Search results for "Language Acquisition"
showing 10 items of 219 documents
Yläkoulun S2-oppilaiden transitiivi-ilmausten käyttö Eurooppalaisen viitekehyksen taitotasoilla
2014
Artikkelissa tarkastelen, miten transitiivi-ilmausten kaytto kehittyy ylakouluikaisten suomi toisena kielena -oppilaiden Eurooppalaisen viitekehyksen (2003) taitotasoille arvioiduissa kirjoitelmissa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittaa, miten nuoret kirjoittajat kayttavat yleista ja monikayttoista ilmaustyyppia, transitiivikonstruktiota, oppijansuomessa ja miten konstruktion toteutumat muuttuvat ja varioivat kielitaidon kehittyessa. Tutkimusaineisto koostuu Jyvaskylan yliopiston Cefling-hankkeessa 7.–9.-luokkalaisilta S2-oppilailta keratyista kirjoitelmista, joita analysoin transitiivi-ilmausten taajuuden ja tarkkuuden kannalta. Laadullisen tarkastelun lahtokohtana on kayttopohjainen konst…
Introduction to Beliefs about SLA revisited
2011
Abstract This article serves as an introduction to this second special issue of System on Beliefs about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) held by learners and/or teachers of foreign languages in a variety of contexts all over the world, and it compares and contrasts the empirical studies included in the issue. In sharp contrast to the first special System issue on beliefs about SLA, most of the studies reported in this issue draw on sociocultural theory, make use of more than one type of data, and can be characterized as qualitative in nature. In addition, the studies tend to view beliefs as variable and fixed, and focus on changes in these and/or on the interaction between beliefs and lear…
Awareness of second language inflectional morphology: A case study on Finnish as a second language
2007
The Finnish language has a very extensive inflectional morphology, whereas Vietnamese, as an isolating language, has no inflection at all. Therefore, the major challenge encountered by Vietnamese immigrants learning Finnish is to develop awareness of the existence, function and use of inflection. This paper examines how this process manifests itself in native-non-native speaker (NS-NNS) conversations during the initial stages of second language acquisition. All the negotiation sequences including overt signals of problems in understanding were subjected to a closer analysis, and the linguistic modifications performed to solve the problems were analysed on the level of both interaction and g…
Discourse Markers of French: Multifaceted Look at a Controversial Category
2021
In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign la…
Einfachheit, Anpassung und Early Literacy
2014
This essay deals with the notions of ›simplicity‹ and ›complexity‹ as well as ›accommodation‹ and ›transgression‹ with respect to child developments in language acquisition and literature acquisition. Focusing on the period of ›Early Literacy‹, it is argued that language development and children’s literature both start with simple patterns and gradually gain complexity. It is shown that children’s literature is a specific input in language acquisition which is accommodated to the needs of children. Both in language acquisition and in literary input, one finds also transgressions of rules.
“But big is a funny word”: a multiple perspective on concept formation in a foreign-language-mediated classroom
2015
In recent years, foreign-language mediated instruction (immersion, content-based language learning and teaching) has been studied from various perspectives. In the following study, a single event from a Finnish third-grade EFL-mediated geography lesson is studied by combining insights from three research approaches: sociocultural, socio-cognitive, and discourse-pragmatic. The data analysis focuses on how during concept formation, the participants use commonplace means present in every classroom – textbook and chalkboard, spoken and written, verbal and nonverbal communicative means – to construct knowledge and its social context. The results indicate that there exist strong parallels among t…
Effects of authority: voicescapes in children's beliefs about the learning of English
2012
This paper examines learner beliefs from a dialogical point of view. Drawing on the writings of the Bakhtin circle, it sees beliefs as shared and recycled viewpoints that are multivoiced: they echo the voices of others as well as the voice of the speaker. A longitudinal interview study was conducted among a group of young Finnish learners of English. The analysis of the data focused on the voicework present in the learners' answers: how they, on the one hand, echoed or even repeated the voices of authority, and, on the other hand, brought forward their own insights. The results indicate that the authoritative voices strongly influence how the individual viewpoints are formed and presented a…
Student beliefs (or metacognitive knowledge) about SLA reconsidered
1995
In applied linguistics, interest in student beliefs (or metacognitive knowledge) about second language acquisition (SLA) is fairly recent, growing out of the emphasis on learner autonomy and on learner strategies in SLA. The purpose of this paper is to review those few studies that have been published so far, to give an outline of definitions of beliefs and research methodology, and finally to provide alternatives to these, based on recent developments in the social sciences. With a reconsideration of beliefs come reconsiderations of research data and methods.
Translation and didactics in the language classroom: the preparation and dissemination of a dual-language critical edition of José Luis Alonso de San…
2015
We have clearly come a long way from the time when translation’s principal role in the classroom was as a tool for language acquisition. This has been a positive development in many respects but, as we hope to demonstrate, the insights gleaned from this specific case-study – viewed through the prism of a Foucauldian approach to the archaeology of the disciplines – illustrate the need for a more general reassessment of the educational and scholarly potential of the dual-language text, a once-popular and well-respected literary and pedagogical resource which was the collateral victim of the disciplinary warfare by which translation and language education were able to establish themselves as a…
Root lexical features and inflectional marking of tense in Proto-Indo-European
2009
This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with re…