Many L2 students in Namibia are not adequately prepared for the academic demands of university courses, mainly because of poor reading skills in the L2. University students reading below their maturational levels, can mainly be attributed to their print-impoverished backgrounds, as reading is a skill that develops mainly through reading. Without any assistance, poor readers at university will continue to read poorly and as a result perform weaker in their academic courses compared to their peers who are better readers. The overall aim of this study is to explore the effects of a reading intervention program on a group of university students in Namibia. A quasiexperimental method with a control and an intervention group was employed. The effect of reading ability on academic performance was also investigated. In addition, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the pre-literacy experiences of students, the differences between good and poor readers at university, their views about the reading intervention program as well as the attitudes and practices of university lecturers towards reading instruction at tertiary level were examined. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (with specialisation in Applied Linguistics)

Text in English / This study examined the vocabulary and academic literacy levels of undergraduate students at the University of Namibia, as well as the effects of an explicit and an implicit vocabulary programme on vocabulary development and academic literacy. The study also sought to determine the effects of the programmes on students’ attitudes about vocabulary and explicit vocabulary strategies. The relationship between students’ vocabulary size, academic literacy levels, and their self-assessment of their vocabulary knowledge was examined. Many students had not reached the desired word mastery and did not have adequate academic literacy skills to cope with the demands of university. Students in the explicit group modestly improved receptive vocabulary knowledge at the end of the intervention but there was no significant improvement in academic literacy skills. Overall, students showed an increase in positive responses regarding their attitudes to vocabulary. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Applied Linguistics)

This research examines the efficacy, if any, of the Music and Visual Arts (MVA) program in improving the English vocabulary development of first grade Thai students. The researcher developed the Vocabulary Recognition Assessment (VRA) as a measure of English vocabulary development. It employs the accuracy and rapidity method of word recognition as a measurement of English language development in Thai children. Forty first grade Thai students in a Bangkok elementary school participated in the study. Participants were divided equally between an experimental group and a control group. During a nine-week period, students in the experimental group were instructed with the MVA strategy, while students in the control group were taught with the Visual Arts (VA) strategy. Paired sample t-test, ANOVA, and ANCOVA were used to analyze data from the VRA, to compare the pre-test and the post-test in terms of accuracy scores and rapidity scores of the control group and the experimental group. Data revealed that students instructed with the MVA strategy improved their English vocabulary development in terms of accuracy of word recognition significantly more than students taught English using the VA strategy. No significant difference was found between the MVA strategy and the VA strategy in terms of rapidity of word recognition. The MVA strategy could be a useful strategy for Thai early childhood teachers to use in helping Thai children learn English vocabulary.

This study examines an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teacher's speech throughout one curricular unit of an intermediate grammar and writing course in order to better understand which high-value vocabulary students might acquire through attending to the teacher and noticing words that are used. Vocabulary acquisition is important for English for Academic Purposes students, given the vocabulary demands of academic language. The Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) has been shown to include important vocabulary in written academic texts, and has become a standard part of English for Academic Purposes curricula and pedagogical materials. Although explicit vocabulary instruction is important, research has shown that large amounts of vocabulary may be acquired incidentally by attending to meaning. Classroom instruction provides a great deal of input, and could potentially offer a chance for students to encounter and begin to learn academic vocabulary through incidental acquisition. However, existing research on incidental vocabulary acquisition in classrooms has focused on adult instruction and English as a Foreign Language settings, resulting in a lack of evidence about English for Academic Purposes classrooms. To respond to these needs, this study analyzes the occurrence and repetition of Academic Word List items in the teacher's speech throughout two weeks of a course in an intensive academic English program in the United States. Two weeks of naturalistic class recordings from the Multimedia Adult Learner Corpus were transcribed and analyzed using the RANGE program to find the number of academic vocabulary types in the teacher's speech and how often they were repeated. Additionally, I derived categories of classroom topics and coded the transcribed speech in order to investigate the connection between topics and academic word use. Academic Word List items are present in the teacher's speech, although they do not constitute a large proportion overall, only 2.8% of the running words. Most of the AWL types relate to specific classroom topics or routines. There are 13 AWL types repeated to a high degree, and 26 AWL types repeated to a moderate degree. These items are the most likely candidates for incidental vocabulary acquisition, though there is evidence from the videos that most of the students already understand their general meanings. It is unlikely that students could learn a great deal about AWL items that they were not already familiar with. However, it is possible that the teacher's speech provides incremental gains in AWL word knowledge. These findings show that there may be a substantial number of AWL items that students learn about even before explicitly studying academic vocabulary. Teachers should try to draw out students' familiarity with these forms when explicitly teaching AWL vocabulary in order to connect familiar words with their academic meanings and uses.

The present study is an attempt to obtain, from two groups of students, useful facts with which to evaluate the most effective method of presenting educational materials to junior-high-school students. The study is an attempt to measure and evaluate the achievement made in social studies, reading comprehension, and vocabulary in 1949 and 1950. The following questions form the basis for the present study: What method is best for the purpose of presenting materials to a class? Which method helps to solve the problem of the student most effectively? By which method is greater achievement made? If the two methods prove of equal value, then how much achievement may be attributed to the use of each method?

This investigation was designed to determine if teaching vocabulary through integrating English and Social Studies curricula would provide tenth grade students who are poor readers with strategies to improve their reading comprehension. The strategies used were designed to support struggling readers and English language development students to connect denotative and connotative meanings of words found in the novel Animal Farm to their social studies class' content.

The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

The study measures the productive vocabulary size of Grade 6 English Second Language learners and teachers in 16 township schools in Gauteng Province. Data from learners (n-881) and teachers (n-19) were collected by testing the participants with versions C and A respectively of the Productive Vocabulary levels Test of Controlled ability. In addition, samples of learners’ written work were examined. Interviews and lesson observations with a sample of teachers were conducted to triangulate the data. Using SPSS version 23, means for each word level were calculated. The ANOVA, t-tests and post hoc tests were performed. Bonferroni corrections were applied. Results indicate that both learners and teachers have not mastered the vocabulary at the levels tested. The results also indicate that poor vocabulary teaching methods and poverty contribute to poor vocabulary development among learners. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Applied Linguistics)

The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

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