scholarly journals The Case Against the Case Against Holding English Classes in English

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Rintaro Sato
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
High School Teachers ◽  
English Learners ◽  
English Education ◽  
Target Language ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
English Classes

15In senior high school, teachers are now officially supposed to conduct their English lessons mainly in English to develop students’ communication abilities (MEXT, 2011). However, some researchers in English education have raised the case against this “English lessons in English” principle, asserting that conducting English lessons in the target language of English is not only ineffective, but harmful. This paper aims to refute critics of MEXT’s guideline for conducting classes primarily in English by considering studies in second language acquisition (SLA), theories for English learners’ motivation in the Japanese context, and offering an alternative for judicious use of the L1, Japanese. 現在、高校での英語の授業は主に英語で行うことになっている。しかしながらこの「英語での授業」には一部の英語教育研究者から, 効果が無いばかりか害があるとの強烈な反対意見もある。本稿では、この「英語での授業への反対意見」を第２言語習得理論や日本人学習者の英語を話そうとする意欲、有効な日本語の活用などの観点から反論する。

Portfolios

2016 ◽  
pp. 166-183
Author(s):  
Joan Lachance
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Teacher Candidates ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Teaching Performance ◽  
Graduate Level ◽  
Capstone Project ◽  
K 12

Graduate level teacher candidates preparing to work with English learners participate in coursework related to theory and practice for many aspects of second language acquisition. In this presentation the author describes and discusses an innovative capstone project, completed in the context of the second language acquisition course, which conceptualizes and embodies performance-based assessments. What makes this exceptional is that teacher candidates demonstrate deep insight regarding the authenticity of using performance-based assessments with K-12 English learners while simultaneously connecting the concepts to their own pre-service teaching performance-based assessments; Portfolios2.

Universal Grammar in the classroom: the effects of formal instruction on second language acquisition

1991 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sascha W. Felix ◽  
Wilfried Weigl
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Second Language ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Learning Situation ◽  
School Students ◽  
Formal Instruction ◽  
L2 Learners

One of the dominating issues in recent second language acquisition research has been the question of whether or not L2 learners have access to principles of Universal Grammar. It seems that currently there is fairly strong evidence both for and against UG-access by L2 learners. Consequently, the question arises what kinds of factors may potentially further or block UG-access and whether such factors can be related to certain properties of the learning environment. In this paper we wish to approach this question by looking at a somewhat extreme learning situation, namely the acquisition (or maybe non-acquisition) of English as a second language by 77 German high school students who learned and were exposed to English exclusively during classroom hours. These students were tested for their ability to correctly judge grammaticality contrasts in English that are standardly attributed to UG principles. The results suggest that - even under a most liberal interpretation - these students did not show any evidence of having UG-access. Rather, they utilized a number of strategies that (a) tied them very tightly to properties of German and (b) prevented them from making any generalizations that went beyond what had been explicitly taught in the classroom.

World Englishes, Second Language Acquisition, and Language Contact

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajend Mesthrie
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Second Languages

Although areas of potential overlap between the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and World Englishes (WE) may seem obvious, they developed historically in isolation from each other. SLA had a psycholinguistic emphasis, studying the ways in which individuals progressed towards acquisition of a target language. WE studies initially developed a sociolinguistic focus, describing varieties that arose as second languages in former British colonies. This chapter explores the way in which each field could benefit from the other. The SLA emphasis on routes of development, overgeneralization, universals of SLA, and transfer in the interlanguage has relevance to characterizing sub-varieties of WEs. Conversely, the socio-political dimension of early WE studies and the notion of macro- or group acquisition fills a gap in SLA studies which sometimes failed to acknowledge that the goal of second language learners was to become bilingual in ways that were socially meaningful within their societies.

Impact of an interaction-oriented Japanese course on learners

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 123-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyoko Ogawa
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Japanese People ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Active Interaction

Abstract Neustupny (1988, 1991) recommended an interactive competence approach for second language acquisition that places a greater emphasis on learners’ active interaction with native speakers in real communicative situations. In order to have the opportunity to interact with native speakers in the target language, a conscious effort by the learners as well as support from the teachers and the community is essential. The third-year Japanese course at Monash University was designed to encourage and support learners to establish and maintain relationships with Japanese people as well as to utilise various other resources of the target language and culture. This paper examines the impact of this interaction-oriented course on learners in their establishment and maintenance of relationships with Japanese people, and cultural and social understanding. It is based on data collected during 1996 and 1997.

Pre-Basic Varieties

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 135-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Perdue
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Single Level ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
European Science ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Level Analysis

Three of the traditional questions in (second) language acquisition research are: 1. What is acquired, in what order? 2. How is it acquired? 3. Why is it acquired? In this paper, I concentrate on (1) and (3), proposing a description of various learners' paths towards various L2s, and examining different factors which may explain the course of acquisition. The learners were, for the most part, recorded during the European Science Foundation's study of the spontaneous (untutored) acquisition of Dutch, French, English and German (Perdue 1993); other comparable studies will also be discussed. The emphasis is placed on the beginning stages of acquisition in an attempt to demonstrate that these stages are crucial for an understanding of the whole process. It will be argued (a) that there are stages (grammars) through which all learners pass, (b) that these stages can be characterised explicitly, but (c) the description of these stages, and of the transition between them, is not reducible to a single-level analysis, and (d) distance between (source and target) language pairs partially determines the amount of useful knowledge available to the absolute beginner.

When activity shapes the repertoire of second language learners

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 121-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolors Masats ◽  
Luci Nussbaum ◽  
Virginia Unamuno
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
Pair Work

Interactionists interested in second language acquisition postulate that learners’ competences are sensitive to the context in which they are put into play. Here we explore the language practices displayed, in a bilingual socio-educational milieu, by three dyads of English learners while carrying out oral communicative pair-work. In particular, we examine the role language choice plays in each task.  A first analysis of our data indicates that the learners’ language choices seem to reveal the linguistic norms operating in the community of practice they belong to. A second analysis reveals that they exploited their linguistic repertoires according to their interpretation of the task and to their willingness to complete it in English. Thus, in the first two tasks students relied on code-switching as a mechanism to solve communication failures, whereas the third task generated the use of a mixed repertoire as a means to complete the task in the target language.

Teachers’ Declared Intentions to Shift Practice to Incorporate Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Theories

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 1023 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Markham ◽  
Mary Rice ◽  
Behnaz Darban ◽  
Tsung-Han Weng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Second Language ◽  
Teacher Preparation ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
English Learners ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Students ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Intentions To Change

While the number of English Learners (ELs) in the United States is steadily growing in most states, teacher preparation for working with ELs is far from universal. It fact, it is contested terrain as to whether information about topics like Second Language Acquisition (SLA) are helpful generally, and if so, what theories teachers are willing to adopt. The purpose of this study was to learn whether teachers in an SLA theory course would declare intentions to change their notions about SLA and express them as desire to shift practice. We also wondered if there were differences in pre-service versus in-service and international versus domestic students. The results confirmed that the participants were willing to change their initial theories because of participating in a second language acquisition course that presented information about SLA theories at a Completely Different or Somewhat Different level by the end of the course.

scholarly journals Morphological complexity in written L2 texts

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaclav Brezina ◽  
Gabriele Pallotti
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Threshold Level ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Complexity Measures ◽  
Morphological Complexity

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels. The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers’ proficiency and the specific language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional diversity remains constant.

scholarly journals A Literature-Based Approach on Age Factors in Second Language Acquisition: Children, Adolescents, and Adults

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Burhan Ozfidan ◽  
Lynn M. Burlbaw
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Instructional Methods ◽  
Age Factors ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Older Learners ◽  
Age Factor ◽  
Adolescents And Adults

Age is an essential factor in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), impacting the success of students and instructional methods. The purpose of this study is to examine the age factor in SLA by examining three age categories – children, adolescents and adults. In doing so, the study considers the Critical Period Hypothesis as a base of linguistic research in the area of age factor. The study disapproves the assertion of the hypothesis that all prepubescent learners are able to acquire native-like proficiency in target language pronunciation. The study analyzes common SLA beliefs, including: 1) younger learners are more successful than older learners, 2) the language learning processes of younger learners are less stressful and require less of an effort, and 3) young learners are more skillful in language learning. Adolescents and adults are considered as older learners in terms of cognitive maturity. The results of the study indicated that children learn a language easier than adolescents and adults, particularly with respect to pronunciation and morpho syntax. Adolescents are good at syntax and listening sills, while the best results for adults are for reading and writing activities. Thus, the types of brain organization at learners of different developmental stages lead to the need for a diversity of instructional methods for children, adolescents and adults.

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