Teaching English as a Second Language Quarterly
Volume:4 Issue: 4, Winter 2012

This empirical study reports on a cross-linguistic analysis of the overarching issue of L1 lexicalization regarding two (non)-interventionist approaches to vocabulary teaching. Participants were seventy four juniors at the Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch in Tehran. The investigation pursued (i) the impact of the provided (non)-interventionist treatments on both sets of (non)-lexicalized items relatrd to the interrelationships between the experimental and the control groups (ii) the importance of the cross-linguistic issue of L1 lexicalization in reference to the significance of the difference between the scores obtained for the two sets of (non)-lexicalized items within each group distinctively. The results of the independent t-test between the two groups indicated a significant difference between the experimental and control groups dealing with both sets of vocabulary items. The obtained findings related to the paired t-test demonstrated a significant difference between the scores achieved for the two sets of words in favor of lexicalized items in the interventionist group. The gained results of the non-interventionist inferencing group demonstrated that the learners had greater familiarity with lexicalized items at pre-testing, and they were more successful in learning lexicalized items compared with non-lexicalized ones at post-testing. However, no significant difference was found regarding the gain scores for the two sets of (non)-lexicalized items in the non-interventionist group. These findings are discussed both theoretically and practically for L2 lexical representation and instruction.

This research explores the effects of three computer-mediated feedback modalities, that is, elicitation, recast, and meta-linguistics, on the learning of English participial, gerund, and infinitival phrases among Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners. The overriding focus of the present study was to investigate whether different types of feedback given through form-focused computer-human exchanges would produce varying immediate and long-term effects on the participants’ incorporation of linguistic forms. To this end, 160 participants were randomly assigned to three equivalent experimental groups. One group then received treatment on the three types of phrases through a tutorial system and multimedia grammar exercises where they received elicitation on the errors they made. The second and the third groups likewise received treatment on the same types of phrases through the same tutorial system, but received either recast or meta-linguistic feedback on their errors. The groups then sat for an immediate and a delayed post-test of grammar two weeks after the experiment. The experiment revealed that meta-linguistic feedback yielded the strongest immediate and sustained effects as compared with those of elicitation and recast. Likewise, while recast produced stronger immediate effects on learning as compared to those of elicitation, its sustained effects were much smaller than those of elicitation and meta-linguistic feedback.

Collocations are one of the areas generally considered problematic for EFL learners. Iranian learners of English like other EFL learners face various problems in producing oral collocations. An analysis of learner's spoken interlanguage both indicates the scope of the problem and the necessity to spend more time and energy by learners on mastering collocations. The present study specifically focuses on the use of different types of collocations in oral productions of 30 intermediate Iranian EFL learners with the aim of identifying, categorizing and accounting for the inappropriate collocations produced. The corpus analysis revealed that preposition-based collocations in general and verb-preposition collocations in particular are the most problematic types of collocation for Iranian learners of English. The results also indicated that negative transfer from L1 was responsible for a high proportion (56.7%) of collocational errors, while intra-lingual transfer accounted for only 30% of the incorrect collocations. Further findings of the study as well as implications for the teaching and learning of collocations are discussed in the paper.

This study examines the phonetic properties of lexical stress in English produced by Persian speakers learning English as a foreign language. The four most reliable phonetic correlates of English lexical stress, namely fundamental frequency, duration, intensity, and vowel quality were measured across Persian speakers’ production of the stressed and unstressed syllables of five English disyllabic stress pairs which differed only in the location of stress, such as contract (noun)/ contract (verb). Results showed that Persian speakers’ use of the prosodic cues to lexical stress, that is fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity was comparable to the use of the same cues by American English speakers for both the stressed and unstressed syllables. There were, however, significant differences in formant frequency patterns (as the phonetic correlates of vowel quality) across the two language groups, such that Persian speakers did not manage to approximate the target native-like productions of the majority of the vowels in the experimental data both in the stressed or unstressed conditions. This observation supports the proposal made by Flege and Bohn (1989), namely that L2 learners acquire L1 patterns of vowel reduction only after they have acquired English-like patterns of prosodic cues to stress (F0, duration and intensity), and that their inability to reduce vowels in unstressed syllables does not influence their ability to employ prosodic cues to lexical stress contrast. As will be discussed at the end, the results shall have implications for material developers and EFL teachers.

Critical Language Assessment (CLA) argues that language testing is a form of social practice and an agent of cultural, social, educational as well as ideological agendas. As such this article scrutinized the power that different groups of people including, teachers, students and their parents own at the levels of developing, administrating and interpreting Iranian University Entrance Examinations (IUEE). The study revealed that tests could be tools of power that serve the empowered parties’ policies and manipulate individual lives. Supported by the findings, the article (1) could be conducive to developing critical thinking among students to see behind the tests, and (2) suggests more democratic testing methods to moderate high-stakes tests consequences so that individual rights get protected.

Once severely rejected, first language (L1) use is no more considered to be inherently detrimental in foreign language pedagogy. Recent research within sociocultural framework has come up with numerous facilitative roles for L1 use (Anton and DiCamilla, 1999; Swain and Lapkin, 2000; Storch and Wigglesworth, 2003). Also, studies from humanistic perspectives that deal with the teachers’ and learners’ attitudes about L1 use report generally positive attitudes from both groups (Duff and Polio, 1990; Macaro, 2001). However, contrary to this bulk of theoretical and empirical support, there seems to have been an evident animosity towards L1 use in the Iranian private English language institutes. The present research was therefore designed to delve deeper into the apparent discrepancy between theory and practice in this regard by identifying some contextual constraints on the teachers’ language choice. After preliminary exploratory interviews and a small-scale pilot study to make sure of the reliability and validity of the instruments, two separate sets of questionnaires for young learners’ parents (243 participants) and teachers (31 participants) were designed and administered. The results of the analyses showed that both parents and teachers held significantly negative attitudes towards L1 use. The findings also indicated that parents reflect their negative attitudes to the institutes so as to hamper L1 use by talking directly to the teachers, threatening to change institutes in the case of dissatisfaction, and influencing the institute principals’ policies about L1 use.