THE EFFECTS OF MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES ON EFL LEARNING FOR STUDENTS AT DBE AT METU

Dictionaries are the most importantpart of second language acquistion since they are used at every level of language learning. People use them while writing, reading, watching movies or listening to music in the language they are learning. They may choose different dictionaries for different activities since there are different types of dictionaries including monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. We focused on these two types of dictionaries in this research and we examined reasons behind the usage of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries among ESL students at Metu DBE ( Department of Basic English)

Hier is Woont Een van Mijn Vader Vriend Woont Hier

For this study we used data collected within the framework of the European Science Foundation Project on second language acquistion by immigrants. Data from the core informants, two Moroccan and two Turkish learners of Dutch, were analyzed. In the work on the acquistion of word order published by Klein and Perdue, a functional perspective was taken. In this study the analyses are carried out from a structural perspective: the principles and parameters model. This has several advantages: phenomena below the level of the utterances can be analyzed; lexical and functional categories can play a role in the acquisition process; parallels can be drawn between nominal and verbal phrases; the important role of the source language appears (contradicting the conclusi-ons drawn by Klein and Perdue). An acquisition process in four steps is outlined relating to which part of the syntactic tree is activated and which part not yet. In the third phase functional categories play an important role: they force the L2 learners to model their L2 utterances for a major part on the structure of their L1. This is expressed in creative constructions as the title exhibits. Restructuring occurs mainly in the last stage but this is reached by hardly any of the ESF informants.

Variation linguistics and SLA

Sociolinguistics (here called variationist linguistics) has been misunderstood and misrepresented in second language acquistion (SLA) research. In spite of that, several productive studies (many of which use the VARBRUL statistical program) have made significant contributions to our understandings of variation in SLA data, contributions which touch on the linguistic and not the social concerns of such data. The failure of SLA researchers who belong to the so-called 'dominant paradigm' (or Chomskyan or Universal Grammar (UG) research programme) to realize that belief in a so-called variable competence is not a prerequisite to variation studies has been particularly harmful. On the other hand, the failure of sociolinguists to take psycholinguistic matters seriously has been another serious drawback to interfield co-operation; a summary of a plausible variationist psycholinguistics (within an SLA setting and allowing UG interpretation) is provided.

SLA Models and Issues: Acquisition of Semantics

Semantic aspects of learner varieties have only recently gained the interest of second language acquistion [SLA] researchers. This is partly a consequence of some shifts in SLA theory and partly due to the discussion of “form” and “function” and the notions “pragmatics” and “semantics” in linguistic theory. There are two corollaries in recent SLA research: interlanguages should be described on the basis of their use in real communication situations, and the process of learning (strategies and stages in course of acquisition) should be the focus of empirical work. (For a discussion of process and product cf., Dittmar 1984.) As a matter of fact, the present standard paradigm in SLA is the description of learner varieties “outside the classroom” with a focus on “learning without explicit teaching” (also known by the somewhat misleading term undirected learning ) under natural conditions of communication with an emphasis on cross-sectional studies in the seventies (cf., Klein and Dittmar 1979) and on longi- tudinal research in the eighties (cf., Perdue 1982).