Abstract-This article aims to provide an overview of major theoretical approaches and psychological considerations related to child language (first language acquisition). The field is multidimensional, as illustrated by the many courses on child language or language acquisition that are taught in departments of Linguistics, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Speech Pathology, Education, and Anthropology. This crossdisciplinary nature of the field is also reflected in many handbooks and articles yearly published across the world. In this article I mainly present a general overview of theoretical/epistemological and classical/modern accounts and approaches to the study of first language acquisition. In other words, the present paper is to investigate the psychological/epistemological considerations of first language acquisition with the aim of shedding a bit of light on this human-species phenomenon.
This paper is an attempt to clarify the status of discourse markers in International Law Texts. Discourse markers, also having been studied under various labels including discourse operators, pragmatic connectives, cue phrases, discourse connectives, and sentence connectives, are used extensively in both spoken and written language to signal the structure of the discourse. Research on this area has shown the importance of discourse markers in communication for marking discourse structure, but almost little attention has been paid to their importance in written language, especially in International Law Texts. This paper looks at the use of discourse markers in a corpus of International Law investigating what discourse markers signal, and when they tend to be used in International Law Texts. Therefore, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, which ranges from macro-investigation by Wordsmith (Scott 1996) to a micro- discourse analytic examination, is used in the study. The results indicate that discourse markers serve as useful maneuvers to structure and organize International Law Texts. In the end, the study also discusses some possible pedagogical implications involved in preparing ESP learners to become communicatively more competent in their field of study
The present study investigated the effect of group dynamic assessment (DA) through software on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability. The main question of the study was whether dynamic assessment via CoolSpeech software had any effect on the listening comprehension ability of learners with high and low self-efficacy. To find the answer, 80 Iranian intermediate learners were selected from among a population of 120, based on their scores on a placement test. A self-efficacy questionnaire was then used to assign selected participants into two experimental groups as low self-efficacious experimental group (n=20) and high self-efficacious experimental group (n=20), as well as two control groups, each containing 20 participants. Next, a pretest of listening comprehension ability was administered to all groups, and no significant difference between their mean scores was observed. After a period of two months, during which the experimental groups received treatment of dynamic assessment through CoolSpeech software and the control groups received a placebo, a posttest of listening comprehension was administered to all groups. The data analysis results revealed that the participants in high self-efficacious experimental group achieved significantly better scores than the other groups. However, in the second experimental group, no significant change was observed, and participants in the second experimental group did not significantly outperform the control group. It was concluded that the group dynamic assessment method via software could have a significant effect on the listening comprehension ability of EFL learners with high self-efficacy.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of two models of texts (contrived versus authentic texts) on Iranianintermediate EFL learners' lexical collocation learning.The participants were sixtystudents majoring in English. They were students in the second semester of academic year 2015 who were selected through a proficiency test titled Comprehensive English Language Test (CELT),administered at the commencement of the study, the result of which showed that the two groups were homogeneous in terms of their language proficiency.They were divided into two equal comparison groups: The Authentic Text group (AT)and Contrived Text group (CT), either of which included thirty ones. The quantitative data on the participants' knowledge on lexical collocations were collected using a pre-planned pretest on lexical collocation, comprising forty multiple-choice-items. The pretest on lexical collocation went through a pilot study. The same version of the test of lexical collocation, with the rearrangement of some items, was administered to the both comparison groups after the completion of the treatment period for the AT group and placebo for the CT group. The analysis of the quantitative data was done using Independent Samples T-test and paired-samples T-test. The results of the Paired-samples T-test and Independent Samples T-test indicated that the AT group was significantly different from the control group; in other words, the AT group outperformed the CT group. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research were included as well.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.