APPLIED RESEARCH ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Year:2014 | Volume:3 | Issue:1 (5)|Papers Count:7

Most vocabulary learning should occur incidentally through listening and reading. This is one of the reasons why a substantial extensive reading program is an important part of an English course. Extensive reading requires the learners to do large quantities of reading using material that is at the right level for them. Vocabulary learning occurs through the conditions of repetition, retrieval, creative use, and deliberate attention. These conditions can be maximized when reading through the use of narrow reading, repeated reading, linked skills reading, reading with discussion, and deliberate learning through reading with exercises. Computer-based activities can be effective in providing opportunities for deliberate learning, but it is important that deliberate learning does not take time away from extensive reading.

This study examined how motivation for learning English, the amount of contact with English, and length of residence in thetarget language area affects Korean graduate students’ English pragmatic skills. The study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50 graduate-level Korean students in relation to individual factors mentioned above. The data were collected using three types of elicitation instruments: a written background questionnaire, a discourse completion test, and the mini-Attitude/Motivation Test Battery. Descriptive and inferential statistics (correlation coefficients, and multiple regressions) were used to analyze the data. The findings of the study revealed that (a) the level of motivation had a positive and moderate relationship with the ESL learners’ L2 pragmatic competence; and (b) the amount of L2 contact and length of residence had only a weak and insignificant impact on the participants’pragmatic competence.

Task repetition is now considered as an important task-based implementation variable which can affect complexity, accuracy, and fluency of L2 speech. However, in order to move towards theorizing the role of task repetition in second language acquisition, it is necessary that individual variables be taken into account. The present study aimed to investigate the way task repetition correlates with language proficiency and the differential effects that task repetition might have on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of L2 learners with different levels of proficiency. Fifty language learners of different levels of proficiency, selected from two different language centers, participated in this study. They were asked to perform an oral narrative task twice with a one-week interval. Results revealed that, compared to the participants with lower L2 proficiency, participants with higher levels of L2 proficiency produced more complex, accurate, and fluent speech on the second encounter with the same task.

Designing a task with a reasonable level of cognitive complexity has always been important for syllabus designers, teachers, as well as researchers. This is because task manipulation may lead to different results in oral production. The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of this manipulation - based onRobinson’s resource-directing model (reasoning demands, number of elements, and here and now versus there and then condition) - on picture narration.The study included 30 Iranian EFL learners at the intermediate level between the ages of 21 and 34. They were all native speakers of Persian. Each participant was required to perform the simple version as well as the complex version of the same picture narration task. The participants’ speechwasaudio-recorded and the results revealed that an increase in task cognitive complexity leads to greater accuracy and linguistic complexity.

This study, situated in an EFL context, aimed at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities influence vocabulary knowledge gain and retrieval. Seventy five elementary learners of English were randomly assigned to three groups of ‘free reading’, ‘reading comprehension’ and ‘reading to summarize’. A modified text was administered to all the three groups. The data in both immediate and delayed post-test revealed that both vocabulary learning and retention were greatly influenced by the purposeful reading activity. The Scheffe post-hoc test revealed that the mean scores of the ‘summarizing’ and ‘reading comprehension’ groups were significantly different from the mean score of the ‘free reading’ group. But the results did not indicate any significant differences between the mean scores of the two groups of ‘summarizing’ and ‘reading comprehension’. However the strength of association for the immediate post-test and the delayed one showed that a large part of the variance between the three groups could be explained by the reading purpose.

Recent research in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has substantiated that some aspects of pragmatics are amenable to instruction in the second or foreign language classroom. However, there are still controversies over the most conducive teaching approaches and the required materials. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of consciousnessraising video-driven prompts on the comprehension of the three speech acts of apology, request, and refusal on seventy eight (36 male and 42 female) upper-intermediate Persian learners of English who were randomly assigned to four groups (metapragmatic, form-search, role play, and control). The four groups were exposed to 45 video vignettes (15 for each speech act) extracted from different episodes of Flash Forward, Stargate TV Series and Annie Hall Film for nine 60-minute sessions of instruction twice a week. Results of the multiple choice discourse completion test (MDCT) indicated that learners’ awareness of apologies, requests and refusals benefit from all three types of instruction, but the results of the Post hoc test of Tukey (HSD) illustrated that the metapragmatic group outperformed the other treatment groups, and that form-search group had a better performance than role-play and control groups.

The current study investigated the expression of disagreement by Iranian advanced English learners. The data for the study comprised the recorded discussions of 26 male and female interlocutors in three different settings: 1) language institute, 2) home environment, and 3) university setting. Analysis of the arguments pointed to the influence of contextual factors.More precisely, disagreements were found to be complex and multidirectional speech acts and thus various factors, including the interlocutors’ power, relationships, background, and the situational context, influence their realization as face-threatening or face-enhancing speech acts.Therefore, the linguistic markers cannot safely categorize disagreement turns into polite/impolite or preferred/dispreferred acts.