Reflection 14

Assessed Levels of Second Language

Speaking Proficiency: How Distinct?

By NORIKO IWASHITA, ANNIE BROWN, TIM MCNAMARA and SALLY O’HAGAN

This study investigated the nature of speaking proficiency at different level and found out that vocabulary and fluency were the factors that had the strongest impact on distinguishing between the proficiency levels. This consideration is particularly important in designing a high-stake test, such as TOEFL. First, it is important to understand what we mean by fluency and how a test can be useful in measuring this competency. Test usefulness includes 6 main qualities: reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness, impact, and practicality. Although there is a tension among these qualities, there is no total abandonment of any. Depending on the purpose of a test, some of these qualities may have higher degree than the others.

If we analyze the TOEFL speaking section, we can see that certain features of the test increase the degree of overall usefulness of the test. I completely agree that pronunciation, rhythm, stress, and intonation are important factors in speaking, which make our speech comprehensible and help us avoid miscommunications. So, the test focuses on it. The topics in the test require not only descriptions but also have test-takers justify an opinion or compare and contrast. If someone is good at describing, it does not mean that he or she is also good at comparing things or justifying an opinion. So, the test measures different types of talk to receive more accurate information about the candidates’ oral proficiency. Besides, the test limits the possibility of memorization of any topic for taking the test, thus increasing its construct validity. This yields the positive washback of the test on teachers and students in the sense that teachers should not have their students memorize the topics; if the student does not actually like coking, he does not have to say he likes it.

Although there is certain control over what happens in the interaction with the test tasks, there is little power over the examinee, while in other tests the interlocutor initiates interaction and asks questions, and the examinee is to comply and answer. The quality of authenticity is also enhanced as the test contains both independent and integrated tasks. This means that there is relatively high degree of authenticity and reliability in the speaking tasks, unless the topics are memorized. I think one concern relates to scorer reliability and inter-rater reliability, an issue which was discussed in our class.

This discussion leads to the pedagogic prescription which could provide the best investment for the development of speaking proficiency. It is not enough to expose our learners to the conventions of actual encodings, because speaking is not something that learners can be rehearsed to. The language that people actually produce as observable behavior presupposes a vast knowledge of language as unexploited potential. They draw on this knowledge pragmatically as a complement to a context. Thus, if we want our learners to become competent in speaking, we should develop both their memory-based knowledge and rule-based knowledge. Drawing on these two types knowledge, which interrelate and interact with each other, learners will be able to exploit the virtual language and adjust to the conventions of actual encodings as the context requires. This implies that we should focus our teaching on the language as a resource for making meaning, which includes both what is virtual in the language and what is actual in its encodings.    

Reflection 13

Genre analysis: Structural and linguistic evolution

of the English-medium medical research article (1985–2004)

By Li-Juan Li, Guang-Chun Ge

This study encouraged me to draw parallels between its findings and my own thesis writing. Therefore, I would like to reflect on these parallels.  Although the study investigated medical research papers, I think the moves, the tenses, and the use of personal pronouns could also be generalized to research of other disciplines. My research appears to conform to all the findings, except for the use of personal pronoun. First, I could observe the seven obligatory moves found by the study. Move 1 related to presenting background information has become obligatory which is explained by the researchers’ desire to present a clearer picture of the topic of discourse, to increase the credibility of the research, and to make it more convincing. Similarly, Move 6 describing data-analysis procedures has become obligatory as reference to approaches and techniques can attract professional readers and ensure that the methods applied are appropriate for the research design. Interestingly, Moves 8 and 9 related to non-consistent observations and highlighting overall research outcome, respectively, appear to be optional, and are not included in my research work either. Researchers tend to discuss their research findings specifically and directly.

Regarding the tenses, my own research is consistent with the finding of the study, which shows that researchers prefer to use simple past in presenting new research, to avoid immediacy, certainty, and generality to science, most probably because they realize that science is a collection of hypothesis and not a field of certainty. Simple present was more used in Move 10, in interpreting the research outcomes, and the present perfect was used very little.

The study showed that “I” pronoun was not used in the corpus of research articles, but the pronoun “we” was used. The reasons behind this include the increased number of co-authored articles, the emphasis on the reliability of their findings, the expression of politeness, and the solidarity with readers. In my thesis, I have used “I” once or twice, but I think it is well known researchers who could allow themselves to use this pronoun more often to stress the importance of their findings. The significance of this study was that it revealed the structural and linguistic changes in research articles and provoked a desire to think over our own research writing.

Reflection 12

Challenging stereotypes about academic writing:

Complexity, elaboration, explicitness

By Douglas Biber, Bethany Gray

I will start reflecting on this topic from the end of the study which claims that in academic writing researchers need to achieve two goals: ‘clarity’ and ‘economy’. These new goals were revealed and emphasized due to the investigation of a corpus of academic research articles which showed less elaborated and more implicitly stated meaning relations. Both of the goals are important for the reader to have no doubts about the intended meaning and to quickly scan through a research article and extract the essential information. However, these two constructs are in tension with each other. Achieving clarity is easier through elaborated sentences and explicit meaning relations; while ‘economy’ entails more compressed and implicit meaning relations. This creates a number of problems both for educators and novice researchers as how to teach and learn the skills of decoding academic writing and the skills of producing clear but compact academic articles.

To enable the novice researchers to become both successful readers and writers, I think, educators first should expose them to multiple research articles, raise their awareness about the style, structure, and discourse of academic writing, and help them decode the meaning behind the text, and improve their comprehension. Second, they can construct various activities where learners are to transform elaborated sentences into more compressed ones maintaining the meaning of the text, and the opposite. Or, they can do activities related to clausal and phrasal modifications. After they get practice, learners should be given opportunity to implement their skills and knowledge of academic writing in the production of their own articles. 

Reflection 11

Investigating the viability of a collocation list

for students of English for academic purposes

By Philip Durrant

This class session was based on the discussion of collocations. We spoke about BNC (British National Corpus) which contains 100 million samples of written English. Another was the Word Smith which represents a corpus of spoken English, and still another is COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) with 450 million text samples. I think corpus linguistics is an impressive achievement in that it reveals patterns of frequency and co-occurrence, which are not intuitively apparent, either to use or analyst. The computer analysis of text provides detailed information about the co-textual relations of words in use: how they relate lexically in collocation, and how they relate to particular grammatical features in colligation. In short, they provide a vast amount of basic fact which could dictate what the content of language courses should be. However, I used could because I acknowledge the limitations of these descriptions.

Although corpus descriptions capture a linguistic reality that others do not, they represent partial reality, like all linguistic descriptions being necessarily limited. What they account for is one aspect of language behavior, namely the texts that language users produce, and these productions do not exhaust the possible. Moreover, they provide basic fact about text, but not about discourse. This means they do not reveal facts about the pragmatic aspect of behavior, how people use language appropriate to context to achieve a particular force and effect. We, as language teachers, need to understand what corpus findings represent. But we should also recognize that these findings are not absolute truths, and that description does not equal prescription; it just provides insights and direction for prescription.

 For academic writing, the list of such collocations is more specific, though, as stated in Durrant’s study, cross-disciplinary collocations differ in type. The main finding of this study was that the type of these collocations does not tend to be lexical, which has traditionally been focused on, but rather grammatical. Our class also captured the discussion of lexical and grammatical collocations, the former being described as the combination of two lexical words, and the latter – as that off one lexical and one grammatical word. I think, the list of grammatical collocations is as important in academic writing as lexical collocations have been valued by researchers. So, both researchers and educators should not downplay the role of either type, and if these collocations are not sufficiently frequent in the language to be learnt implicitly, at least they can be learnt explicitly. 

Reflection 10

The Effects of Repetition on Vocabulary Knowledge

By STUART WEBB

This major finding of this study is that if learners encounter unknown words ten times in context, sizeable learning gains may occur. However, to develop full knowledge of a word more than ten repetitions may be needed. I want to immediately base my reflection on its pedagogical implications - as to how we can make use of this finding to provide effective instruction in vocabulary acquisition, which is one of the main issues in an Armenian EFL classroom where vocabulary instruction is often based on word by word translation. As a result, we have learners who have generally poor comprehension of natural, unedited spoken or written material, even after a year or more of intensive language instruction. Thus, vocabulary is important for communication and it should not be suppressed.

The key of this study to our understanding of vocabulary teaching is the increased importance of cyclical syllabus, as a crucial criterion in designing a course, as it provides recycling of input. This recurrence of the item will allow a continual review of the item studied and an expansion of the item a step further. Regarding the type of instruction, I believe that effective vocabulary learning should focus on both explicit and implicit learning. Initially, we should teach our students at least 2000 high frequency words which account for 80 percent of what we regularly see or hear. We can maximize vocabulary considerably by teaching word families instead of individual word forms. It is important to give our students multiple exposures to items they should learn by providing variety of rich contexts, both written and spoken. Word association techniques and semantic mapping, collocations, lexical phrases, idioms have been proven to be successful ways to learn a large number of words in a short period and retain them over time. Language games have the added advantage of being fun, competitive, and consequently, memorable. As for the implicit or incidental learning, it also requires multiple exposures to a word which can be achieved by providing numerous authentic materials to students.

In my teaching, I use various useful vocabulary learning strategies. For example, I can encourage my students to guess meaning from context, study and practice in peer groups, connect a word to personal experience or previous learning, say a new word aloud when studying, use verbal and written repetition, or review new material at gradually increasing intervals. Finally, I want to emphasize that we should not forget what it means to know a word, which involves not just the translation of a word, but more than that; knowing its spoken and written contexts of use, its collocational patterns, its syntactic, pragmatic and discoursal patterns. It means knowing a word actively, productively, and receptively. Thus, having this understanding at the basis of our teaching, we can enhance the vocabulary learning of our students. 

Reflection 9

Capturing L2 Accuracy Developmental Patterns:

 Insights from an Error-Tagged EFL Learner Corpus

               

By JENNIFER THEWISSEN

Theories of error in foreign language teaching research provide for not only correct appreciation of student errors but also understanding of how L1 as well as L2 is acquired. Through a study of a learner’s erroneous linguistic performance which deviates from formal target language, researchers can obtain evidence how language is acquired or learned and what strategies the learner is employing in his/her learning of languages, and educators can learn information of how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and consequently what remains for him/her to learn. Therefore, I believe error theories in EFL/ESL research have significant value.

This study indicated that the EFL error developmental patterns tend to be dominated by progress and stabilization trends and that progress is often located between B1 and B2, whereas the performance range between B2 and C2 is characterized by a plateau‐like stabilization tendency. As it was mentioned in our discussion, the higher the level, the slower the progress. All the calculations were done by means of ANOVA, t-test, and r-test. Our class discussed helped me refresh my knowledge of statistics; ANOVA is used for measuring more than two groups, t-test can be of two types: independent t-test which measures the difference between two different samples, and paired t-test which measure the two different scores of the same sample. I have used these tools to measure the data for my capstone project.

This kind of investigation, although did not consider the influence of L1, contributed some cumulative evidence for a better understanding of the interlanguage and shed light on teaching and testing techniques as remedial pedagogical interventions which are inextricably linked with error analysis. Students do not pick up language features in a linear, highly predictable, sequential manner. Rather, the key for getting them to use, for example, grammar correctly lies in getting them to notice how grammar is used by proficient speakers, to notice the gaps in their performance, to explore through cycle of hypothesizing, testing, and verifying patterns and rules, to use the data they find and expose to large amounts of language through extensive reading. The question of how to put all of these techniques together is, in my conviction, most suitably answered by the task-based approach, as a needs-based approach to content selection – a productive pedagogical intervention.

Considering the significant research value of error-analysis, I think more and more data-based evidence is necessary for determining with confidence the nature of learning strategies and interlanguage, and for establishing a viable theory of foreign language learning and teaching – a concern and occupation of current research in applied linguistics. 

Reflection 8

Balancing Content and Language in Instruction:

 The Experience of Immersion Teachers

By DIANNE J. TEDICK

To date, I hadn’t explored any research related to teachers’ actual experience of attempting to attend to both content and language in instruction. Unquestionably, Content-Based Instruction (CBI) whose primary mission involves balancing language and content in instruction is extremely complicated and difficult for teachers to put into practice. Teachers, particularly, immersion teachers, face challenges to the successful implementation of CBI where language acquisition suffers more. During our class discussions, I learned that there are two types of immersion programs: one-way where the majority of learners speak in the same L1, and two-way where half of the learners speak, for example, in English, and the other half speaks in French, as in Canada. Another categorization of immersion programs that we discussed is between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). BICS, which lasts 1-2 years, aims to develop learners’ conversational fluency in everyday topics and is more contextualized; while CALP, whose duration is 3-5 years, is targeted at the development of academic skills, is decontextualized, highly abstract, and relies on the knowledge of language.

Providing a good quality immersion education is rather challenging. We need to understand the problems to be able to give them solutions. Thus, this reflective lifeworld research approach helped me identify the problems from the perspective of those, in this case immersion teachers, who had lived them, and the meaning – what it means to live this particular experience. The issues highlighted by them were: identity issues, external challenges issues, isolation issues, ongoing difficulty identifying what language to focus on in the context of content instruction, and increased awareness of the interdependence of content and language.

Based on our class discussion, there are 5 main principles to overcome these challenges: identifying and connecting language and content objectives, activating students’ prior knowledge, providing comprehensible input, enabling language production, and assessing language and content objectives. To further on, it’s also necessary to reinforce immersion teachers’ view of themselves not only as content teachers but also as language teachers. This can be done through teacher education programs. Also, good textbooks that balance language and content should be published. Certain materials might help teachers prepare to implement the CBI successfully. They should focus on strategies to help teachers to find the language, know when and how to focus in on it during instruction, and how to follow-up on it in assessment. This will also help teachers in understanding how to provide explicit instruction within the context of meaning-based instruction when students are developmentally ready for it.