iReasearch学术科研网

摘要：This article outlines the current state of and recent developments in the use of corpora for language assessment and considers future directions with a special focus on computational methodology. Because corpora began to make inroads into language assessment in the 1990s, test developers have increasingly used them as a reference resource to become well versed in terms of the linguistic characteristics of expert and novice speakers' usage and identify the test construct. In regard to developing and validating language tests, large representative corpora, learner corpora, and specialized corpora have been actively used, as these corpora have made it possible to systematically compare the linguistic features associated with expert users with those found in learner language. Recent advances in computational approaches to assessment can facilitate this comparison to a great extent using technologies in automated essay scoring and learner language analysis. As an emerging area in the field of language assessment, corpus-based research should extend to less explored areas including compilation and longitudinal analysis of developmental corpora, fine-grained microanalysis of learner's development, and assessment attuned to individual learners who use different linguistic varieties. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The Output Hypothesis proposes that language production can facilitate language learning in a number of ways. However, while early research into this theory provided a strong starting point for further research, it did not provide clear, long-term evidence of output's role in language acquisition. More recent research has addressed this problem by using simple writing task sequences in which output precedes input in order to maximize its role in noticing. Results have been encouraging. In this article, I summarize this research before going on to suggest ways in which teachers can utilize similar task sequences in order to create practical classroom techniques which encourage learners to notice holes in their own knowledge and gaps between their written ability and expert user texts. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The focus of this study is the acquisition of grammatical gender in Greek and Dutch by bilingual children whose other language is English. Although grammatical gender languages share the property of noun classification in terms of grammatical gender, there are important differences between the languages under investigation here in terms of both the morphological cues for gender marking available to the child and the developmental path followed by monolingual children. Dutch offers limited input cues for grammatical gender, but Greek shows consistent and regular patterns of morphological gender marking on all members of the nominal paradigm. This difference is associated with the precocious pattern of gender acquisition in Greek and the attested delay in monolingual Dutch development. We explore the development of gender in Dutch and Greek with the aim of disentangling input from age of onset effects in bilingual children who vary in the age of first exposure to Dutch or Greek. Our findings suggest that although bilingual Greek children encounter fewer difficulties in gender acquisition compared to bilingual Dutch children, amount of input constitutes a predictive factor for the pattern attested in both cases. Age of onset effects could be partly responsible for differences between simultaneous and successive bilinguals in Greek, but this is clearly not the case for Dutch. Our findings are also addressed from the more general perspective of the status of 'early' and 'late' phenomena in monolingual acquisition and the advantages of investigating these from the bilingual perspective. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Foreign language (FL) films with subtitles are becoming increasingly popular, and many European countries use subtitling as a cheaper alternative to dubbing. However, the extent to which people process subtitles under different subtitling conditions remains unclear. In this study, participants watched part of a film under standard (FL soundtrack and native language subtitles), reversed (native language soundtrack and FL subtitles), or intralingual (FL soundtrack and FL subtitles) subtitling conditions while their eye movements were recorded. The results revealed that participants read the subtitles irrespective of the subtitling condition. However, participants exhibited more regular reading of the subtitles when the film soundtrack was in an unknown FL. To investigate the incidental acquisition of FL vocabulary, participants also completed an unexpected auditory vocabulary test. Because the results showed no vocabulary acquisition, the need for more sensitive measures of vocabulary acquisition are discussed. Finally, the reading of the subtitles is discussed in relation to the saliency of subtitles and automatic reading behavior. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Two separate studies examined older siblings' influence on the language exposure and language development of US-born toddlers who were being raised in bilingual homes. The participants in Study 1 were 60 children between 16 and 30 months who had heard English and another language at home from birth; 26 had older siblings, and 34 did not. The participants in Study 2 were 27 children, assessed at 22 and 30 months, who had heard English and Spanish from birth; 14 had school-aged older siblings, and 13 did not. Both studies found that older siblings used English more in talking to the toddlers than did other household members and that toddlers with older siblings were more advanced in English language development. Study 2 also found that the presence of a school-aged older sibling increased mothers' use of English with their toddlers and that toddlers without a school-aged older sibling were more advanced in Spanish than the toddlers with a school-aged older sibling. These findings contribute to a picture of the complex processes that shape language use in bilingual homes and cause variability in young children's bilingual development. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study examines vocabulary growth rates in first and second languages for Spanish-speaking and Cantonese-speaking English language learners from kindergarten through second grade. Growth-modeling results show a within-language effect of concepts about print on vocabulary. Language exposure also had an effect on English vocabulary: earlier English exposure led to larger English vocabulary in kindergarten. There was no interference of early English exposure on native-language vocabulary. Moreover, Cantonese-speaking children had higher English expressive vocabulary scores than Spanish-speaking children and this difference remained for the 3 years. In contrast, although there were no significant differences in first language vocabulary at the start of kindergarten, Spanish-speaking children had steeper growth rates in first-language vocabulary than Cantonese-speaking children, after controlling for language of instruction and first-language concepts about print. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This article compares the effects of listening and reading on the incidental acquisition and retention of vocabulary. Two hundred thirty students participated in the study: They either (a) read three academic texts, (b) watched three lectures, or (c) received no input at all and just completed the vocabulary measures. This study also assessed and compared the relationship between acquisition through each of these presentation modes and the following factors: frequency of occurrence, type of word, type of elaboration, and predictability from word form and parts. The reading subjects made greater vocabulary gains than the listening subjects for all four levels of proficiency analyzed. Inspection of pairwise comparisons seemed to indicate that the difference in gains between the reading and listening conditions decreased as the students' proficiency increased. Similar trends emerged for retention. Reading also resulted in greater retention 1 month after the input, except for the highest proficiency students. For this group, no significant difference was found between the listening and reading delayed posttest scores. The relationship among each of the four factors was analyzed and vocabulary acquisition was also found to vary across input modes.

摘要：We assessed the language, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities of 27 internationally adopted children from China, adopted by French-speaking parents, 12 of whom had been assessed previously by Gauthier and Genesee. The children were on average 7 years, 10 months old and were matched to nonadopted monolingual French-speaking children on age, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although there were no significant differences between the groups with respect to socioemotional and cognitive development, the adoptees scored significantly lower than the controls on measures of receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definitions, and sentence recall, findings that were similar to those reported by Gauthier and Genesee. Analyses of correlations between the adopted children's language test results and their age at adoption, length of exposure to the adoption language, health, and other developmental problems revealed relatively few significant associations. In contrast, analyses of the relationship between their language test scores and their performance on the recalling sentences subtest suggest a link between performance on these two tests. We speculate on the role that performance on sentence recall might play in mediating differences in language outcomes between the two groups of children.

摘要：Research has consistently shown there is a negative correlation between age of onset (AO) of acquisition and ultimate attainment (UA) of either pronunciation or grammar in a second language (L2). A few studies have indeed reported nativelike behavior in some postpuberty learners with respect to either phonetics/phonology or morphosyntax, a result that has sometimes been taken as evidence against the critical period hypothesis (CPH). However, in the few studies that have employed a wide range of linguistic tests and tasks, adult learners have not exhibited nativelike L2 proficiency across the board of measures, which, according to some, suggests that the hypothesis still holds. The present study investigated the relationship between AO and UA and the incidence of nativelikeness when measures of phonetic and grammatical intuition are combined. An additional aim was to investigate whether children and adults develop the L2 through fundamentally different brain mechanisms -- namely, whether children acquire the language (more) implicitly as an interdependent whole, whereas adults learn it (more) explicitly as independent parts of a whole. Adapted from the source document

摘要：It is widely recognized that the processor has a key role to play in creating and strengthening the mapping between form and meaning that is integral to language use. Adopting an emergentist approach to heritage language acquisition, the current study considers the extent to which the operation of the processor can contribute to an account of what is acquired, what is subsequently retained or lost, and what is never acquired in the first place. These questions are explored from two perspectives. First, morphosyntactic phenomena for which there is apparently substantial input are considered, with a focus on the relevance of salience, frequency, and transparency to the establishment of form-meaning mappings. Second, a phenomenon for which there appears to be relatively little input (i.e., scope) is examined with a view to understanding its fate in heritage language acquisition. In both cases, the emergentist perspective appears to offer promising insights into why heritage language learners succeed-and fail-in the way that they do. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from the monolingual adult controls and from the child HS group. This divergent performance indicates that the adult heritage grammar is not a product of the fossilization of child language. Instead, it suggests that forms existing in the baseline undergo gradual attrition over the life span of a HS. This result is consistent with observations on narrative structure in child and adult HSs (Polinsky, 2008b). Evidence from word order facts suggests that relative clause reanalysis in adult HSs cannot be attributed to transfer from English. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The traditional implicit learning literature has focused primarily on the abstraction of statistical regularities in form-form connections. More attention has been recently directed toward the implicit learning of form-meaning connections, which might be crucial in the acquisition of natural languages. The current article reports evidence for implicit learning of a mapping between a novel set of determiners and thematic roles, obtained using a newly developed reaction time methodology. The results conclude that contextually derived form-meaning connections might be implicitly learned. Adapted from the source document

摘要：This paper explores the motivation and prerequisites for successful integration of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) tools into current foreign language teaching and learning (FLTL) practice. We focus on two aspects, which we argue to be important for effective ICALL system development and use: (i) the relationship between activity design and restrictions needed to make natural language processing tractable and reliable, and (ii) pedagogical considerations and the influence of activity design choices on the integration of ICALL systems into FLTL practice. Adapted from the source document

摘要：According to generative linguistic theory, certain principles underlying language structure are innately given, accounting for how children are able to acquire their mother tongues (L1s) despite a mismatch between the linguistic input and the complex unconscious mental representation of language that children achieve. This innate structure is referred to as Universal Grammar (UG); it includes universal principles, as well as parameters which allow for constrained variation across languages. Adapted from the source document

摘要：A review essay is presented that covers the following books: (1) Andrew Barfield and Stephen H. Brown [Eds], reconstructing autonomy in language education: Inquiry and innovation (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); (2) David Gardner [Ed], Learner autonomy 10: Integration and support (Dublin: Authentik, 2007); (3) Terry Lamb and Hayo Reinders [Eds], Supporting independent language learning: Issues and interventions (Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006); (4) Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood, and Andy Barfield [Eds], Maintaining control: Autonomy and language learning (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); and (5) Terry Lamb and Hayo Reinders [Eds], Learner and teacher autonomy: Concepts, realities and responses (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008).

摘要：There has always been a common-sense view that the number of languages that children learn, whether through natural exposure or educational intervention, has consequences for their development. The assumption was that these consequences were potentially damaging. Even now, after approximately 50 years of research on the topic, parents remain concerned about their children's development when it includes a bilingual experience. It is now clear that although parents were correct that speaking more than one language has consequences, the assumption about the nature of these consequences is not: the outcome of the experience is in fact the opposite of what many early researchers claimed and what many contemporary parents intuitively believe. In contrast to early warnings about negative consequences, bilingualism turns out to be an experience that benefits many aspects of children's development. Although there are documented delays in acquiring some formal aspects of each language, such as vocabulary (Bialystok 2010), bilingualism has either no effect (intelligence) or positive effects (metalinguistic awareness, cognitive development) on development. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Variability in achievement across learners is a hallmark of second language (L2) learning, especially in academic-based learning. The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), based on a large, population-representative sample in the United Kingdom, provides the first opportunity to examine individual differences in second language achievement in a longitudinal and genetically sensitive design, and to relate these differences to variability in first language achievement. Teacher National Curriculum ratings for Modern Foreign Language achievement at age 14 for 1632 twin pairs (611 monozygotic, 1021 dizygotic) constituted the core measure. Measures of socioeconomic status, early (ages 2-4) first language achievement (L1), and adolescent (age 12) L1 and reading significantly predicted L2 achievement. However, both individually and collectively they accounted for only a small proportion of the variance of L2 across the entire distribution. Twin analyses revealed that 42% of the variance of L2 was due to genetic variance, and about a third to shared environmental factors (shared within a family). Structural equation modeling confirmed that although there were genetic and environmental factors that influenced both L1 and L2 achievement (genetic correlations between L2 and other measures ranged from .33 to .51, and shared environment correlations ranged from .15 to 1.00), most of the genetic influence on L2 was independent of genetic influence on L1. Thus, the genetic factors that contribute to individual differences in L2 learning are largely distinct from those influencing L1. Additional analyses showed that the balance of genetic and environmental factors was very similar for the low achieving and high achieving students (lowest and highest 10%, respectively), and was similar to that for the full distribution. This pattern of results suggests that variability in L2 achievement is a continuous variable across the entire range, rather than reflecting qualitative or categorical differences at the extremes, and that it is largely the same genes which influence variability within the normal range and at the extremes. Adapted from the source document

摘要：In this article, I describe studies conducted over 25 years with secondary and post-secondary L2 learners in the United States. The evidence from these studies shows that there are important connections between students' early L1 skills and their L2 aptitude and L2 proficiency and that individual differences in students' L1 skills in elementary school are related to differences in their L2 achievement several years later. Adapted from the source document

摘要：The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the written and spoken modes. Our findings indicate a complex interaction between aptitude components and task performance under different conditions. The components of aptitude that seemed to be most strongly related to the complexity and accuracy of production were inductive ability and grammatical sensitivity. The results also show that in writing the participants used more varied vocabulary than in speech, but their performance was similar in terms of syntactic complexity. Adapted from the source document

摘要：Current evidence demonstrating the importance of language play in second-language (L2) development rests largely on qualitative analyses of L2 discourse. Although these rich descriptions have illustrated a number of important functions of language play, further study of the phenomenon is necessary to understand its potential to facilitate learning. This article reports on research designed to compare learner recall of items that have been the focus of serious versus playful attention. Forty-four hours of interaction by 16 adult English-as-a-second-language learners in an 8-week conversation class were observed and audio-recorded. All instances in which they spontaneously engaged in metalinguistic reflection or discussion about their language use or knowledge (i.e., Swain & Lapkin's, 1995, language-related episodes, or LREs) were identified and coded for whether this was done playfully (PLREs) or seriously (LREs). Each student received tailor-made tests to assess recall of those items. Statistical analysis showed significantly stronger recall of items occurring in PLREs than in LREs. Adapted from the source document