Search results for "ISH"
showing 10 items of 7752 documents
Second Language Prosody and its Development : Connection between Different Aspects
2018
This study focuses on the development of L2 prosody and, in particular, whether different aspects can affect each other. Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish took part in a pronunciation and oral skills course and were recorded for various speaking tasks before and after the experimental intervention. Read-aloud declarative sentences (statements) from nine learners were acoustically analysed for several tonal and temporal aspects, focusing on the marking of primary stress. The results reveal that the learning of Swedish tonal word accent 2 (H*LH) facilitates other tonal developments towards native-like utterance intonation. A link between tonal and temporal developments in the marking of pr…
Words, clauses, sentences, and T-units in learner language: Precise and objective units of measure?
2020
In research on learner language complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF), syntactic complexity is often studied with quantitative measures based on words, clauses, sentences, and T-units. The findings have been mixed, but segmenting learner language into these units of measure has seldom been problematised, even if the need for accurate coding is well known. The present study explores words, clauses, sentences, and T-units as production units in written learner language using a corpus of 352 L2 Finnish texts (28,813 words). The results illustrate how written learner language can be hard to fit into the production unit categories, which are essential for the most frequently used quantitative m…
Lärarnas uppfattningar av att inleda undervisningen i A1-språk i årskurs 1
2022
Since 2020, the teaching of the A1 language starts in grade 1. In order to study the shift to an earlier start to the teaching of the A1 language, a survey of the teaching of A1 languages in grade 1 was carried out with the focus on the most common A1 languages: Finnish in the Swedish-medium schools and English in the Finnish-medium schools. The article examines the teachers’ perceptions of starting the teaching of A1 languages in grade 1. The data consists of 644 answers to an online questionnaire, of which 94 apply to A1 Finnish and 550 to A1 English. The results show that the teachers generally have a positive perception of early language teaching and consider starting the language in gr…
Identity and language discourses in elf context : a case study of five Finnish university students working in an international student organization i…
2016
Tämän tutkielman tarkoituksena oli selvittää, kuinka englantia työssään virallisena kielenä käyttävien suomalaisten korkeakouluopiskelijoiden identiteetti rakentuu englannin kielellä. Työn keskiössä ovat diskurssit ja identiteetti, jonka nähdään rakentuvan diskursiivisesti kielestä ja kaksikielisyydestä puhumisen kautta. Essentiaalisen identiteetin sijaan tutkielmassa sovelletaan käsitystä dynaamisista, päällekkäisistä ja samanaikaisista identiteeteistä. Työn taustan muodostaa toisen kielen ja lingua franca –englannin identiteettitutkimukset. Tutkimuskysymykset ovat: 1) Millaisia diskursseja haastateltavat tuottavat puhuessaan englannin kielestä ja kaksikielisyyd…
From conceptualization to constructions in Finnish as an L2 : a case study
2017
AbstractThis study traces the individual learning trajectories of an adult beginner L2 Finnish learner in expressing the extralinguistic concept of evaluation from a dynamic usage-based perspective. Our results provide support for the view of learner language as a dynamic system in which patterns wax and wane and in which a change in one component has the potential to affect the whole system. In the early stages of learning there was a strong preference to use lexical verbs first, and then adjectives. The study also shows that variability plays a role. Finally, the study confirms that the learning of L2 constructions is in some cases item based. However, another highly frequent and superfic…
Guiding and assessing development of L2 writing process : the role of peer collaboration
2022
This study, informed by Vygotskian notion of mediation and reporting on a partnership between a researcher (the first author) and a teacher (the second author), aims at exploring how peers’ comments can inform teacher assessment and guidance of learners’ L2 (second/foreign language) writing. The participants were 19 L2 English learners in an upper secondary school in Finland. We largely focus on the notes that one pair of learners made on each other’s essays and how they responded to peer assistance. Triangulating these data with classroom observation and a questionnaire, we traced how learners co-constructed their understanding of how their texts can be developed. The foci and how the iden…
Investigating Syntactic Complexity in EFL Learners' Writing across Common European Framework of Reference Levels A1, A2, and B1
2019
Abstract The study investigates the linguistic basis of Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) levels in English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing. Specifically, it examines whether CEFR levels can be distinguished with reference to syntactic complexity (SC) and whether the results differ between two groups of EFL learners with different first languages (Sindhi and Finnish). This sheds light on the linguistic comparability of the CEFR levels across L1 groups. Informants were teenagers from Pakistan (N = 868) and Finland (N = 287) who wrote the same argumentative essay that was rated on a CEFR-based scale. The essays were analysed for 28 SC indices with the L2 Syntactic Co…
Lexically specific vs. productive constructions in L2 Finnish
2020
ABSTRACTIt is assumed from a usage-based perspective that learner language constructions emerge from natural language use in social interaction through exemplar learning. In L1, young learners have been shown to develop their constructions from lexically specific, formulaic expressions into more productive, abstract schemas. A similar developmental path has been shown for L2 development, with some exceptions. The aim of the current study is to explore to what extent the default assumption holds for L2 learning. The development of two constructions was traced in four adults learning L2 Finnish. Free-response data, collected weekly over a period of 9 months, were used to investigate the produ…
Negative constructions in nonliterate learners' spoken L2 Finnish
2016
This chapter discusses the development of Finnish expressions of negation in four initially nonliterate women with very low oral skills during their first ten-month language course. While many studies have been published describing the learning of L2 Finnish by educated adult learners, hardly any research is available on how nonliterate adults learn Finnish. Yet research-based knowledge is needed for both pedagogical and resource-related decision making. The theoretical approach to additional language learning in this study is usage-based (e.g., Bybee 2008), with construction as the unit of analysis (Eskildsen 2012) and classroom as the interactional setting. In standard Finnish, the negati…
Mehrsprachigkeit von Lernern mit Migrationshintergrund im finnischen Fremdsprachenunterricht : Perspektiven der Lerner, Lehrpersonen und Erziehungsbe…
2016
The goal of this study is to examine how the relatively new phenomenon of multilingualism in the Finnish education system is presently managed in foreign language classes in the Finnish comprehensive school. The focus is on how bi- and multilingual learners with migration background can benefit from their previous individual language experiences, language learning experiences and language awareness processes, and how these function as a resource for their further (foreign) language learning process. Until now migration research in the Finnish context concentrating on language learning mainly consists of second language acquisition. This study, however, focusses on foreign language learning …