On the emergence of bilingual code-switching competence

Code-switching among proficient adult bilinguals has been extensively studied, and it is by now universally concluded that intra-sentential code alternations are rule-governed and systematic, displaying dependency relations that reflect the operation of underlying syntactic principles. The central, guiding question to be addressed herein is whether and, if so, how second language learners acquire the knowledge that defines structural coherence and allows them to render well-formedness judgments for code-switched forms. This exploration takes on particular significance given that learners receive no evidence which could guide them in rendering such judgments, and therefore results consistent with those observed among competent bilinguals could be imputed to unconscious, abstract linguistic knowledge. The investigation thus proves doubly fruitful, in the discovery of developmental patterns and in the evaluation of linguistic-theoretical methodologies and constructs.

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Do second language learners acquire restrictive relative clauses on the basis of relational or configurational information? The acquisition of French subject, direct object and genitive restrictive relative clauses by second language learners

Interlanguage studies bulletin (Utrecht) ◽

10.1177/026765838900500204 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 156-188 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Roger Hawkins

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Second Language Acquisition ◽

Language Learning ◽

Language Learners ◽

Relative Clauses ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Linguistic Knowledge ◽

Linear Ordering ◽

Restrictive Relative Clauses ◽

The Way

Much of the work on the second language acquisition of restrictive relative clauses has made reference to the similarities between learners' order of diffi culty and Keenan and Comrie's (1977) typologically determined noun phrase accessibility hierarchy for relativisation (AH). There has been little considera tion, however, of whether this 'theory of markedness' (for that is the implica tion of citing the AH in the context of second language learning) actually determines the way that second language learners develop rules for restrictive relative clauses. The present study examines the way that learners of L2 French construct rules for French relativiser morphology from this perspective. It is found that there is no evidence to support the view that learners make use of a theory of markedness like the AH in constructing such rules. Rather, learners appear to construct rules on the basis of the linear ordering of the constituents of restrictive relative clauses in surface configurations. From the evidence it is suggested that 'markedness' in the development of L2 restrictive relative clauses is not a feature of the grammatical component of learners' linguistic knowledge, but is a feature of their L2 processing capacity.

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Strategic Competence in an ELT Syllabus

ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.2143/itl.145.0.562912 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 145-146 ◽

pp. 145-165 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ghaleb Ahmed Rabab'ah

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Learning ◽

Language Learners ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Communication Strategies ◽

Strategy Training ◽

Linguistic Knowledge ◽

Teaching Methodology ◽

Strategic Competence ◽

Communication Problems

Abstract Communication strategies (CSs) are important in helping learners to communicate successfully when they are faced with a production problem due to their lack of linguistic knowledge. This paper aims to support the importance of developing second language learners’ strategic competence and making communication strategies part of an ELT syllabus. This paper first discusses the various definitions of strategic competence and communication strategies. Then it briefly presents various communication strategies used by second language learners to solve their communication problems. The major portion of this paper is devoted to strategy training and its advantages in language learning. Finally, the paper concludes with the importance of introducing tasks and activities on communication strategies in an EFL syllabus, and suggests ways of improving teaching methodology.

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Starting Over

Psychological Science ◽

10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01852.x ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 79-87 ◽

Cited By ~ 57

Author(s):

Jesse Snedeker ◽

Joy Geren ◽

Carissa L. Shafto

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Cognitive Development ◽

Language Development ◽

Language Learners ◽

Language Production ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Vocabulary Size ◽

Developmental Patterns ◽

Grammatical Morphemes ◽

Parental Reports

Language development is characterized by predictable shifts in the words children produce and the complexity of their utterances. Because acquisition typically occurs simultaneously with maturation and cognitive development, it is difficult to determine the causes of these shifts. We explored how acquisition proceeds in the absence of possible cognitive or maturational roadblocks, by examining the acquisition of English in internationally adopted preschoolers. Like infants, and unlike other second-language learners, these children acquire language from child-directed speech, without access to bilingual informants. Parental reports and speech samples were collected from 27 preschoolers, 3 to 18 months after they were adopted from China. These children showed the same developmental patterns in language production as monolingual infants (matched for vocabulary size). Early on, their vocabularies were dominated by nouns, their utterances were short, and grammatical morphemes were generally omitted. Children at later stages had more diverse vocabularies and produced longer utterances with more grammatical morphemes.

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The impact of English as medium of instruction on the academic performance of second language learners in the Further Education and Traning band at schools in KwaZulu-Natal

10.51415/10321/758 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Rajendren Sabapathy Dorasamy

Keyword(s):

Academic Performance ◽

Second Language ◽

Language Learners ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Further Education ◽

Code Switching ◽

Target Language ◽

Medium Of Instruction ◽

English Second Language ◽

The Impact

This study, in adopting a phenomenological approach, provides an overview of the contextual realities surrounding language choice and usage as it impacts on the academic performance of English second language learners. There have been concerns that the majority of learners with indigenous mother tongues can be seen to fare badly in a post liberation educational system in which English or Afrikaans is still used as medium of instruction. The focus of this study was therefore the impact of English as the medium of instruction on the academic performance of English second language learners. Using a mixed method approach, through a case study, data from questionnaires, interviews and observations were analysed using various statistical packages and the findings were reported on. It was established that it was not so much the language per se which had a negative impact on the academic performance of English second language learners: it was rather the efficacy of usage of the chosen language and other periphery issues in the formal environment, such as lack of interactions with target language speakers, code-switching, and teacher competence, which resulted in the poor academic performance of English second language learners. Furthermore, it was also established that the informal environment, consisting of learners’ culture and traditions, family educational qualifications, absenteeism and appropriate resources at home and community libraries, which also had a negative impact on academic performance. It was therefore recommended that, amongst other things, the Language in Education Policy be amended to provide for more opportunities for learner interaction with the target language. Furthermore, given that the efficacy of education is contingent upon the competence of the teachers, relevant skills and competencies among teachers should be developed to enhance their performance in class. It was also found that code-switching was counterproductive to learning the target language, thus holding back ESL learners’ acquisition of content knowledge. As such, code-switching should be used very restrictively, if at all, in the Further Education and Training phase. It was also recommended that necessary lexicons and registers of the indigenous languages be developed sufficiently so that these are worthy of use as media of instruction, without necessarily being seen as a replacement of English as medium of instruction. There should also be greater involvement of all stakeholders in the choice of and availability of resources which are relevant to the context of learners. Other issues requiring intervention from a broader stakeholder involvement include iii interdepartmental integration to alleviate poverty, and provision of transport so that learners might report regularly and timeously to school, thus reducing absenteeism. The solution to improving learner academic performance requires concerted and co-ordinated inter-governmental, community and other stakeholders’ effort and the necessary will of the government to ensure that learners receive quality education.

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Analysis and feedback of erroneous Arabic verbs

Natural Language Engineering ◽

10.1017/s1351324913000223 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 21 (2) ◽

pp. 271-323 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

KHALED SHAALAN ◽

MARWA MAGDY ◽

ALY FAHMY

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Learners ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Arabic Language ◽

Recall Rate ◽

Linguistic Knowledge ◽

Tutoring System ◽

Error Diagnosis ◽

Basic Step ◽

Arabic Morphology

AbstractArabic language is strongly structured and considered as one of the most highly inflected and derivational languages. Learning Arabic morphology is a basic step for language learners to develop language skills such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Arabic morphology is non-concatenative and provides the ability to attach a large number of affixes to each root or stem that makes combinatorial increment of possible inflected words. As such, Arabic lexical (morphological and phonological) rules may be confusing for second language learners. Our study indicates that research and development endeavors on spelling, and checking of grammatical errors does not provide adequate interpretations to second language learners’ errors. In this paper we address issues related to error diagnosis and feedback for second language learners of Arabic verbs and how they impact the development of a web-based intelligent language tutoring system. The major aim is to develop an Arabic intelligent language tutoring system that solves these issues and helps second language learners to improve their linguistic knowledge. Learners are encouraged to produce input freely in various situations and contexts, and are guided to recognize by themselves the erroneous functions of their misused expressions. Moreover, we proposed a framework that allows for the individualization of the learning process and provides the intelligent feedback that conforms to the learner's expertise for each class of error. Error diagnosis is not possible with current Arabic morphological analyzers. So constraint relaxation and edit distance techniques are successfully employed to provide error-specific diagnosis and adaptive feedback to learners. We demonstrated the capabilities of these techniques in diagnosing errors related to Arabic weak verbs formed using complex morphological rules. As a proof of concept, we have implemented the components that diagnose learner's errors and generate feedback which have been effectively evaluated against test data acquired from real teaching environment. The experimental results were satisfactory, and the performance achieved was 74.34 percent in terms of recall rate.

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