Lingüística contrastiva

En aquest article, s’hi justifica la importància de conèixer algunes de les propietats gramaticals de les llengües dels parlants que aprenen català i que són molt diferents de les que habitualment tenim més a prop. Aquest coneixement és bàsic per entendre moltes de les dificultats d’aquestes persones a l’hora d’aprendre el català i pot ajudar a elaborar materials didàctics més adequats i a plantejar les estratègies d’ensenyament més adients per a cada cas

Lengua, escuela e inmigración

A lo largo de la última década, la heterogeneidad identitaria, lingüística, religiosa, cultural y étnica ha crecido de manera significativa en España debido a la llegada de inmigrantes, lo cual está planteando al Sistema Educativo problemas hasta ahora desconocidos. En este artículo se discuten las relaciones entre lengua, escuela e inmigración con un énfasis especial en los factores implicados en la adquisición de la lengua de uso escolar. Se discute tanto el tiempo que el alumnado inmigrante tarda en aprender dicha lengua como el papel de su lengua inicial en dicha adquisición. La discusión se realiza a partir del análisis de datos provenientes de evaluaciones internacionales, así como de trabajos de investigación realizados en situaciones escolares multilingües y se reflexiona sobre su pertinencia para el establecimiento de una política educativa que tenga en cuenta las dificultades de las y los inmigrantes con la adquisición y el dominio de la lengua de la escuela. Finalmente, se abordan las nuevas necesidades de los sistemas educativos en relación con alguno de los retos que plantea la educación intercultural y se enfatiza la importancia de la práctica educativa para encontrar soluciones a los problemas que se derivan de la nueva situación escolar

Acerca de las relaciones entre escuela e inmigración

El artículo repasa algunos aspectos sobre la relación entre educación escolar e inmigración. Así, al inicio se analizan de manera descriptiva las características de la inmigración ligada a la sociedad de la información y sus repercusiones educativas. Igualmente, se repasan algunos trabajos sobre el rendimiento académico de la infancia y la adolescencia extranjera, y se enfatiza el factor lingüístico como una de las fuentes explicativas de dicho rendimiento. En este sentido, se muestran varias investigaciones dedicadas a conocer los factores que inciden en el aprendizaje por el alumnado extranjero de la lengua de la escuela y, finalmente, se ofrecen varios criterios para encarar con éxito la relación entre escolarización e inmigración

L'ús dels clítics pronominals del català i la seva adquisició per parlants de romanès i de tagal

The thesis L’ús dels clítics pronominals del català i la seva adquisició per parlants de romanès i de tagal [The use of pronominal clitics in Catalan and their acquisition by Romanian and Tagalog speakers] analyzes the mechanisms of transfer from the L1 in the process of acquisition of Catalan (L2) in two groups of learners, one of which has Romanian and the other Tagalog as their native language. Our study lends support to the idea of transfer from the L1 to a second language in general, and, in particular, within the process of acquisition of pronominal clitics from a Romance language (Catalan). The results show that the differences between the two groups are statistically significant and are attributable to the characteristics of the L1. Moreover, starting from a detailed description of the grammar of pronominal clitics in the three languages involved, we define the specific grammatical aspects of the Tagalog and Romanian languages that can have an influence on certain productions and on certain errors in the use of pronominal clitics in Catalan, within the process of acquisition of this Romance language as L2. In the theoretical domain, we started from studies on functional markedness to determine four reference terms that allowed us to carry out a systematized study of the difficulties in acquisition of the use of Catalan clitic pronouns according to their complexity and their degree of grammaticalization.

A narrativa em crianças surdas : papel da Língua Gestual Portuguesa

A presente pesquisa tem como Questão Central a avaliação da estrutura da narrativa por um grupo de seis crianças surdas profundas utilizando a Língua Gestual Portuguesa (LGP). Neste estudo questionou-se se se encontrariam diferenças na produção da narrativa entre crianças que adquiriram a LGP precocemente e as que tiveram o primeiro contato com a língua materna tardiamente. Colocou-se a hipótese geral que a língua natural das crianças surdas portuguesas é a LGP e as que tiveram um acesso precoce à sua língua apresentam um melhor desempenho na narração de uma história. Para verificar esta hipótese, foi aplicada uma prova que consistia no conto de uma história, a partir de uma sequência de imagens, em LGP a todos as crianças desta investigação. Releva-se a importância de um precoce ambiente comunicativo para que a criança surda adquira um desenvolvimento global semelhante aos seus pares ouvintes. Salienta-se ainda que a influência dos pais, dos educadores e dos professores é fundamental para que a criança surda possa desenvolver a sua língua natural, a LGP e a aprendizagem da segunda língua. Os resultados obtidos confirmaram as hipóteses colocadas, ou seja, as crianças que adquiriram precocemente a LGP apresentaram um maior desenvolvimento na estrutura da narrativa.

Aprender inglês como segunda língua : a importância do domínio de outras línguas num mundo globalizado

“Aprender inglês como segunda língua – A importância do Domínio de outras línguas num mundo globalizado” é um trabalho de investigação que visa abordar a importância da aprendizagem da língua inglesa na perspetiva dos alunos no final do 3º Ciclo do Ensino Básico e tendo em conta o mundo globalizado em que vivemos. A metodologia a aplicar é do tipo descritivo. Os sujeitos são 101 alunos do 9º ano de escolaridade do Ensino Básico, pertencentes ao Colégio Vasco da Gama, perfazendo cinco turmas. Para ter acesso às opiniões dos alunos, recorremos à elaboração de questionários estruturados de acordo com os objetivos da investigação. Os questionários foram aplicados em aula com a devida autorização da Direção do Colégio. Procuramos apurar se, de acordo com a legislação europeia que valoriza a aprendizagem de várias línguas como forma de aproximar os vários países da comunidade, nomeadamente de uma língua franca que possa ser o meio de comunicação preferencial no mundo político, económico, social e cultural, os alunos valorizam a aquisição da língua estrangeira e em caso afirmativo, quais as funções e com que objetivos pretendem os alunos atingir a fluência na língua inglesa. No que diz respeito aos resultados obtidos, podemos afirmar que os alunos valorizam o domínio de outras línguas num mundo globalizado, em especial o domínio da língua inglesa visto ser considerada a língua franca internacional que permite a comunicação entre povos de diferentes línguas maternas. Também o enriquecimento cultural e o desenvolvimento da criatividade são fatores apontados pelos alunos como importantes consequências da aquisição de outras línguas.

Production of tense marking in successive bilingual children: when do they converge with their monolingual peers?

Children with English as a second language (L2) with exposure of 18 months or less exhibit similar difficulties to children with Specific Language Impairment in tense marking, a marker of language impairment for English. This paper examines whether L2 children with longer exposure converge with their monolingual peers in the production of tense marking. 38 Turkish-English L2 children with a mean age of 7;8 and 33 monolingual age-matched controls completed the screening test of the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI). The L2 children as a group were as accurate as the controls in the production of -ed, but performed significantly lower than the controls in the production of third person –s. Age and YoE affected the children’s performance. The highest age-expected performance on the TEGI was attested in eight and nine year-old children who had 4-6 YoE. L1 and L2 children performed better in regular compared to irregular verbs, but L2 children overregularized more than L1 children and were less sensitive to the phonological properties of verbs. The results show that tense marking and the screening test of the TEGI may be promising for differential diagnosis in eight and nine year-old L2 children with at least four YoE.

Developmental trends in lexical diversity.

This article discusses issues in measuring lexical diversity, before outlining an approach based on mathematical modelling that produces a measure, D, designed to address these problems. The procedure for obtaining values for D directly from transcripts using software (vocd) is introduced, and then applied to thirty-two children from the Bristol Study of Language Development (Wells 1985) at ten different ages. A significant developmental trend is shown for D and an indication is given of the average scores and ranges to be expected between the ages of 18 and 42 months and at 5 years for these L1 English speakers. The meaning attributable to further ranges of values for D is illustrated by analysing the lexical diversity of academic writing, and its wider application is demonstrated with examples from specific language impairment, morphological development, and foreign/second language learning.

Coping with linguistic challenges in UK higher education: the use of strategies by Chinese research students

The present study sets out to examine the strategies used by Chinese learners in a predominantly naturalistic environment and how such learner strategy use relates to their proficiency in the second language. Data were collected from four Chinese research students in the UK using semi-structured interviews. Their proficiency in English was assessed with an oral interview and a listening test. The main findings from this study are that the learners used a wide range of strategies overall, including metacognitive, cognitive, social/affective and compensation strategies. The majority of the commonly reported strategies were metacognitive strategies, suggesting that the learners were self-directed and attempting to manage their own learning in an informal context. They also showed idiosyncrasies in their use of learner strategies. Attempts to explain the learners’ strategy use in relation to their levels of proficiency in English and contextual factors, as well as several other factors, are offered. Implications for target-country institutions in terms of the provision of support to Chinese students are discussed.

Bilingual 'tagging' of financial accounts in Demotic and Greek

‘Bilingual’ documents, with text in both Demotic and Greek, can be of several sorts, ranging from complete translations of the same information (e.g. Ptolemaic decrees) to those where the information presented in the two languages is complementary (e.g. mummy labels). The texts discussed in this paper consist of a number of examples of financial records where a full account in one language (L1) is annotated with brief pieces of information in a second language (L2). These L2 ‘tags’ are designed to facilitate extraction of summary data at another level of the administration, functioning in a different language, and probably also to make the document accessible to those who are not literate in the L1.

Thinking for speaking and linguistic relativity among bilinguals: towards a new research agenda

This article evaluates how the different papers in this special issue fill a gap in our understanding of cognitive processes that are being activated when second language learners or bilinguals prepare to speak. All papers are framed in Slobin’s (1987) Thinking for Speaking theory, and aim to test whether the conceptualisation patterns that were learned in early childhood can be relearned or restructured in L2 acquisition. In many papers the focus is on identifying constraints on this restructuring process. Among these constraints, the role of typological differences between languages is investigated in great depth. The studies involve different types of learners, language combinations and tasks. As all informants were given verbal rather than non-verbal tasks, the focus is here on the effects of conceptual transfer from one language on another, and not on the effects of language on non-linguistic cognition. The paper also sketches different avenues for further research in this field and proposes that researchers working in this field might want to take up the challenge of investigating whether speakers of different languages perceive motion outside explicitly verbal contexts differently, as this will enable us to gain an understanding of linguistic relativity effects in this domain. Studying which teaching methods can help learners to restructure their conceptualisation patterns may also shed new light on the aspects of discourse organization and motion event construal that are most difficult for learners.

The effects of word exposure frequency and elaboration of word processing on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading

Research on incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition through reading has claimed that repeated encounters with unfamiliar words and the relative elaboration of processing these words facilitate word learning. However, so far both variables have been investigated in isolation. To help close this research gap, the current study investigates the differential effects of the variables ‘word exposure frequency’ and ‘elaboration of word processing’ on the initial word learning and subsequent word retention of advanced learners of L2 English. Whereas results showed equal effects for both variables on initial word learning, subsequent word retention was more contingent on elaborate processing of form–meaning relationships than on word frequency. These results, together with those of the studies reviewed, suggest that processing words again after reading (input–output cycles) is superior to reading-only tasks. The findings have significant implications for adaptation and development of teaching materials that enhance L2 vocabulary learning.

Investigating task difficulty: learners’ and teachers’ perceptions

This paper presents an investigation into learners’ and teachers’ perceptions of and criteria for task difficulty. Ten second language learners performed four oral narrative tasks and were retrospectively interviewed about which tasks they perceived as difficult, what factors affected this difficulty and how they identified and defined this task difficulty. Ten EFL/ESOL teachers were given the same tasks and asked to consider the difficulty of the tasks for their learners, and were invited to discuss the factors they believed contributed to this difficulty. Qualitative analysis of the data revealed that, although there were some differences between the two groups’ perceptions of task difficulty, there was substantial similarity between them in terms of the criteria they considered in identifying and defining task difficulty. The findings of this study lend support to the tenets of a cognitive approach to task-based language learning, and demonstrate which aspects of two models of task difficulty reflect the teachers’ and learners’ perceptions and perspectives.