representations presented to them in the course of L2 phonoloxical acquisition. Similar to Chapter 2, two follow-up spelling experiments were conducted. Here, spellers failed to symbolically mark a difference between singleton and geminate auditory items, whether they were presented randomly or in minimal pairs. This lack of differentiation in writing suggests that a consonantal singleton/geminate contrast is a priori not so intuitive to native English speakers. The contributions of this dissertation are manifold. First, the present results provide strong evidence that, aside from recognized acoustic and phonological features influencing the acquisition of a second language sound system, extra-linguistic elements such as written representations also contribute to the acquisitional experience of L2 learners. Furthermore, such findings show that exposure to unfamiliar written representations can significantly inhibit the successful creation of target-like phonological representations, an outcome that has thus far not been attested. Second, it provides additional and complementary research in the subfield of L2 acquisition dealing with the interaction of phonological and orthographic knowledge. The work presented here indeed expands the scope of L2 contrasts and script treatments thus far investigated. Third, implications for second language teaching and loanword phonology can be envisaged. Methods geared towards the acquisition of L2 sounds for instance could be designed taking into account the results obtained here, namely, the fact that a foreign written support may not always be beneficial to learners, depending on the degree of familiarity with the L2 writing system.

Se examino la produccion de vocales tonicas y atonas por parte de tres grupos de hablantes de espanol (dos grupos con diferencias en anos de experiencia y un grupo nativo). Los hablantes participaron en un experimento de produccion cuyos datos fueron sometidos a varios analisis. Se encontraron efectos robustos de los anos de practica con una segunda lengua, por el hecho de que los hablantes avanzados fueron capaces de reproducir vocales que no produjeron los intermedios. Para las vocales tonicas, la /e/ es la vocal mas difi­cil de aprender para los hablantes no-nativos, seguida por la /a/ y la /u/, mientras que la /o/ y la /i/ son mas faciles. Para las vocales atonas, la /e/ y la /o/ son las mas difi­ciles de aprender para los hablantes no-nativos, seguidas por la /a/ y la /u/, y finalmente por la /i/, la cual es la mas facil.

The Spanish voiced alveolar multiple vibrant consonant /r/, or trill, is often regarded as one of the most difficult sounds in the Spanish phonological inventory for second language (L2) learners. Trills are particularly difficult segments because of their exacting articulatory requirements for production. The highly restricted gestural and aerodynamic configuration required to successfully produce trills could lead to non-native trills automatically being native-like once acquired by learners, unlike other segments which generally show measurably gradient approximation of native values over time. This study employed two experiments to investigate the characteristics of L2 acquisition of Spanish /r/ by adult native speakers of English. The first experiment broadly surveyed the frequency of trill production at four levels of proficiency and among a comparison group of native speakers of Mexican Spanish when trills were the target segments in words. This experiment was designed to show the rate of trill frequency at different learner-levels and to compare it with the rate at which native speakers produce trills. A pattern of increasing ability to produce trills as proficiency level increased was found, as was a pattern of substitution of the alveolar tap as an intermediate strategy among learners who had ceased to transfer American English <italic>r</italic> but who had not yet acquired the ability to produce trills consistently. The second experiment investigated the aerodynamic properties of successfully produced trills to see if the trills of learners who had acquired the ability to produce trills displayed different physical properties from native speakers' trills. Patterns of both "categorical" and "gradient" acquisition were found. On the several measures studied, non-native trills showed patterns of acquisition in which their trills either were immediately native-like, acquired with non-native-like properties which fossilized with no further improvement, or showed gradient improvement in the direction of nativeness as proficiency level increased.

The structural complexity and the typological universals associated with relative clauses (RCs) have made the structure particularly interesting to linguists and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. Currently, much controversy is found in RCs in East Asian Languages. This dissertation tests the syntactic status of "relative clauses" in Chinese and explores second language (L2) learners' processing and production of different types of Chinese RCs.In the theoretical part of the dissertation, I test whether Comrie (2002)'s proposal of analyzing putative relative clauses in East Asian languages as "attributive clauses" can be applicable to Chinese. From a review of syntactic literature and movement test, I argue that there are crucial differences between Chinese RCs and attributive clauses. Further, reconstruction effect suggests that A-bar movement takes place within gapped Chinese RCs. More specifically, following Sauerland (2000)'s proposal, I suggest that the derivation of Chinese RCs involves the movement of an operator taking a complex NP as its complement to the Spec of CP, and that complex NP matches with an external head outside the RC.Further, I examine the possibility of analyzing AdjP+DE structure as relative clauses, and examine the flexibility and effect of demonstrative and numeral-classifier positions and their relation with relative clauses.In the experiment chapter, I discuss results from three experiments that tested the relative degrees of difficulty for L2 learners among different types of RCs including Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object and Object of Preposition relative clauses, I seek plausible linguistic and psycholinguistic proposals in explaining the performance data. The experiments include a self-paced word order judgment task, a written sentence completion task, and a written sentence combination task. It was found that the L2 acquisition of Chinese RCs is generally consistent with the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), a typological generalization based on natural languages and a hierarchy that was found to be predictive of learners' order of acquisition in SLA studies of many other languages.

Sorace (1993) suggests that competence at the final stage of non-native acquisition falls into qualitatively distinct categories: (1) incomplete grammar, which lacks a representation for a part of the target system; (2) divergent grammar, which has the target distinctions with non-target instantiations. She captures the general nature of the two systems but leaves their contents undefined. This study adopts her proposal and investigates non-native grammars with respect to acquisition of the Polish aspects: completive, pofective and perfective, in an attempt to define the properties of incomplete or divergent knowledge in the domain of aspect. / According to the account of the aspectual system of Polish proposed in this thesis, acquisition of this system requires knowledge of the following semantic and morpho-syntactic properties: (1) aspectual interpretations, which depend on the semantic features of a VP; (2) the semantic features carried by the aspects; (3) the distinct feature context required for each aspectual interpretation; (4) restriction on feature composition with respect to the syntactic domain of derivation, namely l(exical)-syntax vs. s(syntactic)-syntax. The learners' competence, therefore, must contain information about which feature context yields which interpretation, which interpretations are unrealizable in these contexts, and which aspectual structures are allowed by virtue of their syntactic vs. lexical feature character. The Polish aspectual system involves many elements of knowledge that must be acquired for the L2 end-state to be complete. It also provides a wide range of properties whose nontarget status would lead to a divergent grammar. / Experimental data were elicited from two groups of English speakers who were advanced or near-native learners of Polish in a series of tests (grammaticality judgments, semantic and end-state compatibility tasks, and picture selection) each addressing separate sets of restrictions governing the system. Results were compared to native speaker adult and child controls. / Although the results reveal two types of competence, these cannot be categorically defined as either complete or divergent. While the near-natives' knowledge manifests a complete representation of the elements of the target grammar and native-like distinctions between the aspects, it also bears some characteristics of an incomplete system. The advanced learners manifest a system that is both divergent and incomplete. The study shows that the classification proposed by Sorace (1993) is only appropriate with reference to individual properties of grammar, as a single system of knowledge may show the characteristics of complete, incomplete, divergent and, possibly, non-divergent competence.

<p> This study investigated whether learners with a phonemic vowel quantity distinction (VQD) in their L1 have an advantage when acquiring allophonic vowel length in L2. Many languages contain a phonological rule to devoice final consonants. While English maintains a phonemic contrast between voiced and voiceless syllable codas ("bat" vs. "bad," e.g.), it accompanies an allophonic contrast in the duration of the preceding vowel, resulting in longer vowels before voiced codas than before voiceless ones. German-L1 English learners (group 1), whose L1 has devoiced codas and VQD, and Russian-L1 English learners (group 2), whose L1 also devoices codas but has no VQD, performed a vowel production and XAB vowel perception task, designed to determine whether group 1 perceived and produced longer vowels before English voiced stop codas, compared to group 2. Both perceived but did not produce vowel lengthening before English voiced codas, which was significantly different from native English speakers. </p>

While translation in L2 learning/teaching has been viewed negatively since the 1950s in North America, in the late 1980s a re-evaluation of translation has begun (Duff, 1989). The purpose of this research is to explore text-level translation from the learner’s perspective, as this kind of research, at present, remains quite scarce (Krings, 1987). This study focuses on text-level translation as a useful component of second language (L2) learning/teaching. Adult L2 learners’ translation processes and performance are examined and contrasted with the same group’s Li and L2 writing performance. Twenty-two Japanese ESL students studying at a Canadian college performed three tasks individually (translation from Li into L2, Li writing, L2 writing), thinking aloud. Their writing samples were evaluated, and think-aloud protocols were analyzed, supplemented by interviews and text analyses. The data were analyzed with attention given to four recent cognitive theories of language learning: Cummins’ theories (1986) of cross-linguistic interdependence of cognitive academic skills; Schmidt’s “conscious attention” (1990); Swain’s “i+1 output” hypothesis (1985); and McLaughlin’s “restructuring” (1 990b). Findings: 1) The correlations of the quality of translation, Li writing, and L2 writing of L2 learners (whose Li writing skills are still developing) were not significant. 2) The learners’ conscious attention to language use was high in the translation task, but unexpectedly low in the L2 writing. Their language use was more sophisticated in the translation than in the L2 writing. 3) Some students preferred translation tasks to L2 writing tasks, expressing their views which were consistent with the “i+1 output” hypothesis. 4) Contrary to general expectation about student translations, the students did not translate word for word; they often restructured Li/L2 correspondences, and examples of “restructuring” were not limited to the word level. General conclusions: Cross-linguistic interdependence among translation, Li writing, and L2 writing was not confirmed clearly. However, there was evidence that translation processes prompted conscious attention, “i+1 output”, and restructuring, which some consider to be necessary for second language learning. Thus translation in L2 learning deserves a closer look as it provides potential opportunities for learners to learn a second language.