Reading is an important skill to acquire for overall language proficiency. Sustained reading skill improvement and reading motivation are needed to become a fluent reader and to develop a positive reading identity. Students are better able to maintain ongoing reading development by becoming autonomous and self-regulated readers. This paper explains the benefits of developing self-regulated readers through an extensive reading program, where students read many interesting books at an appropriate level of difficulty. Students and teachers made use of an extensive reading module for an open-source audience response system. Using this system provides autonomous learning conditions that enable students to read books extensively by choosing books, monitoring, and reflecting on books read. Teachers can monitor students through summaries of the number of books read by each student, estimates of book difficulty, and popularity ratings of the books. Empirical data from our work-in-progress that was presented in Lake and Holster (2013) shows how extensive reading leads to gains in reading speed, reading motivation, and a positive reading identity.
Peer feedback can engage the learning process, but collecting the survey data into a usable format can be time-consuming, which can deter classroom teachers from undertaking the kind of in-depth analysis for classroom research. To overcome this detriment, and in order to research the effects of learning by assessing, we created a peer feedback module ("add-on") to a free, open-source student response system (SRS). Using this SRS, teachers create a survey for peer feedback. Students can access this survey through any web browser on any kind of device, from computers to smartphones, to rate their classmates' performances. The survey is reused for each feedback session. This module can output data files compatible with MFRM (many-faceted Rasch measurement) software, which allows teachers to analyse the collected data in a very short amount of time.
Folse (2004) argued for the importance of vocabulary instruction and the effectiveness of list learning, while Laufer and Girsai (2008) found mechanical output tasks using contrastive analysis and translation effective for vocabulary learning, following Swain and Lapkin’s (1995) advocacy of pushed output using creative tasks. Vocabulary gains over one semester were compared from a treatment group of 37 learners taught vocabulary using mechanical tasks with a control group of 67 learners assigned creative output tasks in a quasi-experimental design. Rasch measurement was used to provide equated scores from vocabulary pre-tests and post-tests. Both groups showed substantive gains in vocabulary knowledge but the control group showed larger vocabulary gains than the treatment group, contrary to expectations. These results suggest that mechanical tasks alone may not lead to optimal gains in vocabulary knowledge. Swain and Lapkin (1995)は創造的タスクを使う強制的アウトプットを提唱し、Folse (2004)は語彙指導の重要性とリスト学習の有効性を主張した。一方、Laufer and Girsai (2008)は対照分析と翻訳を用いる機械的なアウトプットを促すタスクが語彙学習に有効であると指摘した。本論では、1学期間での語彙習得度を準実験的形式で、機械的なタスクを使い語彙指導を受けた37名の実験群と、創造的アウトプットタスクの指導を受けた67名の統制群を比較した。語彙テストの事前・事後のスコアを等価するために、ラッシュ分析を用いた。両グループの事後テストにおいて実質的な語彙習得が認められたが、予測に反して実験群よりも統制群における語彙習得の方が大きいという結果になった。これは、強制的アウトプットが言語習得に効果的な手段とする主張を支持する結果であり、長期的な語彙習得には機械的タスクのみでは不十分であることを示唆する。
A robust finding in psycholinguistics is that cognates and loanwords, which are words that typically share some degree of form and meaning across languages, provide the second language learner with benefits in language use when compared to words that do not share form and meaning across languages. This cognate effect has been shown to exist for Japanese learners of English; that is, words such as table are processed faster and more accurately in English because they have a loanword equivalent in Japanese (i.e., テーブル /te:buru/ ‘table’). Previous studies have also shown that the degree of phonological and semantic similarity, as measured on a numerical scale from ‘completely different’ to ‘identical’, also influences processing. However, there has been relatively little appraisal of such cross-linguistic similarity ratings themselves. Therefore, the present study investigated the structure of the similarity ratings using Rasch analysis, which is an analytic approach frequently used in the design and validation of language assessments. The findings showed that a 4-point scale may be optimal for phonological similarity ratings of cognates and a 2-point scale may be most appropriate for semantic similarity ratings. Furthermore, this study reveals that while a few raters and items misfitted the Rasch model, there was substantial agreement in ratings, especially for semantic similarity. The results validate the ratings for use in research and demonstrate the utility of Rasch analysis in the design and validation of research instruments in psychology.
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