Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 17, Issue 2, 1994

This was a 10-week time-series investigation of a class of 12 students with the same teacher carrying out the teaching for both the experimental and control condition and the same students exposed to both treatment conditions. The question of central interest in this study was whether Suggestopedia affects more sophisticated language skills than recall, and both quantitative and qualitative measures were included to address the criticism that Suggestopedia affects memory skills alone. Year 10 students’ recall, comprehension, word production, fluency, accuracy, writing quality, transfer skills of grammatical items, and understanding of grammar rules were tested once a week. Long-term retention rates for recall were also checked at the end of each four-week period. The findings suggested that Suggestopedia does in fact have the potential to positively affect sophisticated language skills such as transfer of structures and creative writing. Compared with performance during the control Phase, results showed that during the experimental Phase students performed equally as well on tests of comprehension, accuracy and understanding of rules, and significantly better on tests of recall, word production, fluency, writing quality and transfer of grammatical items.

This paper presents data from a cross-sectional study of the use of cohesion in Italian texts written by L2 adult learners and by native speakers. Twenty-six free compositions were analysed for cohesion: eighteen by anglophone learners of Italian attending first, second, third and fourth year of Italian at Sydney University, and eight by native speakers of Italian divided in two groups: one of students, who have either done their schooling in Italy or recently arrived in Australia, the other of Italian professionals living in Sydney. More specifically, cohesion was analysed for the three categories of reference, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The objective of the study is twofold: a) to compare learners and native speakers in their use of cohesion, and b) to observe the developmental sequences in the use of cohesion in the six different groups. Examples from the texts are given and a tentative interpretation of the data is presented.

This paper presents the results of a study pertaining to the acquisition of timing control by Australian subjects who are enrolled in first-year Japanese at tertiary level. Instrumental techniques are used to observe segment duration and pitch patterns in the speech production of learners and native speakers of Japanese. The observations concern vowels and obstruents based on minimal pairs with durational contrasts, and the results are discussed within the framework of interlanguage phonology. The results obtained from this study demonstrate problems of beginning-level learners, including the underdifferentiation of durational contrasts (Han 1992). From the viewpoint of interlanguage phonology, however, the results seem to indicate that the learners have the ability to control timing and that they try to achieve durational distinctions in their speech production, but that their phonetic realisation is different from that of native speakers.

Lack of inter-rater agreement in the assessment of oral tests is wellknown. In this paper, multi-faceted Rasch analysis was used to determine whether any bias was evident in the way a group of raters (N=13) rated two different versions of an oral interaction test, undertaken by the same candidates (N=83) under the two conditions – direct and semi-direct. Rasch measurement allows analysis of the interaction between ‘facets’; in this case, raters, items and candidates are all facets. In this study, the interaction between rater and item was investigated in order to determine whether particular tasks in the test were scored in a consistently biased way by particular raters. The results of the analysis indicated that certain raters consistently assessed the tape-version of the test more harshly whilst others consistently rated the live version more harshly. This type of approach also allowed a finer analysis at the level of individual items with respect to harshness and consistency across ratings. The implications for rater training and feedback are discussed.

This paper sets out to address the problem of just what, from the vast amount of research now available into the spoken language, can and ought to form part of the oral component of a second or foreign language course. Exemplification is principally based on spoken English from the British Isles, but reference is made, where appropriate, to other modern languages. Structural, interactive, generic and contextual constraints are discussed in terms of their implications for teaching, and a core set of features are highlighted. Some results of discourse analysis and conversation analysis are argued as better treated within the domain of cross-cultural studies, and other features of spoken language usually considered within the domain of discourse analysis are proposed for inclusion within the lexico-grammatical areas of the syllabus. Methodological implications are discussed in the final section, where it is argued that traditional ‘presentational’ approaches to language teaching need to be rethought and supplemented by more inductive- and language awareness based activities.

Linguistic imperialism is the expansion of a small number of privileged languages at the cost of a large number of others. The language teaching profession is a potential instrument of linguistic imperialism and needs to address the question of the ecological impact of language teaching and to take an ecological view of their profession. An ecological view focuses on areas such as the well being of the inhabitants of a language ecology, and the long term sustainability of the system. The principal task for language teachers as that of empowering their learners by giving them additional knowledge and skills and to cater for the learner’s needs rather than the short-term economic benefits of the teaching institution. Language teachers have to address the question of likely long term outcomes of their practices.

This paper examines children’s literature as discourse and argues that attention to the textuality of children’s literature discloses a network of signifying strategies which serve to confine texts within a narrow band of socio-cultural values. The language of fiction written for children offers conventionalised discourses by means of which content is encoded. While there are many other books can be and are titled, these are culturally representative. They are symptomatic of the frames used in Australian children’s literature, and in effect disclose how that literature is complicit in the ideological construction of Australian childhood (or, in this case, adolescence). This is part of how children are socialized. Hence the mediators of children’s books focus attention on the ‘truth’-value of theme and content and perpetuate the illusion that discourse is merely transparent.

It is argued that Aboriginal children’s English is different inside and outside the classroom largely because characteristically, inside the classroom the Aboriginal children do not have the freedom to determine the discourse pattern which they have outside the classroom. This is illustrated on the basis of an analysis of five first person oral narratives of Aboriginal children of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia recorded outside the classroom, which are compared both with a first person oral narrative of a non-Aboriginal child and with teacher led interactions in the classes of which these children were members. The Aboriginal children’s discourse exhibits ‘tracking,’ a culture-specific way of organising narrative, which is widely exhibited in Aboriginal communities. It is implied that education of speakers of Aboriginal English needs to be sensitive to such discoursal features which are not shared by other English speakers.