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The focus of this paper will be the development of an Albanian illustrated dictionary for children. The necessity of a dictionary in standard Albanian for Albanian school children has been discussed many times in the Albanian scientific community, but this gap remains yet unfulfilled. The authors of this paper have attributed their attention to this issue for quite some time now, which is why in this paper we want to address the general principles and special criteria that come into play when one writes such a major book. Specifically, we will talk about the basic lexicon of Albanian school age children and the corpus to be used for that. Very important is the way of presenting, explaining, and illustrating the lemmas with specific clauses and phrases for proper paradigms. Furthermore, a dictionary of this kind needs special grammatical information appropriate to the school and cognitive needs of the target group. Also, this dictionary should unify and improve lexical and grammatical criteria followed in previous Albanian dictionaries, especially with regard to functional words such as prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions or particles, which are often unclear not only to a child, but for an adult as well. Another special feature of this age group is the need for colourful illustrations, with photos and drawings that represent the meaning of the lemmas, especially the meanings that refer to concrete objects in the real world. Of course, such a dictionary is certainly contemporary and comparable with dictionaries of the same type that have already been published in languages with highly developed lexicography, such as English, French, and so on. Finally, we emphasize that a dictionary in standard Albanian for children of ages 6 to 15 would surely be very useful and a novelty for Albanian linguistics and Albanian teaching schools, for the entire community dealing with the education of children in Albanian language, as well as foreigners who wish to learn Albanian.
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The review of: Katarina Aladrović Slovaček. 2019. Od usvajanja do učenja hrvatskoga jezika. Zagreb: Alfa d. d. 220 str. ISBN: 978-953-364-149-2.
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The aim of the current article is to present the first results of an experiment conducted with 8 Estonian children and 4 young adults as a control group for testing the acquisition of an artificial morphological rule (AMR). Each participant was individually trained in 10 consecutive daily training sessions (1–4 days apart) and re-tested for retention after an interval of one month. The experiment was based on the experiment conducted by Sara Ferman and Avi Karni (2010, 2014) but was shortened and adopted for Estonian language. The AMR was designed to be analogous to the morphophonological rules of Estonian grammar and participants were supposed to add different verbal suffixes depending on the animacy of the subject. Training occurred through exposure to and use of the AMR in the performance of a judgment task wherein the participants were instructed to make a forced-choice (correct – incorrect) response. Both the number of correct answers and reaction time were measured. There was no explicit instruction on the nature of the AMR at any time during the training. As a result of the experiment, 6 of the 8 children acquired the rule by the third session, their performance reaching to the level of approximately 85% of correct answers, while 2 children did not acquire the rule (the answers of one child were random from the first until the last session, the second child just decided that one of the suffixes was correct in every sentence). The increase in the number of correct answers and decrease of reaction time demonstrated a similar pattern in children’s and young adults’ results. The adults’ performance was 10% superior to that of the children. The results show that children did not give more correct answers to verbs occurring with animate subjects, nor did they perform better with verbs having different morphophonological structure (grade alternation of the verb stem).
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The goal of this paper is to describe the first emergence and productive use of inflectional forms in the speech of three Estonian-speaking children and provide the order of the emergence of different inflectional categories. Spontaneous data from three children aged 1;3–5;8 have been used to determine which noun, verb and adjective categories emerge first and which morphophonological features of first exemplars (stems used first in different inflectional forms) play a role in the acquisition of Estonian. The first inflectional categories acquired by the children in question were in grammatical cases, the imperative and first person singular present tense forms. Concerning the productively used forms, it can be argued that the number of verb forms increases rapidly while the acquisition of noun forms is slower. Some case forms were even not registered in the speech material of the children. The children started to use comparative degrees of adjectives quite late compared to adjectival case forms. It seems that the children acquired the core of Estonian grammar at the same time. The further order of acquisition of inflectional forms was different in the speech of the three children in question. Still, the differences in the order of emergence of forms can be caused by the different frequency of some forms: if the inflectional form is infrequent also in the speech of adults it can just be that the form is not present in recordings but the child could still use it; therefore, evidence of the order of emergence of infrequent forms can be quite occasional in the data presented here. The first exemplars with distinguishable morphophonological features could be detected only in the case of nouns. The first nouns used for early case forms could be divided into two prototypical morphophonological class: nouns with monosyllabic strong grade stem in the nominative and disyllabic nouns without grade alternation. Clear-cut morphophonological distinctions could not be identified in case of verbs and adjectives.
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This paper considers the early and later stages of the acquisition of epistemic modality, focusing on certainty and uncertainty, and such basic forms of their expression as parenthetical modal words (e.g. navernoe ‘probably’, možet byt’ ‘maybe’, konečno ‘of course’, dejstvitel’no ‘really’), along with sentential complement constructions (e.g. I dumaju/sčitaju, (čto) p ‘I think/believe (that) p’), which are closely connected in semantics and functions. Epistemic and – more broadly – subjective (modus) markers are interpreted as linguistic tools, conveying the propositional attitudes and feelings of the speaker/writer to a given state of affairs. Sequences in the development of epistemic repertoire, the epistemic density of spoken speech and the written texts of Russian children and adolescents, as well as the functions performed by epistemic markers, both at utterance level and text level, are discussed.
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Language, literature and culture are interdependent and their contributions to the teaching and learning of a second language are immense. The study aims at examining the purviews of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach to teach language skills and culture. As CLIL has a dual focused learning approach, it seeks to examine the various possibilities of using the folk narratives of Poireiton Khunthok as the main teaching material to integrate the teaching of English language skills and culture. Poireiton Khunthok is a folktale of Manipur, a state in India which describes the long journey of Poireiton’s migration and settlement from the netherworld Burmese side to Manipur. The study was conducted with the students of one of the schools of Manipur. The testing of the language skills was conducted with the student participants using the pre-test and post-test method. In the pre-test method, a conventional prose prescribed by the Board of Secondary Education Manipur was used. In the post-test method, the folk narrative of Poireiton Khunthok adopting the CLIL approach was used. The study indicated that the CLIL approach using the indigenous material assisted in developing the English language skills as well as understanding culture.
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Assuming that the acquisition of a foreign language, in our case French, is much faster and easier when an effective methodology and adapted to the learning style of the students adds dynamic learning activities and fun, I proposed this new approach whose learning activities are realized through the theatre. By interpreting the action and the characters the students realized the issues of communication. The overcoming of the language blockages, the self-control that they demonstrated during the year and at the time of the evaluation, as well as the best results obtained at the final evaluation, allowed us to conclude that their oral communication skills and written have clearly improved. On a personal level, this active and responsive learning approach has stimulated their creativity and imagination. Regarding social relations, we have seen the creation of true solidarity and strong cohesion within the group.
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Telecollaboration projects between higher education institutions have been focusing mainly on the development of L2, intercultural and digital skills of the learner [Dooly & O’Dowd 2012]. In spite of the increasing number of studies investigating this type of projects, there is still little research on telecollaborative practices that connect L2 Spanish learners with student teachers with a double focus on (1) how reciprocity between learners with different learning goals is met, and (2) what success factors guarantee the sustainability of the exchange over time. This article presents the RUG-UB telecollaboration project that was implemented over 4 academic years (2013–2017) in the University of Groningen and the University of Barcelona, and which laid the foundations for another telecollaboration project that continues to be developed between the University of Barcelona and the University of Iceland at the time of writing this article. After describing the academic context and task design, the results of the experience are presented and analyzed. Finally, the factors that have contributed to the consolidation of this project are discussed, such as the design of tasks which address the reciprocity between learners with different learning objectives, or the ability of students, teachers or institutions to adapt to change.
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In this work we collected the results of a study based on L2 Spanish writing tasks [Manchón 2016]. The analyzed corpus is based on letters written by Russian teenagers who study Spanish as a foreign language and native Spanish teenagers. In order to analyze the written texts of native and non-native speakers, syntactic and lexical complexity are established [Bulté & Housen 2012], as well as an accuracy rate [Polio 1997; Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998]. These measurements have been commonly used in second language acquisition studies [Mavrou 2016], and this allows us to discuss the results and to relate them to previous data obtained in similar studies. In addition, contextual adequacy will be measured taking into account communicative intention. Based on the obtained results, we will give some didactic recommendations for teaching writing skills to teenage students in formal education contexts.
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Bilingual and monolingual learner’s dictionaries provide information on the vocabulary a foreign language (FL) student should learn. Moreover, they specify grammatical information related to peculiar words, especially verbs. These dictionaries present, specifically, the syntactic contents in a more explicit way by means of construction indications and in a more implicit way by means of examples, or both. Starting from the English learner’s dictionaries, it is shown what lexicographical solutions the dictionaries analyzed in this paper adopt to transmit the syntactic information to the user. This description can be doubly useful: to teach the FL learner how to find syntactic information in dictionaries (something not everyone is able of ) and to prepare new lexicographical works with more explicit indications.
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Bezprecedensowe tempo zmian we współczesnym świecie i wymagania, które stawia nauczycielom nowoczesna szkoła, z jednej strony w sposób znaczący wpływają na dydaktykę języków obcych, z drugiej zaś na przygotowanie nauczycieli języków obcych do zawodu. W chwili obecnej glottodydaktyka wkroczyła w fazę post-metodyczną, w nauczaniu/uczeniu się języków podkreśla się perspektywę ekologizmu, a w kształceniu nauczycieli kładzie się nacisk na rozwój autonomii, samodzielności w generowaniu wiedzy i zdobywaniu nowych umiejętności oraz otwartości na zmienność i dynamikę rzeczywistości. W niniejszym artykule pragniemy wyjaśnić sedno tej reorientacji i zarysować główne zasady, z których owe przekształcenia wynikają. Opisując krótko post-metodyczny model Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006b), kreślimy ramy post-nowoczesnej glottodydaktyki. Wskazujemy jednocześnie, jak zmienność i nieprzewidywalność współczesnego świata przesądza o tym, że nauczyciel języka obcego, właściwie przygotowany do wykonywania swego zawodu, to przede wszystkim osoba otwarta, gotowa do uczenia się przez całe życie i do budowania teorii na podstawie praktyki, a równocześnie wykorzystująca praktykę by teorię umiejętnie modyfikować. To kreatywny profesjonalista nastawiony na rozpoznawanie i rozwiązywanie problemów. // The unprecedented speed of change in the world today and the demands that modern school places on the teacher, on the one hand, affect foreign/second language didactics, and on the other, influence language teacher programmes. In the 21st century L2 didactics appears to have entered a post-method era education, informed by language ecologism, and marked by emphasis on teacher autonomy. The teacher is no longer supposed to be primarily the knower; instead he or she must be an individual capable of generating new knowledge and developing skills necessary to deal with the unpredictable and changeable reality. The paper attempts to elucidate the nature of these new tendencies and presents the major principles of L2 teaching and learning that follow from them. Kumaravidelu’s (2003, 2006b) post-method model is focused on as the epitome of post-modern L2 instruction. It is argued that it lays foundation for open-ended teacher education, the major goal of which is to create in future language teachers the attitudes and abilities indispensable to a self-exploring and self-directed practitioner.
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The present mixed-method study examined the focus and effects of peer and machine feedback on the revisions of English argumentative essays. The study collected data from 127 Chinese university EFL learners, which included Draft 1, peer feedback (PF), PF-based Draft 2, machine feedback (MF), MF-based Draft 2, questionnaires, and interview recordings. The main findings were: (a) peer feedback was primarily concerned with content errors while machine feedback mainly involved language errors, (b) significant differences occurred in most types of errors between Draft 1, PF and PF-based Draft 2, and between Draft 1, MF, and MF-based Draft 2, (c) the uptake of ‘introducing a new topic in Conclusion’ was a powerful predictor of PF-based Draft 2 scores, and (d) the participants generally moderately considered peer and machine feedback to be useful. Based on the findings, some implications are discussed on how to better implement and enhance the quality of peer and machine feedback.
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The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the research on code-switching in CLIL, including the use of mother tongue vs. target language by CLIL teachers, as well as teacher perception of CLIL learners’ language use and language problems, attention being given to spoken and written discourse difficulties and ways of overcoming them. The study was conducted among 29 Secondary School CLIL teachers teaching geography, biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, or history in English, and was based on a questionnaire especially prepared for this study. The main aim of the study was to investigate the situations of switching the codes and reasons for particular linguistic behaviours in CLIL classrooms, especially through the prism of teacher and learner code-switching functions, and find out both positive and negative aspects of this phenomenon.
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The present study investigates the comprehension and production of Spanish as a third or additional language (De Angelis’s (2007) term), paying special attention to the use of code-switching and translanguaging. Following Lewis, Jones, and Baker (2012, p. 655), it is assumed that translanguaging involves the mobilisation of all of learners’ linguistic resources “to maximise understanding and achievement,” so the learners’ use of languages other than Spanish (especially English, but also e.g. French, Italian, etc.) in the tasks could be assumed to be an example of translanguaging too. Simultaneously, the use of words from languages other than Spanish for lack of a Spanish word could be argued to be more precisely classified as code-switching. Multilingual repertoires are highly complex and, according to Otheguy, García, and Reid (2018), multilingual competence is unitary rather than divided into several distinct languages, so, in their view, words are selected from a single lexicon. However, as shown by Williams and Hammarberg (1998), the different languages in multilingual repertoires perform various functions, which gives rise to different types of switches. The study was carried out with English Philology and Romance Philology students studying Spanish as a third or additional language. As the results show, even though the Romance Philology students were generally more skilled at translanguaging, viewed as the use of all their linguistic resources, they avoided switches into other Romance languages, probably to minimize interference. By contrast, the English Philology students, who had lower proficiency in Spanish, were less capable of using their multilingual resources, including English, to provide the missing words, possibly also due to problems with the comprehension of the Spanish sentences.
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A learner corpus is a computerized textual database of the language produced by foreign language learners. Such corpus enables researchers to create more efficient learning materials and teaching methodology for language learners by using the corpus-driven error analysis. The learner’s corpus, like other language corpora, can be annotated at different language levels (morphologically, syntactically); however, corpus-based error annotation and the corpus-based error analysis are especially important in the learner’s language research. Error analysis is influenced by certain factors: 1) the error types setup or error typology; and 2) target hypothesis setup, e. g., corrected text. Therefore, it is crucial to have special guidelines indicating the subject of annotation and the methods how the annotation is performed. The article begins with description of “The Latvian Learner corpus” (LaVA) and its initial development strategies, the term of target hypothesis and its role in the creation of the learner corpus. The main target hypothesis setup criteria in the LaVa corpus is also provided with the examples showing how the language learners’ utterances are being corrected according to the language norms, and the main deviations from the rules allowed. This work has received financial support from the Latvian Council of Science under the grant agreement No. lzp-2018/1-0527 (“Development of Learner Corpus of Latvian: methods, tools and applications”) in synergy with the Latvian State Research Programme “Latvian Language”, agreement No. VPP-IZM-2018/2-0002 (subproject “Acquisition of Latvian Language”).
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In today's world, when the global movement occurs, there are more and more mixed families interacting in two or more languages. Children born in such families have the opportunity to learn the mother tongues of both parents and become bilingual or multilingual. Whether this can work often depends on the family language policy. The latter is often influenced by a variety of factors, therefore its success depends not only on internal choices, but also partly on external factors. This article provides an overview of research by various authors, which present family language policy strategies. The aim of the study is to find the factors that determine the choice of those strategies and their success. The study revealed that family language policies are influenced both by the family's internal choices, for example, the desire that the children would know the language of one parent or both parents, that they would talk to relatives, would know parents' culture through language, and by external factors, such as the norms of the society in which they live, integration processes or the conditions for learning the language. A key element in determining the success of family language policy is the consistent adherence to one or more of the strategies chosen.
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In order to transition from a monolingual foreign language course to a multilingual one, all the elements that are connected to students’ cognition should be taken into consideration in order to facilitate this shift. Working with classes of French as a Foreign Language involving 11–12 years old Greek students, our study revealed that by switching to multilingual teaching, students’ representations of language(s) start to emerge; these representations had in most cases been hidden, incoherent and fossilized in teaching monolingual classes. While considering metalinguistic awareness, a variable that is central to our research, as a prerequisite for resolving problems emerging in a multilingual educational context, this article seeks to show that the representations language learners make of themselves and their learning constitute metalinguistic reflection at a macro level, which may influence how metalinguistic awareness functions when performing multilingual tasks. This paper focuses on the processing of qualitative data: meta-discourse analysis of the learners participating in our study led us to establish a typology of representations that enabled us to highlight what aspects to focus on in the classroom so as to prepare students to reflect on language more intensively. This involved guiding learners towards modifying their representational framework, by addressing deficiencies and correcting their representations characterized as "unproductive", in order to take full advantage of multilingual teaching/learning situations.
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This article reports findings from an investigation into migrant and nonmigrant origin pre-service teachers’ beliefs about multilingualism and the relationship between their linguistic trajectories as students and how they perceive themselves as future teachers. We analize the beliefs of around seventy pre-service teachers taking part in a university course, collected through an individual reflection tool based on a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and a group discussion in which students had to discuss their ideas and create a collective document. In this article we focus on the discourse of four pre-service teachers, two of whom had migration backgrounds and two of whom who did not. Findings suggest that pre-service teachers’ life and learning experiences contribute to different emotions and feeling about language and teaching in a multilingual setting. They also influence the perception the pre-service teachers have of themselves as future teachers. Pre-service teachers regard the preparation received at the university negatively and express insecurities. Findings illustrate that migrant origin pre-service teachers feel more prepared in the sense they believe that their migration experience can help to understand newcoming students and be empathic with them.
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This article discusses a small-scale research project that investigated how students learn and use English outside the classroom. It was conducted during the 2019–2020 academic year and completed by administering a questionnaire to 47 students enrolled in the B2-level English language course offered at Vytautas Magnus University in the fall semester of 2019. The data were collected through an online survey. The participants were asked to choose the ways which helped them to learn English outside of the classroom and to comment on them based on how useful they were in terms of learning English. The students were also asked to indicate the frequency of such out-of-classroom (OOC) activities, in other words, how often they engage in the chosen OOCs. The results showed that most of the activities that the research participants engaged in outside the classroom were related to popular culture and their free time activities that were fun and entertaining rather than consciously chosen activities with the purpose of learning English. These activities helped to expand vocabulary and listening, but they did not help to practice speaking and writing (productive skills).
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