Exploring the relationship between listening development and strategy use

This paper reports on an investigation into the development of the listening proficiency and strategic behaviour of 15 lower-intermediate learners of French in England. We consider whether listeners remain in the same listening proficiency group after six months, and whether changes in strategy use are related to movement or non-movement between listening proficiency groups. We also examine whether learners’ strategic behaviour reflects their teachers’ approaches to listening. Data were gathered at two time points from a recall protocol which learners completed after listening to short passages and from verbal reports made by learners while they completed a multiple choice listening task. Teacher interviews provided information on how listening had been presented in learners' classrooms. We detected little movement by students across the listening proficiency groups between the two time points. In spite of some changes in frequency of strategy use, we also observed stability in manner of use by some learners. Differences in strategy use were more evident between groups (non-movers, improvers and decliners) than between uses from Time 1 to Time 2. We conclude by discussing the pedagogical implications of these findings.

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.

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.

Native speakers and task performance: comparing effects on complexity, fluency, and lexical diversity

This article argues that a native-speaker baseline is a neglected dimension of studies into second language (L2) performance. If we investigate how learners perform language tasks, we should distinguish what performance features are due to their processing an L2 and which are due to their performing a particular task. Having defined what we mean by “native speaker,” we present the background to a research study into task features on nonnative task performance, designed to include native-speaker data as a baseline for interpreting nonnative-speaker performance. The nonnative results, published in this journal (Tavakoli & Foster, 2008) are recapitulated and then the native-speaker results are presented and discussed in the light of them. The study is guided by the assumption that limited attentional resources impact on L2 performance and explores how narrative design features—namely complexity of storyline and tightness of narrative structure— affect complexity, fluency, accuracy, and lexical diversity in language. The results show that both native and nonnative speakers are prompted by storyline complexity to use more subordinated language, but narrative structure had different effects on native and nonnative fluency. The learners, who were based in either London or Tehran, did not differ in their performance when compared to each other, except in lexical diversity, where the learners in London were close to native-speaker levels. The implications of the results for the applicability of Levelt’s model of speaking to an L2 are discussed, as is the potential for further L2 research using native speakers as a baseline.

Assessing L2 task performance: understanding effects of task design

The overarching aim of the research reported here was to investigate the effects of task structure and storyline complexity of oral narrative tasks on second language task performance. Participants were 60 Iranian language learners of English who performed six narrative tasks of varying degree of structure and storyline complexity in an assessment setting. A number of analytic detailed measures were employed to examine whether there were any differences in the participants’ performances elicited by the different tasks in terms of their accuracy, fluency, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. Results of the data analysis showed that performance in the more structured tasks was more accurate and to a great extent more fluent than that in the less structured tasks. The results further revealed that syntactic complexity of L2 performance was related to the storyline complexity, i.e. more syntactic complexity was associated with narratives that had both foreground and background storylines. These findings strongly suggest that there is some unsystematic variance in the participants’ performance triggered by the different aspects of task design.

Researching task difficulty: towards understanding L2 proficiency

The prime purpose of this article is to put teachers’, learners’ and research perspectives of task difficulty (TD) together and to investigate whether teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of and criteria for TD are in line with the available research on TD. A summary of three interrelated empirical studies on learner and teacher perceptions of TD is presented before the findings are discussed in light of the current models of TD. The chapter concludes by arguing that cognitive demands of a task are a signifcant factor that contributes to TD and should be considered more critically by L2 educators and SLA researchers.

L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: the typological primacy model

The present article addresses the following question: what variables condition syntactic transfer? Evidence is provided in support of the position that third language (L3) transfer is selective, whereby, at least under certain conditions, it is driven by the typological proximity of the target L3 measured against the other previously acquired linguistic systems (cf. Rothman and Cabrelli Amaro, 2007, 2010; Rothman, 2010; Montrul et al., 2011). To show this, we compare data in the domain of adjectival interpretation between successful first language (L1) Italian learners of English as a second language (L2) at the low to intermediate proficiency level of L3 Spanish, and successful L1 English learners of L2 Spanish at the same levels for L3 Brazilian Portuguese. The data show that, irrespective of the L1 or the L2, these L3 learners demonstrate target knowledge of subtle adjectival semantic nuances obtained via noun-raising, which English lacks and the other languages share. We maintain that such knowledge is transferred to the L3 from Italian (L1) and Spanish (L2) respectively in light of important differences between the L3 learners herein compared to what is known of the L2 Spanish performance of L1 English speakers at the same level of proficiency (see, for example, Judy et al., 2008; Rothman et al., 2010). While the present data are consistent with Flynn et al.’s (2004) Cumulative Enhancement Model, we discuss why a coupling of these data with evidence from other recent L3 studies suggests necessary modifications to this model, offering in its stead the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) for multilingual transfer.