Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 25, Issue 1, 1986

Pronunciation is generally regarded as an important subskill in FLT. Its quality is usually assessed by impression marking the reading aloud of a piece of text or a number of spontaneous utterances. The drawbacks of this method, however, are its lack of transparency (what exactly is being tested?) and its suscepti-bility to subjectivity.To avoid these drawbacks Cito has developed an alternative method for the assessment of pronunciation: as the student reads a piece of text, the teacher assesses one aspect of pronunciation for each line (8 or 9 words) the student reads. A fair number of such minor decisions (about 40) yield a pretty good insight into a student's pronunciation.The reliability of this atomistic method of assessment was sub-mitted to practical tests and compared with that of traditional assessment procedures. Further research compared the validity of the atomistic method with that of the impression marking procedures involving reading aloud and spontaneous speaking.It is concluded that the atomistic assessment method has three major advantages: a high correlation between various raters in assessing pronunciation; it functions not only as a summative, but also as a diagnostic tool; irrelevant factors that play a role in traditional assessment procedures are largely excluded.

At d'Witte Leli it seems that students of English whose native language is not Dutch experience greater difficulties in acquiring a sufficient oral proficiency than students whose lan-guage is Dutch. A study of some Turkish and Moroccan students suggests that they have several characteristic problems, both in the field of pronunciation and in that of vocabulary and syntax; the correct realization of the fortis "th" seems very difficult for them, their pitch range tends to be restricted, they frequently fail to provide the correct complementation of the verb and often leave out definite articles where they should be used. No attempts to explain and remedy these pro-blems systematically have been made but in some cases good results were obtained when the students' attitude towards the English language had become more positive.

This article describes global listening strategies as a promising approach to perception. In a number of demonstrations it is shown that global specification of the acoustic signal and a global perceptual approach may be quite sufficient for adequate communication, depending on the nature of the subtle interplay between speaker and hearer.The author emphasizes that it is this interplay which eventually determines the relative contributions of acoustic information and linguistic expectancy to the process of communication. Listening proficiency in a foreign language is also discussed in this context.

Communication has at least two different aspects: the propositi-onal aspect and the social aspect. Any utterance in a face-to-face-interaction therefore has the function to give information and to indicate how the ralation to the other participant is interpreted. In order to establish his communicative goal, the speaker has to analyse the social situation and the preceding context. Depending on this interpretation he selects between the different verbal patterns to perform a certain speech act. This involves for instance the choice of direct/indirect speech act realizations, the selection of certain linguistic elements (modality markers) for downtoning or upgrading the illocutionary force of speech acts.The contrastive analysis of the realizations of the speech act REQUEST in three different dialogue batteries elicited via role play from Dutch learners of German, native speakers of Dutch and native speakers of German has shown 1. that Dutch native speakers use modality markers in different communicative functions than German native speakers, 2. that Dutch learners of German mostly choose the same social strategies when speaking the target language as they do when speaking the mother tongue, 3. that the learners are not always able to establish their modal goal, that is, the are not able to communicate their intentions on an interpersonal level. The reason for this seems to be that in the Netherlands the teaching of German as a second language is mainly a matter of teaching grammatical rules and linguistic expressions without taking into consideration that the meaning of these expressions is pragmaticalley conditioned and that their usage is motivated by the relevant characteris-tics of such social situations.

In this research a comparison was made of reading speed in mother tongue (Dutch) and foreign language (French). Subjects were two groups of Dutch university students in the 3rd or 4th year of their study: students of French language and literature (advanced group), and students of history and Dutch literature (intermediate group) respectively. There was no beginners groupsince all the the students involved had passed through a six year high school French curriculum. Texts of about 150 words (adapted from introductory handbooks, an encyclopedia and a political magazine) were presented in segments of about 1 sentence on a microcomputer screen. Self paced reading rate was registered segment by segment. After each text subjects were asked to give a short summary of the text they had read. The summary was recor-ded on tape. All the texts contained two interwoven topics. Texts were presented to the two groups of students with different reading tasks:1. Read the text and give a summary (neutral condition)2. Read the text and give a summary of what it says about topic χ3. Read the text and give a summary of what it says about topic yAs expected, no significant difference was found between the two groups in Dutch. In the neutral condition the intermediate readers read twice as fast in Dutch as in French. The difference for the advanced readers was a factor 1,3. In the topic oriented Dutch and French reading tasks subjects generally had a faster reading speed in the irrelevant segments.An additional analysis of the results revealed that in the topic oriented French reading tasks only the faster readers (=faster mother tongue readers) had a faster reading speed in the irrelevant segments. The slower readers made no or little difference between relevant and irrelevant segments in the French texts. It was concluded that for slower readers the use of efficient strategies in topic oriented reading tasks is only possible beyond a fairly high level of language proficiency.

At university level, many modern language courses continue to use translation in their training and testing program of writing proficiency.In this article we report on an empirical investigation intended to trace differences between translations and short essays of third year students of French.Two groups of about 30 students translated a text of 300 words and wrote an essay of the same length; the topics of both texts were somewhat controversial: a-the relative value of the study of Latin .and Greek; b-the moral problem of the transplantation of the heart of a monkey in a human baby. Group I translated the text on topic a and wrote an essay on topic b; group II did the reverse.The products of each group were rated on one aspect, correctness of language, by three raters who worked independently. First, they rated the texts according to the impressionistic method as is usually done for essays; in order to improve reliability, they divided each writing product in four paragraphs of approxi-mately equal length, and scored each paragraph separately. A month later, they rated the same texts; this time, they marked and counted errors: this corresponds to the usual way of rating translations.The mean scores for the translations were somewhat lower than the mean scores for the essays: quality of language thus seems to be superior in the latter.Correlations between translation and essay scores of the same rater were about .64; this does not seem to differ much from what is known about correlations between the scores for two essays of one student on different topics.Correlations between the impression scores and the error-count scores of the same raters were about .75 : it is evident that the two rating methods didn't yield very different scores. Counting errors with or without the comparison of the translations with the original text resulted almost in the same scores: correlations were about .90.The error-count method yielded a higher rater reliability (of about .80) than the impressionistic method, but this rating too was relatively reliable (about .70).The analysis of a small number of translations and essays didn't show any remarkable and systematic differences between three stylistic characteristics of these two kinds of written products; the characteristics we analysed were: type/token ratio, mean T-unit length, syntactic complexity.No systematic relation between these characteristics and quality of language, i.e. the two kinds of correction scores, was found.

In this article I try to show that the relationship between grammar teaching and grammar learning is not as close as one often assumes on intuitional grounds. My arguments are based on research at the University of Amsterdam. They are of a psychological, didactic and psycholinguistic nature.In the first place, teachers assume too easily that learners will integrate into their knowledge system the rules presented to them during the instruction in more or less the same way in which these rules have been presented. Instead, learners have their own individual way of internalizing knowledge. They not only build up an incomplete network of rules, but they also invent idiosyncratic rules that cannot be explained by L1, L2, or the instruction (Van der Linden 1985).Secondly, it seems that these networks of rules resist restructuring. That is, new rules are incorporated into the system with some difficulty; the learner seems to prefer to stick to what he already knows.In the third place, grammar tests do not always seem to test precisely the things that were taught during instruction. From the more or less complete set of rules taught, the "simple" rules are often absent in the tests, because it is supposed that these are known by all students. Therefore, it is mainly the "difficult" rules, i.e. "exceptions" that figure in the test. As a consequence, a student's results do not reflect his language proficiency in an everyday sense which is why native speakers have often great problems in making these tests). Obtaining a 80% score (a com-monly used norm to pass the exam) means a more than 80% mastery of the rules concerned.Finally, there is a discrepancy between the knowledge presen-ted to the student in the instruction and the knowledge acquired in other learning situations. This difference concerns the register of the language. Whereas the student is confronted with different registers in his learning process (poetic, familiar, "argot",...), the grammar instruction (and test) limits itself to the norm of the standard language ("français standard"), and considers expressions of another register incorrect.For all these reasons, there are discrepanties between the teaching and the learning of grammar. Careful research and reflection on this problem could lead to a closer relationship between both activities.

In this article I try to show that the relationship between grammar teaching and grammar learning is not as close as one often assumes on intuitional grounds. My arguments are based on research at the University of Amsterdam. They are of a psychological, didactic and psycholinguistic nature.In the first place, teachers assume too easily that learners will integrate into their knowledge system the rules presented to them during the instruction in more or less the same way in which these rules have been presented. Instead, learners have their own individual way of internalizing knowledge. They not only build up an incomplete network of rules, but they also invent idiosyncratic rules that cannot be explained by L1, L2, or the instruction (Van der Linden 1985).Secondly, it seems that these networks of rules resist restruc-turing. That is, new rules are incorporated into the system with some difficulty; the learner seems to prefer to stick to what he already knows.In the third place, grammar tests do not always seem to test precisely the things that were taught during instruction. From the more or less complete set of rules taught, the "simple" rules are often absent in the tests, because it is supposed that these are known by all students. Therefore, it is mainly the "difficult" rules, i.e. "exceptions" that figure in the test. As a consequence, a student's results do not reflect his language proficiency in an everyday sense which is why native speakers have often great problems in making these tests). Obtaining a 80% score (a com-monly used norm to pass the exam) means a more than 80% mastery of the rules concerned.Finally, there is a discrepancy between the knowledge presented to the student in the instruction and the knowledge acquired in other learning situations. This difference concerns the register of the language. Whereas the student is confronted with different registers in his learning process (poetic, familiar, "argot",...), the grammar instruction (and test) limits itself to the norm of the standard language ("français standard"), and considers expressions of another register incorrect.For all these reasons, there are discrepanties between the teaching and the learning of grammar. Careful research and reflection on this problem could lead to a closer relationship between both activities.

Alternative or humanistic approaches to foreign language teach-ing such as the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, Community Language Learning and Confluent Education, have been generated by scholars who are not linguists. An analysis of the ideas underlying the respective approaches leads to the conclusion that they are suitable for advanced students as well as for beginners. Although humanistic approaches are not based on empirical research, they have their roots in sound educational theories. If language teachers want to introduce these approaches into their teaching, they do not have to opt for any of them, but they can select elements from them. An example fo such an integrative approach is The Explorative-Creative Way. Research on processes which occur in second or foreign language classrooms, should be done in accordance with qualitative procedures as wellas with quantitative ones.

The article is opened with an account of the state ot the art concerning vocabulary studies within Applied Linguistics in the late 1970s, which shows that experiments in the classroom, i.e. in situ, are the best alternative to formulating and testing hypotheses based on non-existent or unproven theories. One's breadth of option in the matter of experiments in situ is very limited 'indeed (control and manipulation of dependent and inde-pendent variables, and setting up control groups being virtually impossible). An Adequacy study is proposed with the following features: analyses and comparison of (a) curriculum input, and (c) native speaker output. The article goes on to concentrate on (b), i.e. two longitudinal studies and one cross-sectional study of second-year students of English, and is then narrowed down to a report on one of the two longitudinal studies.It is shown that this one student did a great deal of incidental learning. A careful reconstruction of his workbook shows that he was a late bloomer: he had a 96-page personal vocabulary file which at first he hardly put to productive use. Then in the second semester there was a sudden lexical outburst, which proves that it is motivation and dogged determination that lead to lexical resource utilization. Other students' comments ('slogger/ toiler/fanatic') express a dubious attitude to vocabulary learning. This case-study also shows that lexis is part and parcel of communication strategies, a point which is obvious enough, though cheerfully overlooked by too many students. In quantitative and qualitative terms this student is shown to be a very good lexical performer. His output in the 10.000+ Frequency range is superior (percentage-wise), and his versati-lity in the matter of idiomatic English and number of exclusive items is manifest.With specific reference tot the 25-student cross-sectional study the important conclusion is drawn that at university level one has a very long way to go lexically speaking.

Two investigations were carried out to estimate the usefulness of the context method for the explanation of word meanings. This method provides the L2 learner with a sample sentence for each target word, without translation into LI.A sample of 100 sentences was selected from a monolingual vocabu-lary learning course book for adult learners of Dutch as a second language (Hart & Polter 1983). In the first study, these sample sentences were presented to 40 educated Dutch native speakers. They were asked to judge the appropriateness of the sentences (i.e. the extent to which the contexts constrained the meaning of the target words). In the second study, the same sentences, from which the target words had been deleted, were presented as a "fill-in-the-blank" test to 20 11/12-year old and 20 17/18-year old Dutch native speakers.In the discussion, it is argued that word meanings can seldom be successfully induced from the context. In general, the context method seems to be an ineffective way for initial explanation of word meanings, frequently causing noncomprehension or miscompre-hension on the part of the learner.However, the context method seems to offer an excellent means for further illustrating word meanings after they have been initially explained by translation.

Teacher training institutes in the Netherlands submit to their students tests of grammaticality judgments concerning FL senten-ces, in order to prepare them for their future task. Comparison of the results of these tests with results of FL production tests of the same students suggested that the former task was more difficult that the latter. The aim of this study was to examine two questions: (1) Is the production of FL grammatical structures different from, that is, more difficult than giving a judgment of grammatical acceptability concerning the same structures? (2) How do students proceed when judging the grammaticality of a given FL sentence?Existing studies on FL grammaticality judgments do not give a clear-cut onswer to these questions. Therefore we decided to carry out an experimental study, concentrating on the characteristics of grammaticality judgment tasks. 30 French syntactic structures were selected which often give rise to errors. These structures were incorporated in a grammaticality judgment test and a production test. The tests were administerd to matched groups of Dutch students of French. The hypothesis was that the two tasks were of a different degree of difficulty. The results did not confirm this hypothesis: although differences were found between the three conditions explored (judgment of a correct sentence, of an incorrect one, and production), these differences were not significant.The grammaticality judgment test was also administered to two groups of French subjects in order to compare their behaviour to that of the Dutch group. The French subjects were found to behave more homogeneously than the Dutch ones.Finally, the grammaticality judgment test was administered to a small group of Dutch subjects in a thinking-aloud-setting.The results of the pilot study suggest that the two tasks are not essentially different. This can be explained in the framework of the literature discussed.An article reporting this study will appear in ITL Review of Applied Linguistics (1986 or 1987)