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Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been used to measure children's expressive language skills in normal and abnormal language development, and to examine the development of the speaking skills in second language acquisition, as well as to survey the proficiency of bilingual language development. Recently, SR tasks have been recognized as a potential psycholinguistic tool to identify bilingual children with language impairment. SR tasks are easy and quick to conduct, and a useful technique for obtaining quantitative and qualitative information about children's lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge, as well as language development in a complex linguistic background. This paper reports the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the performance of SR among bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers, from age four to six. The task was conducted in both languages: Mandarin, and English, to examine the type of grammatical errors found among different age groups in the SR task. Studying the performance of SR in both languages could provide a better understanding of children's language learning and their acquisition pattern in both the first and second language. Overall task accuracy in each language was compared; grammatical errors in the SR task were described qualitatively. The results showed that the linguistic characteristic of the stimulus materials in Mandarin and English influences the performance of these bilingual children in the SR task. The study also showed that the grammatical errors found in the SR tasks may have the potential of being used to distinguish children with typical and atypical language development in the first language (L1).
Regional varieties of language, often a result of language contact, possess various characteristics, such as borrowed words, and often structures, sounds, and meanings transferred from one or more languages. The variety of English used in informal contexts in Malaysia known as Malaysian English contains localized features resulting from contact with languages spoken by the local indigenous populations as well as the Chinese and Indian diaspora in this Southeast Asian nation. A prominent feature of Malaysian English is the presence of discourse particles (such as lah, meh, and lor) that are not found in the standardized form of English and that are often unintelligible to people unfamiliar with them. Using communication on Facebook by Chinese Malaysian young adults as data representing real-life, informal talk in a computer-mediated environment, this article examines the multiple functions of Malaysian English discourse particles and proposes a framework for interpreting their meanings when used in communication. tay et al.
Considering the growing interest in task-based language teaching, classroom-based research
that investigates the effects of task complexity on L2 development is needed. Despite the
inclusion of task reasoning demand (TRD) as a dimension of task complexity in Robinson’s
Cognition Hypothesis (2007), there is insufficient classroom-based research that investigates
the language learning outcomes that may occur as a result of engaging in tasks of differing
reasoning demands in a variety of task conditions. This study aims to fill in some of the gap by
identifying the main and interaction effects of task reasoning demand and individual versus
dyadic task conditions (TC) on the grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity of learner
written output. Modified versions of the dictogloss task and the opinion-gap task were used to
provide a relatively high reasoning demand task (+TRD) and a relatively low reasoning
demand task (-TRD) to the learners respectively. A repeated-measures design was used with 76
participants consisting of 18 year-old learners in a public secondary school randomly assigned
into four groups. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and repeated-measures
ANOVAs. Results indicated that both TRD and TC had significant main effects on
grammatical accuracy. Also, TRD and TC had significant main and interaction effects on
syntactic complexity. The results point to differential effects of using tasks of high and low
reasoning demand in dyadic and individual task conditions. The results have pedagogical
implications on task design and task selection to elicit higher rates of grammatical accuracy
and syntactic complexity in learner written output.
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