Search results for "Language Acquisition"
showing 10 items of 219 documents
Key Issues Relevant to the Studies to Be Reported: Beliefs, Agency and Identity
2016
As pointed out in Chapter 1, this volume is a response to the recent calls for research on learner and teacher beliefs that would be not only contextual and longitudinal, but also interconnected. In other words, beliefs should be viewed in relation to other issues that play a role in learning and teaching foreign languages. These include aspects of those involved in the processes of learning and teaching foreign languages, that is, learners and teachers — their agency and identity, for example. This chapter provides background to the seven studies that will be reported later in Chapters 3–9 by reviewing the key issues addressed: beliefs, agency and identity. In the following, an attempt wil…
Parents as Informants of their Child's Vocal and Early Language Development
1996
Continuity in vocalization and language development was examined in the longitudinal study of 94 children. Parents observed their infant's vocal development with the help of a checklist during the first year of life and reported their lexical development by using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (the CDIs) at the ages of 14 and 18 months. The Reynell Developmental Language Scales (the RDLS) were administered to the children in a laboratory setting at 18 months. The vocalization checklist revealed milestones of sound production which parents reported reliably and which were significantly related to the child's later language development. The continuity in vocal and languag…
The impact of foreign language mediated teaching on teachers’ sense of professional integrity in the CLIL classroom
2011
Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has received significant interest in recent years as a practical means of creating a plurilingual European community. A key feature of CLIL is the non-native speaking teacher responsible for developing learners’ content and language knowledge in a foreign language mediated environment. Teachers often enter the CLIL classroom with established expertise in either content or language learning; however, the impact of entering the foreign language mediated environment is little explored in existing literature. This investigative research is based on six teacher interviews intended to access the teachers’ own understanding of how foreign language me…
The Tense-Aspect system between ontogeny and phylogeny: Evidence from the Proto-Indo-European “Injunctive”
2006
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Pre-Indo-European by establishing a correlation between ontogeny and phylogeny in language acquisition and development. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology. More specifically, the so-called Injunctive forms, which are assumed to be the most ancient verbal inflected items tracing back to the Pre-Indo-European language (see, among others, Lehmann 2002), permit us to infer that the initial grammar of the Proto-language was lacking tense morphology. In other words, the residual category of the Injunctive, which…
La transmissió lingüística intergeneracional a Castelló de la Plana i la Franja: La rellevància dels usos entre progenitors
2020
Fa 50 anys, a Conflicte lingüístic valencià, Rafael L. Ninyoles situava el trencament de la transmissió familiar del català com a resultat i manifestació externa de conflictes socials i de classes, especialment visibles enmig del procés de modernització econòmica i mobilitat social accelerada del País Valencià dels anys 60 del segle XX. En aquest article partim de dos estudis de cas quantitatius sobre la transmissió intergeneracional de les llengües a Castelló de la Plana i les comarques centrals de la Franja per a actualitzar el seu diagnòstic i matisar la visió d'aquest fenomen com a resultat de decisions dels progenitors imposades verticalment a la descendència. Hi proposem que els usos …
Co-learning of recursive languages from positive data
1996
The present paper deals with the co-learnability of enumerable families L of uniformly recursive languages from positive data. This refers to the following scenario. A family L of target languages as well as hypothesis space for it are specified. The co-learner is fed eventually all positive examples of an unknown target language L chosen from L. The target language L is successfully co-learned iff the co-learner can definitely delete all but one possible hypotheses, and the remaining one has to correctly describe L.
To correct or not correct the erroneous utterances of children: teacher‐initiated organisation of repair in the L2 pre‐primary education classroom
2010
ABSTRACT The research reported on a qualitative study of feedback given in one Finnish pre‐primary education group which integrated English into the programme as a first foreign language. The study was based on the authentic video‐recorded observations of actual pre‐primary teaching sessions (N = 11 lessons). The findings suggested that the reactions of the teachers to child errors depended on the types of errors made by children. The study discussed the tension present in feedback giving when balancing between the aim of maintaining the early interest of children in language learning and the purpose of paying attention to correct ways of using the target language. The data were analysed by…
A probabilistic approach to learning a visually grounded language model through human-robot interaction
2010
A Language is among the most fascinating and complex cognitive activities that develops rapidly since the early months of infants' life. The aim of the present work is to provide a humanoid robot with cognitive, perceptual and motor skills fundamental for the acquisition of a rudimentary form of language. We present a novel probabilistic model, inspired by the findings in cognitive sciences, able to associate spoken words with their perceptually grounded meanings. The main focus is set on acquiring the meaning of various perceptual categories (e. g. red, blue, circle, above, etc.), rather than specific world entities (e. g. an apple, a toy, etc.). Our probabilistic model is based on a varia…
The Big Five Study in SLA: Future Directions and Pedagogical Implications
2020
This chapter is an attempt to integrate the existing theoretical and empirical study on personality traits in SLA in order to consider possible future research directions related to the scrutiny of isolated traits. For this reason, it commences with an outline of existing empirical findings on the role of each trait in the process of foreign language learning. On the basis of the findings, an outlook on future investigation is proposed, followed by an attempt to depict the cluster of traits that might be included to describe the characteristics of the ideal L2 achiever. In the next step, an outline of pedagogical interventions is included. It addresses ways in which specific strengths ident…
Aspetti della prosodia nell'interlingua di apprendenti vietnamiti di italiano L2: un'ipotesi di trattamento task-based in contesto guidato
2014
E' un fenomeno noto e ampiamente documentato che l'apprendimento delle strutture prosodiche dell'italiano possa subire considerevoli rallentamenti in ragione della distanza tipologica tra L1 e L2 (cfr. inter al. le analisi su parlanti sinofoni in Costamagna 2011). Sulla base di questa assunzione teorica, il presente intervento prende le mosse dall'analisi dell'interlingua di un campione di apprendenti vietnamiti adulti, selezionato nell'ambito dei corsi estivi di italiano L2 presso la Scuola di lingua italiana per stranieri dell'Università di Palermo. L'attenzione sarà, in particolare, focalizzata sui problemi relativi all'acquisizione delle variazioni intonative dell'italiano e, dunque, de…