Inadequate research attention has been paid to the learning of a third language. For this reason, this study explores senior English major students' learning of additional foreign languages in seven universities in Shaanxi Province, China. The study examines the relationship between the participants' motivation and language proficiency through a questionnaire, and the collected data are analyzed using hierarchical linear regression analysis. The results identify that the participants' instrumental and integrative motivations positively influence their second foreign language proficiency. Further analysis reveals that the connection between the participants' motivation and language proficiency is mediated by foreign language enjoyment. These findings form the basis of our suggestions for the sustainable learning and teaching of foreign languages in universities.Sustainability 2020, 12, 1302 2 of 13 the field of positive psychology have pointed out the importance of foreign language enjoyment (FLE) in language acquisition [22][23][24], more work is needed to elaborate the role of FLE in foreign language learning. Considering FLE's connection with mental activity, we assume in this paper that it mediates the relationship between motivation and foreign language proficiency, and we try to examine this mediating effect in the TLA context. Therefore, the present study uses survey data from seven universities in Shaanxi Province, China, to explore the process of second foreign language acquisition, examining and explicating the relationship between motivation and language proficiency as well as the mediating role of FLE on the focal relationship. Theoretically, this paper enriches our understanding of how motivation influences second foreign language proficiency, facilitates further interest in TLA in terms of individual differences, and highlights the importance of positive psychology in learning a second foreign language. Practically, it suggests important implications for the sustainability of second foreign language teaching and learning.
This article reports the results of an investigation, based on a 170 000-word corpus of test performance, of the validity of College English Test-Spoken English Test (CET-SET) group discussion by examining the degree of interaction among candidates in the group discussion task with respect to a set of interactional language functions (ILFs) to be assessed. The results show a low degree of interaction among candidates in the CET-SET group discussion. Consequently, the inadequate elicitation of ILFs from candidates may well pose a problem for measuring their speaking ability in this regard.
Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units.
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