Search results for "English"

Social factor comparisons of noun and verb insertion patterns in Spanish and English bilingual clauses

2016

This paper compares noun and verb insertion in bilingual clauses in a Spanish and English bilingual data corpus collected in northeast Georgia (U.S.A.).   Even though Myers-Scotton and Jake (2014) have given grammatical reasons why verbs theoretically can be as easily inserted as nouns, most bilingual data corpora, from many different language contact settings, show that far more nouns than verbs of one language are inserted into clauses of the other language.  The northeast Georgia Hispanic community data set examined here is no exception. Analysis of the northeast Georgia data reveal that some social factors are associated with higher EL verb use. Children, who have more English proficien…

Comparing speaking situations in three different language tests

2013

The purpose of this study was to compare learner outcome when five similar speaking situations were offered in the speaking subtest in Finnish, Swedish and English intermediate level tests in the Finnish National Certificates language testing system. The overall aim was to investigate the tasks by comparing learner outcomes across the three tests and to seek explanations for the outcome in the learners’ selfreported demographic, language, educational and professional background.The speaking situations were selected from the NC item bank meaning that they have undergone the Item Response Theory based analyses which indicate that the tasks function well in all tests. More information was need…

Effects of summarization tasks on comprehension monitoring of science texts in university students with elementary or intermediate English proficiency

2012

Two studies were conducted to improve Spanish university students" comprehension monitoring of macro-ideas when reading expository Science texts in English (L2). The first one evaluated the effects of using summarization tasks on comprehension monitoring compared to other reading-for-understanding tasks. A significant improvement of comprehension monitoring was obtained from the summarization tasks. Results in study 1 suggested study 2 aimed at instructing students on summarizing texts in L2. The instructional work had a single significant contribution to students" comprehension monitoring on the macro-structural level. English proficiency also explained a significant proportion of the vari…

Student-initiated multi-unit questions in EMI classrooms

2021

This conversation analytic study investigates student-initiated multi-unit questions (MUQs) in whole class interaction. Based on a corpus of 30 hours of videotaped interactions from teacher education classrooms in an English-medium instruction university, we demonstrate that students use MUQs to introduce topics, either by recontextualizing some aspect of the prior topic, or alternatively, without these cohesive ties, which requires more interactional work to achieve intersubjectivity. Findings reveal that MUQs render student professional concerns more relevant and salient, foregrounding those inquiries as a space for launching topics. Students bring up issues such as ways of handling parti…

Speed in cognitive tasks as an indicator of second/foreign language reading and writing skills

2013

In a cross-sectional study 823 Finnish school children were tested to examine the relation between speed of performance in cognitive and linguistic tasks and second/foreign language reading and writing. Participants were Finnish-speakers with English as foreign language and Russian-speakers with Finnish as second language which made it possible to compare the results across these two language groups. The Finnish group was furthermore divided into three groups by age to see how speed develops with age and education. Groups were tested with a number of cognitive instruments that included measures of speed of performance. Overall, performance on the speed measures improved with age; often, the…

“He should so be in jail”: An Empirical Study on Preverbal So in American English

2021

This paper explores the use of so-called GenX so as a modifier of verb phrases, as exemplified in “He should so be in jail” (SOAP, DAYS, 2005). Drawing on over 1350 relevant tokens retrieved from the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP) (Davies 2011-, 100 million words from 2001-2012), the main purpose of the present study is to provide robust empirical evidence for various findings yielded by small-scale studies and by introspection. The results corroborate some of the previous findings, while others, particularly those based on introspection, are challenged in light of empirical (counter)evidence. The data show that preverbal so is very flexible in that it can occur in various syntactic…

Identity construction in ELF contexts: a case study of Finnish engineering students working in Germany

2010

This paper explores connections between identity and language use in lingua franca contexts by investigating identity construction among Finnish users of English as revealed in interviews conducted both before and after a period spent in Germany. The focus is on the users' own stories of their language use and learning, and on the discursive construction of identities. The study draws on poststructuralist theories of identity construction, combining them with research that focuses on language learners' identity construction or on identity issues in contexts with English as a lingua franca. This paper illustrates how language users actively draw on different discourses in constructing their …

Internationalization of Finnish higher education — is language an issue?

2012

Finland is among the countries with the highest amount of English-taught programmes in higher education in Europe (Wächter and Maiworm 2008). This article analyses, how the higher education language situation of a small country with a marginal majority language (Finnish) and an official bilingual status (Finnish and Swedish) has historically developed from the setting of “drawing the line” between Finland and Sweden or Finland and Russia (Harle and Moisio 2000) in the 19th century and the early 20th century (nationalism), towards drawing the line between Finnish/Swedish and English in the late 20th century (globalization). It then continues to present a case of foreign language (in practice…

American English Antedatings for Malossol

2019

Strength and weakness of the Old English adjective

2021

Abstract As regards Old English, the inflectional strength and weakness are characterised by a kind of inconsistency. In the case of Old English adjectives these two inflectional properties appear to be different from those associated with nouns and verbs. In the case of the latter the two properties seem to be lexically determined while in the case of adjectives they appear to be determined by syntactic conditions. The traditional accounts of the Old English grammar attribute two paradigms to one adjectival lexical item. The analysis presented in this article postulates that one can actually speak about one adjectival inflection and what is traditionally presented as strong and weak adject…