Search results for "Language acquisition"
showing 10 items of 219 documents
The Marginalisation of Finely Tuned Semiotic Practices and Misunderstandings in Relation to (Signed) Languages and Deafness
2014
AbstractWhen people draw on the available modal resources (e.g. gestures) in specific contexts over time, those resources come to display regularities. The more a community uses and regulates those resources, the more fully and finely articulated their regularities and patterns become. Modes, organised by regular means of representation, are constantly transformed by users, depending on what the community needs. This paper discusses the way semiotic resources and practices, i.e. social actions with a history, used by sign language signers in visually oriented communities, as well as the research in such domains, have been marginalised. The paper reflects some of the main reasons for such ma…
Foreign Language Students’ Perceptions of Their Identity
2019
Foreign language learning innvolves cognitive, affective and social functioning of the persons involved in this experience. As a social practice, it is also related to the learners’ perceptions of their identity, specifically to their language identity which refers to the relationship between one’s sense of self and the language used to communicate. This implies that using a system of communication, the speaker develops a new sense of self that remains in a dynamic relation with other senses of self, based on (an)other language(s) the person knows.Language learners’ identity is no longer defined as fixed and stable but as “complex, contradictory and multifaceted” (Norton 1997, p. 419). It i…
Retrospective Orientation to Learning Activities and Achievements as a Resource in Classroom Interaction
2018
This article explores the temporal nature of language learning in classroom settings through the lens of Conversation Analysis (CA) by drawing on video‐recorded interactions from Content and Language Integrated (CLIL) classrooms. It outlines some methodological challenges that the task of documenting language learning in and as observable social interaction poses for CA studies of second language (L2) learning and proposes that learning has typically been described as either a situated activity (in cross‐sectional studies) or a series of intermediate achievements (in longitudinal studies). The empirical analysis focuses on interactional instances in which students observably invoke and desc…
The Prima Vista Line by Line Research Method
2012
In this article I argue for the justification of an experimental research method in poetry response in English as a foreign language. I claim that to exploit the resources of student readers in a better way, a method is needed to elicit uncensored primary responses that are often lost in the classroom. Unless student readers are allowed to encounter a poem personally and sincerely, and read it line by line, the primary reactions will be lost and language learning through poetry will be hampered. The primary reactions include the readers’ experiences in terms of knowledge of language and poetic devices, in addition to emotional and psychological reactions during the reading of a poem in Engl…
Activating Character Strengths Through Poetic Encounters in a Foreign Language—A Case Study
2016
The paper brings together two important issues related to effective functioning of foreign/second language learners, that is character strengths (one of the pillars of positive psychology) and the use of literary texts for language learning. The goals of using literary texts in a foreign/second language learning contexts and the goals of positive psychology converge. Both literature and positive psychology aim at enriching and expanding individual and social functioning and so they contribute to satisfaction and flourishing. The case study reported in the paper aimed at finding the participants’ opinions about the role of literary texts in foreign language learning and checking whether work…
Children show right-lateralized effects of spoken word-form learning
2017
It is commonly thought that phonological learning is different in young children compared to adults, possibly due to the speech processing system not yet having reached full native-language specialization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological learning in children are poorly understood. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track cortical correlates of incidental learning of meaningless word forms over two days as 6±8-year-olds overtly repeated them. Native (Finnish) pseudowords were compared with words of foreign sound structure (Korean) to investigate whether the cortical learning effects would be more dependent on previous proficiency in the language rather than ma…
The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.
2007
International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…
Children's Implicit Learning of Graphotactic and Morphological Regularities
2005
In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old children and adults were influenced by both types of constraints. The influence of graphotactic regularities persisted when reliance on morphological rules was possible, without any falling off as a function of age. This suggests that rules are not abstracted, even after massive amounts of exposure to a rule-based material. These re…
Developmental trajectories of early communication skills.
2012
Purpose This study focused on developmental trajectories of prelinguistic communication skills and their connections to later parent-reported language difficulties. Method The participants represent a subset of a community-based sample of 508 children. Data include parent reports of prelinguistic communication skills at 12, 15, 18, and 21 months and language difficulties at age 4;7 (years;months). The authors used latent profile analysis to identify groups of children with differing developmental trajectories of prelinguistic communication skills ( n = 271). The relations among these groups and follow-up data of parent-reported concerns of language development ( n = 187), as well as the ro…
Continuity From Prelinguistic Communication to Later Language Ability: A Follow-Up Study From Infancy to Early School Age.
2016
Purpose This longitudinal study examined the development of prelinguistic skills and the continuity of communication and language from the prelinguistic stage to school age. Method Prelinguistic communication of 427 Finnish children was followed repeatedly from 6 to 18 months of age ( n = 203–322 at ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months), and its associations with language ability at ages 2;0 ( n = 104), 3;0 ( n = 112), 4;7 ( n = 253), 5;3 ( n = 102), and 7;9 ( n = 236) were examined using latent growth curve modeling. Results Prelinguistic development across several skills emerged as a rather stable intraindividual characteristic during the first 2 years of life. Continuity from prelinguistic …