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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2025
Pedagogical Linguistics - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2025
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2025
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A course of free voluntary reading on linguistic principles for average to below-average writers in university
Author(s): Geoffrey J. Huckpp.: 1–22 (22)More LessAbstractThis article describes an experiment in pedagogy for general writing improvement at the university level consisting of a course of Free Voluntary Reading (FVR), which can be offered either independently of or together with standard courses on writing. Evidence so far supporting the efficacy of FVR in helping students to improve their writing skills has largely come from the K-12 grades and university-age foreign language students, so whether it would prove useful for university students in general is open to question. A linguistic perspective is adopted, which entails a methodology for the experiment that differs in major respects from that which is typical in composition studies. The results of the experiment showed that a course of FVR, independently of instruction in writing, may be effective in improving university students’ grammatical fluency in writing.
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Identifying language requirements of pre‑scientific writing for learners in science education using a task‑based needs analysis
Author(s): Johanna Taglieber, Corinna Pieber, Suzanne Kapelari, Wolfgang Dür and Barbara Hingerpp.: 23–52 (30)More LessAbstractIn science, subject-specific languages have a communicative and epistemic function. Thus, in science education learners need to both learn the language of science and learn through this specific language. Based on the assumption that learning subject-specific languages can be compared to second language acquisition, the study transfers Task-based Language Teaching to science education and explores the language needs of Austrian upper secondary school learners in science education when writing a Pre-Scientific Paper (PSP), using multiple methods (semi-structured interviews, online questionnaires) and data sources (curriculum, learners, teachers). The study reveals pre-scientific writing as a relevant overall task, identifies over 30 target tasks, describes subject-specific linguistic challenges students face when performing these tasks and shows how they are supported in their pre-scientific writing skills. Altogether, the paper shows the importance of having a more regular and systematic implementation of subject-specific language tasks in upper secondary science education.
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The types of cues that help you learn
Author(s): Laurence Romain and Dagmar Divjakpp.: 53–77 (25)More LessAbstractDespite a considerable amount of research conducted on the development of tense/aspect (TA) usage in English by second language (L2) learners, nuances in uses of TAs remain elusive to many L2 learners of English: the grammatical accounts proposed appear difficult to apply as they are either too general or too specific and fail to provide learners with a conceptual understanding of the system. Merging insights from psychological models of learning, corpus-based, and cognitive linguistics approaches to second language acquisition we use the results of computational simulations of learning of the TA system conducted by Romain et al. (2022) and propose an approach to TA teaching that focuses on the cues that have been identified as crucial for accurate TA use. Our pedagogical approach draws learners’ attention not so much to the cues themselves but to the type of cues that are the most reliable in the choice of different TA combinations. This approach allows teachers to equip learners with a long-term learning strategy that will help them focus on the most useful type of information, and thus gradually build up a bank of knowledge specific to each TA combination.
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A revisit of three hypotheses about second language development of English relative clauses
Author(s): Chi Wui Ngpp.: 78–108 (31)More LessAbstractCantonese-English learners in Hong Kong confront with substantial difficulty in development of English relative clauses. This study aims at verifying predictions of hypotheses about second language learners’ development of English relative clauses with data of written Hong Kong English. wh relatives and that relatives in the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English were identified. Frequencies of occurrence of distinct types of relative clauses in the Hong Kong component were compared to evaluate whether predictions of Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, Kuno’s (1974) Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, and Hamilton’s (1994) Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis are supported by the corpus data respectively. Results indicate that the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis is supported by data of written Hong Kong English whilst the other two hypotheses are partially supported only. Hypotheses supported by corpus data of written Hong Kong English are suggested to inform English language education in Hong Kong by illuminating the instructional order of different types of English relative clauses.
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