The interactional space in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms

Aquest estudi pretén investigar els intercanvis verbals mestre/a – aprenent(s) en dos contextos d'instrucció diferents: classes amb un enfocament AICLE (Aprenentatge Integrat de Continguts Curriculars i Llengua Estrangera) on s’aprenen continguts no lingüístics a través de l’anglès, per una banda, i classes 'tradicionals' d'anglès com a llengua estrangera, on l’anglès és alhora objecte d’estudi i vehicle de comunicació, per una altra banda. Més concretament, les preguntes que formula el/la mestre/a, la producció oral dels aprenents i el 'feedback' del/de la mestre/a en els episodis d’atenció a la forma s’han estudiat a la llum de les principals teories provinents del camp de l’Adquisició de Segones Llengües (SLA) per tal de demostrar el seu paper en l’aprenentatge de l’anglès. El corpus de dades prové de l’enregistrament de 7 sessions AICLE i d'11 sessions EFL enregistrades en format àudio i vídeo en dos centres públics d’Educació Primària (EP) de Catalunya. A cadascuna de les escoles, el/la mateix/a mestre/a és l’encarregat/da dels dos tipus d’instrucció amb el mateix grup d’aprenents (10-11 anys d’edat), fet que permet eliminar variables individuals com l'aptitud dels aprenents o l'estil del/de la mestre/a.Els resultats mostren un cert nombre de similituds discursives entre AICLE i EFL donat que ambdós enfocaments tenen lloc en el context-classe amb unes característiques ben definides. Tal com apunta la recerca realitzada en aquest camp, la instrucció AICLE reuneix un seguit de condicions idònies per un major desenvolupament dels nivells de llengua anglesa més enllà de les classes ‘tradicionals’ d’anglès. Malgrat això, aquest estudi sembla indicar que el potencial d'AICLE pel que fa a facilitar una exposició rica a l’anglès i una producció oral significativa no s’explota degudament. En aquest sentit, els resultats d’aquest estudi poden contribuir a la formació dels futurs professors d'AICLE si es busca l’assoliment d’una complementarietat d’ambdós contextos amb l’objectiu últim de millorar els nivells de domini de la llengua anglesa.

English as a world language: its role as a lingua francaa sociolinguistic profile of students of secondary schools in Santiago Island, in the Archipelago of Cape Verde

Esta tese centra-se em aspectos relevantes do inglês como uma língua universal, no actual contexto globalizado e examina possíveis mudanças relacionadas com o seu uso, em especial no continente africano, particularmente no caso de Cabo Verde, no sentido de ponderar eventuais alternativas nas pedagogias linguísticas no ensino desta língua que impliquem uma adaptação à realidade contemporânea. Uma vez que, nos nossos tempos, o inglês é a língua de eleição para a comunicação intercultural entre povos com várias experiências culturais e linguísticas, o conhecimento deste idioma torna-se, a cada dia que passa, impreterível e indispensável, na interacção intercultural. Em África, as funções desempenhadas pelo inglês são complexas; além da língua inglesa ser usada para comunicação entre etnias, com o estatuto de língua franca, também tem o papel de preservar a identidade nacional e de estabelecer a unidade entre os povos da mesma nação. Por conseguinte, é de considerar talvez ainda com mais pertinência, a adopção de uma nova filosofia de pedagogia de ensino que permita dotar os seus cidadãos de capacidades que lhes possibilitem comunicar de forma inteligível com povos de outras culturas e línguas. O primeiro capítulo aborda aspectos teóricos relacionados com a expansão, comunicação e mudança associadas à língua inglesa e suas implicações no ensino em países onde esta não é língua nativa (L1). O segundo capítulo reflecte, em primeiro lugar, sobre a situação linguística em África e as línguas francas predominantes no continente, incluindo a língua inglesa. Considera também questões relacionadas com o multilinguismo e a identidade, bem como assuntos relacionados com as implicações da diversidade linguística para a educação dos povos africanos.

Adapting the Process Writing Approach to English Language Learners with Special Needs: Using Visuals

The available literature on the writing characteristics and best practices to teach writing to English Language Learners who also present some disability is scarce. In order to understand and provide some insight on the developments in this field, I propose an adaptation of the Process Writing Approach based on a literature review of the existing bibliography about the writing characteristics of English Language Learners, Special Needs Learners, and English Language Learners with Special Needs’ writing, the effects of the Process Writing Approach in teaching writing to these groups, and the use of visuals in writing instruction. The main assumptions of this study are: a) The Process Writing Approach provides an opportunity to differentiate instruction to ELLs with special needs and gives them additional opportunities to bring their funds of knowledge to the classroom, improving their writing, and b) By allowing students to rely on visuals in different phases of the writing process teachers will be addressing the needs of both visual and verbal learners, therefore allowing students more options to develop writing skills. The main pedagogical implication is that by dividing writing in recursive stages and inserting visuals as scaffolding throughout the entire writing process, teachers will provide an alternative approach to writing instruction that may be more effective to English Language Learners with Special Needs.

A Case-based reasoning approach to validate grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish language

Across Latin America 420 indigenous languages are spoken. Spanish is considered a second language in indigenous communities and is progressively introduced in education. However, most of the tools to support teaching processes of a second language have been developed for the most common languages such as English, French, German, Italian, etc. As a result, only a small amount of learning objects and authoring tools have been developed for indigenous people considering the specific needs of their population. This paper introduces Multilingual–Tiny as a web authoring tool to support the virtual experience of indigenous students and teachers when they are creating learning objects in indigenous languages or in Spanish language, in particular, when they have to deal with the grammatical structures of Spanish. Multilingual–Tiny has a module based on the Case-based Reasoning technique to provide recommendations in real time when teachers and students write texts in Spanish. An experiment was performed in order to compare some local similarity functions to retrieve cases from the case library taking into account the grammatical structures. As a result we found the similarity function with the best performance

Assessment of Young Learners’ English Proficiency in Bilingual Content Instruction CLIL

This applied linguistic study in the field of second language acquisition investigated the assessment practices of class teachers as well as the challenges and visions of language assessment in bilingual content instruction (CLIL) at primary level in Finnish basic education. Furthermore, pupils’ and their parents’ perceptions of language assessment and LangPerform computer simulations as an alternative, modern assessment method in CLIL contexts were examined. The study was conducted for descriptive and developmental purposes in three phases: 1) a CLIL assessment survey; 2) simulation 1; and 3) simulation 2. All phases had a varying number of participants. The population of this mixed methods study were CLIL class teachers, their pupils and the pupils’ parents. The sampling was multi-staged and based on probability and random sampling. The data were triangulated. Altogether 42 CLIL class teachers nationwide, 109 pupils from the 3rd, 4th and 5th grade as well as 99 parents from two research schools in South-Western Finland participated in the CLIL assessment survey followed by an audio-recorded theme interview of volunteers (10 teachers, 20 pupils and 7 parents). The simulation experimentations 1 and 2 produced 146 pupil and 39 parental questionnaires as well as video interviews of volunteered pupils. The data were analysed both quantitatively using percentages and numerical frequencies and qualitatively employing thematic content analysis. Based on the data, language assessment in primary CLIL is not an established practice. It largely appears to be infrequent, incidental, implicit and based on impressions rather than evidence or the curriculum. The most used assessment methods were teacher observation, bilingual tests and dialogic interaction, and the least used were portfolios, simulations and peer assessment. Although language assessment was generally perceived as important by teachers, a fifth of them did not gather assessment information systematically, and 38% scarcely gave linguistic feedback to pupils. Both pupils and parents wished to receive more information on CLIL language issues; 91% of pupils claimed to receive feedback rarely or occasionally, and 63% of them wished to get more information on their linguistic coping in CLIL subjects. Of the parents, 76% wished to receive more information on the English proficiency of their children and their linguistic development. This may be a response to indirect feedback practices identified in this study. There are several challenges related to assessment; the most notable is the lack of a CLIL curriculum, language objectives and common ground principles of assessment. Three diverse approaches to language in CLIL that appear to affect teachers’ views on language assessment were identified: instrumental (language as a tool), dual (language as a tool and object of learning) and eclectic (miscellaneous views, e.g. affective factors prioritised). LangPerform computer simulations seem to be perceived as an appropriate alternative assessment method in CLIL. It is strongly recommended that the fundamentals for assessment (curricula and language objectives) and a mutual assessment scheme should be determined and stakeholders’ knowledge base of CLIL strengthened. The principles of adequate assessment in primary CLIL are identified as well as several appropriate assessment methods suggested.

Language-specific aspects of reading acquisition: the case of Russian

We have investigated Russian children’s reading acquisition during an intermediate period in their development: after literacy onset, but before they have acquired well-developed decoding skills. The results of our study suggest that Russian first graders rely primarily on phonemes and syllables as reading grain-size units. Phonemic awareness seems to have reached the metalinguistic level more rapidly than syllabic awareness after the onset of reading instruction, the reversal which is typical for the initial stages of formal reading instruction creating external demand for phonemic awareness. Another reason might be the inherent instability of syllabic boundaries in Russian. We have shown that body-coda is a more natural representation of subsyllabic structure in Russian than onset-rime. We also found that Russian children displayed variability of syllable onset and offset decisions which can be attributed to the lack of congruence between syllabic and morphemic word division in Russian. We suggest that fuzziness of syllable boundary decisions is a sign of the transitional nature of this stage in the reading development and it indicates progress towards an awareness of morphologically determined closed syllables. Our study also showed that orthographic complexity exerts an influence on reading in Russian from the very start of reading acquisition. Besides, we found that Russian first graders experience fluency difficulties in reading orthographically simple words and nonwords of two and more syllables. The transition from monosyllabic to bisyllabic lexical items constitutes a certain threshold, for which the syllabic structure seemed to be of no difference. When we compared the outcomes of the Russian children with the ones produced by speakers of other languages, we discovered that in the tasks which could be performed with the help of alphabetic recoding Russian children’s accuracy was comparable to that of children learning to read in relatively shallow orthographies. In tasks where this approach works only partially, Russian children demonstrated accuracy results similar to those in deeper orthographies. This pattern of moderate results in accuracy and excellent performance in terms of reaction times is an indication that children apply phonological recoding as their dominant strategy to various reading tasks and are only beginning to develop suitable multiple strategies in dealing with orthographically complex material. The development of these strategies is not completed during Grade 1 and the shift towards diversification of strategies apparently continues in Grade 2.

Explicit versus implicit spelling strategy instruction and its effects on grade one children's invented spellings

The intent of this study was to investigate .the effectiveness of teaching thirty-five Grade One children a variety of effective spelling strategies in comparison to tradit~onal spelling instruction. Strategy instruction included training in phonology, imagery and analogy. In addition, the type of instruction pro~ided (implicit versus explicit) was also examined. Children were seen in small groups of four or five, for four, twenty-five minute sessions. All children were tested prior and immediately following the training sessions, as well as at 14-day follow-ups. Pretest and posttest measures included a dictated spelling test (based on words used in training), a developmental spelling test and a sample of each child's writing. In addition, children completed a metacognitive spelling test as a measure of their strategy awareness. Performance scores on the pretest and posttest measures were compared to determine if any differences existed between the three spelling instruction groups using the Dunn-Bonferroni and Dunnett procedures. Findings revealed that explicit strategy instruction was the most effective spelling program for improving Grade One children's invented spellings. Children who received this instruction were able to spell targeted words more accurately, even after a 14-day follow-up, and were able to recall more effective spelling strategies than children who received either implicit strategy instruction or traditional strategy instruction.

The effectiveness of explicit strategy instruction on the top level structure of a text

Thesis (M.Ed.)-- Brock University, 1995.

Enhancing teaching and learning speech acts: action research of Japanese as a foreign language /

This action research observes a second year Japanese class at a university where foreign language courses are elective for undergraduate students. In this study, using the six strategies to teach Japanese speech acts that Ishihara and Cohen (2006) suggested, I conducted three classes and analyzed my teaching practice with a critical friend. These strategies assist learners toward the development of their understanding of the following Japanese speech acts and also keep the learners to use them in a manner appropriate to the context: (I) invitation and refusal; (2) compliments; and (3) asking for a permission. The aim of this research is not only to improve my instruction in relation to second language (L2) pragmatic development, but also to raise further questions and to develop future research. The findings are analyzed and the data derived from my journals, artifacts, students' work, observation sheets, interviews with my critical friend, and pretests and posttests are coded and presented. The analysis shows that (I) after my critical friend encouraged my study and my students gave me some positive comments after each lesson, I gained confidence in teaching the suggested speech acts; (2) teaching involved explaining concepts and strategies, creating the visual material (a video) showing the strategies, and explaining the relationship between the strategy and grammatical forms and samples of misusing the forms; (3) students' background and learning styles influenced lessons; and (4) pretest and posttests showed that the students' Icvel of their L2 appropriate pragmatics dramatically improved after each instruction. However, after careful observation, it was noted that some factors prevented students from producing the correct output even though they understood the speech act differences.

Show me, help me, let me : supporting teachers' changing conceptions of reading assessment and reading instruction

This qualitative inquiry used case study methodology to explore the change processes of 3 primary-grade teachers throughout their participation in 7 -month professional learning initiative focused on reading assessment and instruction. Participants took part in semimonthly inquiry-based professional learning community sessions, as well as concurrent individualized classroom-based literacy coaching. Each participant's experiences were first analyzed as a single case study, followed by cross-case analyses. While their patterns of professional growth differed, findings documented how all participants altered their understandings of the roles and relevancy of individual components of reading instruction (e.g., comprehension, decoding) and instructional approaches to scaffold students' growth (e.g., levelled text, strategy instruction), and experienced some form of conceptual change. Factors identified as affecting their change processes included; motivation, professional knowledge, professional beliefs (self-efficacy and theoretical orientation), resources (e.g., time, support), differentiated professional learning with associated goal-setting, and uncontrollable influences, with the affect of each factor compounded by interaction with the others. Comparison of participants' experiences to the Cognitive-Affective Model of Conceptual Change (CAMCC) and the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) demonstrated the applicability of using both conceptual models, with the IMTPG providing macrolevel insights over time and the CAMCC microlevel insights at each change intervaL Recommendations include the provision of differentiated teacher professional learning opportunities, as well as research documenting the effects of teacher mentorship programs and the professional growth of teacher educators. ii

Exploratory study : exploring the effectiveness of a literacy-based intervention with children with language impairments

Research points clearly to the need for all concerned stakeholders to adopt a preventative approach while intervening with children who are at-risk for future reading disabilities. Research has indicated also that a particular sub-group of children at-risk for reading impairments include preschool children with language impairments (Catts, 1993). Preschool children with language impairments may have difficulties with emergent literacy skills - important prerequisite skills necessary for successful formal reading. Only in the past decade have researchers begun to study the effects of emergent literacy intervention on preschool children with language impairments. As such, the current study continues this investigation of how to effectively implement an emergent literacy therapy aimed at supporting preschool children with language impairments. In addition to this, the current study explores emergent literacy intervention within an applied clinical setting. The setting, presents a host of methodological and theoretical challenges - challenges that will advance the field of understanding children within naturalistic settings. This exploratory study included thirty-eight participants who were recruited from Speech Services Niagara, a local preschool speech and language program. Using a between-group pre- and posttest design, this study compared two intervention approaches - an experimental emergent literacy intervention and a traditional language intervention. The experimental intervention was adopted from Read It Again! (Justice, McGinty, Beckman, & Kilday, 2006) and the traditional language intervention was based on the traditional models of language therapy typically used in preschool speech and language models across Ontario. 5 Results indicated that the emergent literacy intervention was superior to the ,t..3>~, ~\., ;./h traditional language therapy in improving the children's alphabet knowledge, print and word awareness and phonological awareness. Moreover, results revealed that children with more severe language impairments require greater support and more explicit instruction than children with moderate language impairments. Another important finding indicated that the effects of the preschool emergent literacy intervention used in this study may not be sustainable as children enter grade one. The implications of this study point to the need to support preschool children with language impairments with intensive emergent literacy intervention that extends beyond preschool into formal educational settings.

Writing and science connections : integrated instruction and assessment

Learning to write is a daunting task for many young children. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a combined approach to writing instruction and assessment on the writing performance of students in two grade 3 classes. Five forms and traits of writing were purposefully connected during writing lessons while exhibiting links to the four strands of the grade 3 Ontario science curriculum. Students then had opportunities to engage in the writing process and to self-assess their compositions using either student-developed (experimental group/teacher-researcher's class) or teachercreated (control group/teacher-participant's class) rubrics. Paired samples t-tests revealed that both the experimental and control groups exhibited statistically significant growth from pretest to posttest on all five integrated writing units. Independent samples t-tests showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the persuasive + sentence fluency and procedure + word choice writing tasks. Pearson product-moment correlation r tests revealed significant correlations between the experimental group and the teacher-researcher on the recount + ideas and report + organization tasks, while students in the control group showed significant correlations with the teacher-researcher on the narrative + voice and procedure + word choice tasks. Significant correlations between the control group and the teacher-participant were evident on the persuasive + sentence fluency and procedure + word choice tasks. Qualitative analyses revealed five themes that highlighted how students' self-assessments and reflections can be used to guide teachers in their instructional decision making. These findings suggest that educators should adopt an integrated writing program in their classrooms, while working with students to create and utilize purposeful writing assessment tools.

Implicit and explicit processes in a second-language learning task

Two experiments examined the learning of a set of Greek pronunciation rules through explicit and implicit modes of rule presentation. Experiment 1 compared the effectiveness of implicit and explicit modes of presentation in two modalities, visual and auditory. Subjects in the explicit or rule group were presented with the rule set, and those in the implicit or natural group were shown a set of Greek words, composed of letters from the rule set, linked to their pronunciations. Subjects learned the Greek words to criterion and were then given a series of tests which aimed to tap different types of knowledge. The results showed an advantage of explicit study of the rules. In addition, an interaction was found between mode of presentation and modality. Explicit instruction was more effective in the visual than in the auditory modality, whereas there was no modality effect for implicit instruction. Experiment 2 examined a possible reason for the advantage of the rule groups by comparing different combinations of explicit and implicit presentation in the study and learning phases. The results suggested that explicit presentation of the rules is only beneficial when it is followed by practice at applying them.

Strategy instruction in listening for lower-intermediate learners of French

Second language listening has historically proved to be a difficult skill. Strategy instruction studies have sought to bring about improvements in subjects’ listening but with mixed results. This lack of success might be due to the nature of listening strategy theory and its influence on conceptualizations of listening strategy instruction. The current study, based on an initial descriptive investigation of a specific population of learners, measured the effects of strategy instruction on both the listening performance and self-efficacy of 68 lower-intermediate learners of French in England, against a comparison group. Moreover, the effects of high- and low-scaffolded interventions were compared. Results suggest that the program improved listening proficiency and learners’ confidence about listening. Implications for pedagogy and strategy theory are discussed.

Exploring writing in products in students with language impairments and autism spectrum disorders

Oral language skills scaffold written text production; students with oral language difficulties often experience writing problems. The current study examines the ways in which oral language problems experienced by students with language impairment (LI) and students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) impact on their production of written text. One hundred and fifty seven participants (Mage = 10;2) with LI or ASD completed standardized measures of oral language, transcription, working memory, and nonverbal ability and produced a written narrative text assessed for productivity, grammatical accuracy, and quality. Measures of transcription, productivity, and grammatical accuracy, but not text quality, were poorer for students with LI. Transcription skills accounted for the majority of variance in the writing of the LI cohort. For the ASD cohort, handwriting, oral language and autism symptomatology were significant predictors. When students with ASD also experienced language problems, their performance was equivalent to that observed in the LI cohort.