In line with the directions of the Council of Europe on the teaching of foreign languages to young learners and in view of recent waves of immigration in Europe, special emphasis is nowadays being ...placed on plurilingual and pluricultural practices in the school system. This paper describes the change towards embracing plurilingualism in a primary school in Barcelona (Spain) to try to cater for the students' home languages and for cultural diversity in the EFL classroom. Results show that both the cohesion between the school and the families, and respect for and understanding of diversity were favoured, and that the level of competence in English at the end of primary education in this school was higher than the average of schools in the same context.
The aim of the study is to investigate trends in academic L1 Swedish and L2 English reading comprehension ability among Swedish adolescents, with a specific focus on 18- to 20-year-olds in the period ...2012-2018. The material consists of results from regular tests and anchor tests in the spring administrations of the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test (SweSAT) 2012-2018, allowing an analysis of trends in reading comprehension ability among a subset of the adolescent population. The results show two highly significant but opposite trends, with a substantial decrease in academic Swedish reading comprehension and an equally substantial increase in academic English reading comprehension. The results are discussed from the perspective of a changing media landscape, and related to results of the PISA-studies as well as to research on extramural English in Swedish society.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Contrasted with the more typical English bare noun forms of mass and proper nouns, bare singular count nouns comprise a problematic set for many descriptive grammars and thus for many second language ...learners. Although article usage is one of the trickiest areas of English as a Second Language (ESL) to master, bare noun phrases, and bare singulars in particular, are less emphasized in the English language classroom, where much of the focus is placed on learning to produce articles, not learning to exclude them. To investigate L2 sensitivity to bare singular forms, the distribution of bare and articulated NPs in corpus data is contrasted, nouns appearing most often without articles are tracked, and a survey of L2 grammaticality judgments by adult learners is gathered. Lastly, the combined results of the corpus and survey data are integrated into a lesson on the syntax and pragmatics of bare singular count nouns that is designed for the ESL classroom.
Recent literature on language teaching has questioned the established view that a language is most effectively taught monolingually, arguing instead that the student's own language has an important ...role to play, and this view is now widely accepted. While this literature draws attention to the extremism of some monolingual approaches, and advocates a judicious use of the own language, it often neglects the many educational contexts in which a very high proportion of teaching is conducted in the students' own language. This article addresses this issue and adds to the growing literature on classroom own-language use and its pedagogic functions by examining an instance of such large-quantity use of the own language in an 'intensive reading' tertiary English-language course in China. Through analysis of lesson transcripts and interviews with participants, it documents the uses and functions of Chinese, and teacher and student attitudes to it. It also discusses speculatively how the large-scale use of Chinese relates to the aims of the Chinese curriculum, western influences, the textbooks, and teaching style: all matters which merit further research.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper aims to understand and critically analyses the various underlying theoretical constructs to evolve a critical pedagogy of English in Indian classrooms language leaning is not an isolated ...process, it is an amalgation of multiple voices and multiple identities. These voices and identities are quite different from the ‘cultural values’ imbibed and inculcated through English. So critically pedagogy builds a bridge between L1 (Language 1 or Mother Tongue) and L2 (English) by giving space to multiple voices and multiple identities and transforming language learning into an agent of social change.
I denne studien undersøker vi intonasjonstrekk ved to av språkene til ti flerspråklige kongolesere i Norge. Språkene vi ser på, er norsk og fransk, begge språk talerne har lært etter å ha lært andre ...språk. Vi har analysert tre intonasjonsvariabler i et korpus med spontan tale på begge språk: gjennomsnittlig grunntonehøyde, grunntonevariasjon og ytringsdeklinasjon. Analysene viser 1) svært sterk idiolektal konsistens mellom fransk og norsk når det gjelder gjennomsnittlig grunntonehøyde, men grunntonen er generelt litt høyere i de norske ytringene, 2) svært sterk idiolektal konsistens mellom fransk og norsk når det gjelder variasjon i grunntonehøyde, og det er ingen systematiske forskjeller i variasjonen mellom de to språkene, 3) og 9 av 10 talere bruker deklinasjon i noen ytringer i både fransk og norsk, og det er ingen systematiske forskjeller i antall ytringer med deklinasjon mellom de to språkene. Disse funnene tyder på at disse trekkene ved den fonetiske implementeringen av ytringsintonasjon er konsistent i en og samme idiolekt og ikke språk-spesifikk.
PDF
