Teaching English Language
Volume:1 Issue: 4, Autumn 2007

This study reports on an investigation of reliability, different aspects of validity, and discrimination power of the C-Test as a measure of overall language ability. A C-Test developed by the researcher and a Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (MTELP) were administered concurrently to 144 university students.The reliabilty coefficients found for the C-Test were high. The C-Test also proved to have acceptable content relevance and fairly high criterion-related validity. Results of two factor analyses confirmed that the C-Test texts measure, to a large extent, the same underlying trait as the MTELP –significant evidence of construct validity for the C-Test. However, the CTest texts did not prove to behave consistently with examinees of different proficiency levels. Also it came out that the C-Test could not consistently classify the subjects in their appropriate proficiency levels. This finding was further affirmed by an ANOVA whose results demonstrated that the C-Test had difficulty discriminating between participants of lower and upper intermediate levels.

This paper provides a cross-sectional study of the fossilized endstate L2 English grammar of freshmen and junior university students of English. Results are presented from spontaneous production and grammaticality judgment tasks of two groups of the students, high-level (24) and low-level (19), concentrating on use of 3rd person simple present marker (-s), past tens marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment. Data showed that despite low rate of suppliance of 3rd person simple present tense marker (-s) just in spontaneous task, student's suppliance of past tense marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment is about perfect at both levels and tasks. Syntactic correlates (such as case assignment and presence of overt subject) were completely accurate, suggesting no underlying impairment to functional categories or features. There is some evidence from the L1, which has the person and number features of the subject marked by verbal agreement but usually lacks the third person singular in production task.

The issue of cross-linguistic influence in non-primary language learning has long been an important topic. Studies conducted in this area suggest that a form of L1 or L2 transfer is evident in the language produced by third language learners (Cenoz 2001; Leung 2003; White 2003, among many others). On the nature of this transfer; however, there seems to be no consensus. Whether the acquisition of syntactic structures is a matter of mere parameter setting from a minus value in one language to a plus value in another or a rather painstaking process of reassembling the relevant features from the way they are conditioned and realized in the L1 to that of the L2 or L3 is not yet revealed. While, Hawkins (2003) supports a "Representational Deficit Hypothesis" (RDH) whereby interlanguage grammars are confined to L1 feature values and hence any problem in L2 or L3 initial state is attributed to problems in resetting syntactic features of L1, Lardier (1999, 2000, 2003) argues for a Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) in mapping lexical entries onto overt phonological forms. Still there is a third argument which claims that the entire L1 grammar (in the sense of all abstract properties) constitute the initial state in L2 acquisition. Based on this stance, Schwartz & Sprouse (1994, 1996) argue that changes to the initial grammar can take place to the effect that the L2 learners are not confined to representations based on L1 steady state. Finally, Hawkins proposes a moderate modulated structure building Hypothesis (MSBH) which claims for an incremental leaning mechanism for L2 and L3. Inspired by the given issue, the present study attempts to see what effects the interaction of Kurdish and Persian have on Kurdish EFL students’ acquisition of syntactic and morphological properties of tense and passive structures in English. To this end, 120 Persian monolingual and Kurdish-Persian bilingual EFL Learners took part in this study. They were assigned to three proficiency bands (after taking a general proficiency test, OPT) and received a grammaticality Judgment and a contextualized functional production tasks. The results showed no significant difference between the performance of monolinguals and bilinguals at each level of proficiency beyond the initial state. Nonetheless, significant differences were found across the levels of proficiency. The findings, interpreted in terms of the viewpoints of the current generative models of L2A, revealed a dominant role for L1 settings in L3 interlanguage grammar especially at the initial state and were more in line with the claims of MSBH.

For the past several decades, research on L1 and L2 composition has emphasized the importance of the role of composition teachers in providing feedback on student's writings. This article reports on the use of providing different modes of feedback–written/oral–by the teacher and their impacts on Iranian EFL students’ writing performances.Sixty Iranian university students–10 males and 50 females, aged between 22 and 25 majoring in English Translation–were assigned to three homogeneous groups based on their scores on the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and a sample paragraph on a given topic, emphasizing the expository genre by providing some reasons. They covered five topics in a sequence of ten written texts–before and after receiving feedback–over a 15-week period. Then, the researchers scored the papers analytically. The results revealed that: first; feedback had a significant effect on students’ revising their first drafts and second, the students benefited from the two types of teacher-provided feedbacks almost equally. The findings also confirmed student-teacher conferences as an effective means of providing comments on student's writings, which in turn, could be employed to improve interaction and socialization among students and contribute to enhanced attitudes towards learning and working with others especially in EFL settings.

A linguistic analysis of 2 to 7 years old children’s naturally produced utterances was conducted to examine the development of different syntactic structures. The results showed that children use certain structures very infrequently and certain other structures are missing in their production. For example, there was no instance of passives in this corpus which included 894 utterances. Relative clauses were used with a very low frequency across all age groups. Reflexive pronouns were produced markedly less frequently than pronouns. At the early stages of language acquisition, the two values of the pro-drop parameter were used interchangeably. But with older children, the use of the pro-drop parameter with a positive value was more frequent. As for the interrogatives, the youngest children used intonation for making questions more frequently than the other age groups. And the most difficult wh-question structure for them was using the wh-word in initial position. Each of these findings has been discussed in the framework of the related theories and contrasts with the findings in the literature have been reviewed.

This article is an attempt to address a major issue which is widely neglected in the area of pedagogical studies. Unfortunately, the mere focus of educational researches has been on the issue of teaching foreign languages. It is wrongly presumed that any person who is an expert on a subject – including literature – can be automatically considered as a teacher in that field. Here, the focus is on the major contemporary developments in the field of teaching poetry and the introduction of a number of practical strategies as resource ideas for the teachers of English poetry. The importance and impact of reader-oriented theories on teaching methods is an instrumental factor and is the major concern of this article. Therefore, the article creates a balance between the theoretical issues in the field with practical advice – in the form of strategies inspired by reader-oriented theories – for the teachers of English poetry.

According to Hans Robert Jauss, reception history plays an important role in determining the aesthetic value of literary texts. In his famous essay “Literary History as a challenge to Literary Theory”, Jauss provides seven theses through which he clarifies how history plays an important role in reception theory and proposes objective methods through which the aesthetic value of texts can be determined. This paper seeks to apply these theses to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by considering how the work was received as part of eighteenth century history and literature and how the horizons of expectations changed among later nineteenth and twentieth century readers. In general terms, what constitutes criticism and readings of Swift’s contemporary readers is a result of their focus on the role of the author and the equality of narrator with author. However, more interest in the text itself as a work of art develops in later periods.