Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advances. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the acquisition of Hebrew by Arab students in Israel: level of abstractness, lexical diversity, and density lexical. The corpus consisted of sixty essays written in Hebrew by 9th and 11th graders. The quantitative analysis reveals several findings. First, abstractness increases with subjects' age, as expected. The density test, however, did not show the expected increase in density with age. A likely reason for this is relatively high density in younger pupils' essays, indicating lack of cohesion rather than high linguistic competence. The national high school language curriculum for eleventh graders focuses on connectivity, which causes a decrease in density. Third, the diversity test also did not yield statistically significant findings, probably because this test is influenced by text length, which in the ninth grade still does not enable a reliable test. In conclusion, the lexical measures can be divided into two types: basic tests, that can be applied at any level of competence; and advanced tests, which require a high level of competence. Level of abstractness is of the first type: it is effective as a measure of progress in L2 acquisition even in the initial stages of acquisition, while diversity and density require a higher competence level.
Most of the research on lexical measures was conducted in English and conducted similarly in other languages without accurate adaptations to the language being tested. The first objective of this study is to identify differences between applications of lexical density and lexical diversity when tested as in English and when adapted to the language being tested. The second objective is to inspect the effect of acquisition time on intermediate-level second-language learners' lexical density and diversity. In a test-retest study over one year, Arabic Hebrew bilinguals (n=23) wrote argumentative essays, in which lexical density and diversity were analyzed according to two approaches; a conventional approach as in English and an adapted approach more aligned with Hebrew linguistic features. In both approaches, lexical density was calculated as the number of lexical words in proportion to the total number of words and lexical diversity using the type-token ratio (TTR) and Corrected TTR (CTTR). Findings reveal statistically significant differences between the two approaches and the adapted approach allowed for cross-language and interlanguage comparisons. Although no significant increase in lexical density and diversity over the year was found, various patterns for lexical development were observed; at the second time point, students with the lowest level of lexical diversity substantially improved and more essays fell within the lexical density range of a typically written language.
Much of the theorization in Second Language Acquisition is based on findings in unrelated language dyads, with English as L1 or L2. We focus on two closely related languages, Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew is the majority language in Israel, taught in Arab minority schools mostly by L1 Arabic-speaking teachers. We explore the persistence of very common syntactic errors in Hebrew of Arab high-school students, and the correlation between persistence, interference and developmental errors. From a longitudinal corpus of Hebrew essays written by 22 Arab 11th graders, and a year later in 12th grade, the six most frequent syntactic error categories were isolated. Statistical analysis showed interference to be involved in the vast majority of the errors that also persisted most, whereas almost all the improvement over the year was in developmental errors with no interference. This contradicts a common claim that interference, initially predominant, decreases over time with relation to developmental errors. We found prepositions to be particularly problematic, especially in errors involving interference, but these were no more persistent than others. We conclude that more research on syntactic interference in the acquisition of closely related languages would benefit SLA theory, as our findings differ from many typically attested patterns.
אחת ההנחות הבלשניות העיקריות בתהליך של רכישה או למידה של שפה היא שרכיבים בשפה השנייה הדומים לשפת האם של הלומד יהיו פשוטים בעבורו, ואילו רכיבים שונים יהיו קשים. דמיון זה הוא גורם דומיננטי בתהליך הרכישה אך מלבדו מעורבים גורמים נוספים. במאמר זה אתמק ד בדמיון ובשוני בתחום אחד מבין תחומי השפה השונים והוא תחום אוצר המילים, תחום בעל חשיבות מכרעת ברכישת שפה.
פיתוח מיומנות הכתיבה הוא פעילות בסיסית בתהליך ההוראה, וחיבורים הנכתבים בזמן מוגבל הם לרוב האמצעי להערכתה. נמצא שממגוון המאפיינים הלשוניים שלפיהם אפשר להעריך את איכות הכתיבה, כגון מאפיינים ל קסיקליים, תחביריים, פונולוגיים ומורפולוגיים, תכונות של אוצר מילים הן אמצעי ניבוי חזק לאיכות הכתיבה יותר מאשר תכונות לשוניות אחרות, על כן פותחו מדדים רבים להערכת מיומנות לקסיקלית. בבסיס ערך זה יוצג מדד לקסיקלי – מדד הדחיסות הלקסיקלית – ויוצעו לו יישומים להוראה ולהערכה מדויקת יותר של מיומנות הכתיבה בשפת אם ובשפה שנייה.
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