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Investigating the learning of pragmatics across ages and contexts
\"A timely contribution to the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The nine chapters presented here expand the scope of research to date by including different contexts (i.e., formal instruction, stay-abroad, and online) and age groups which have received less attention (for example, young learners and adolescents). Whereas the speech act of requesting is the one that has been most explored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, as attested by several chapters in the present volume, disagreements and directives are also tackled. This book embraces research addressing both elicited and naturally-occurring data in studies which deal with pragmatic use, development, and awareness\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A simple view of linguistic complexity
Although a growing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies take linguistic complexity as a dependent variable, the term is still poorly defined and often used with different meanings, thus posing serious problems for research synthesis and knowledge accumulation. This article proposes a simple, coherent view of the construct, which is defined in a purely structural way, i.e. the complexity directly arising from the number of linguistic elements and their interrelationships. Issues of cognitive cost (difficulty) or developmental dynamics (acquisition) are explicitly excluded from this theoretical definition and its operationalization. The article discusses how the complexity of an interlanguage system can be assessed based on the limited samples with which SLA researchers usually work. For the areas of morphology, syntax and the lexicon, some measures are proposed that are coherent with the purely structural view advocated, and issues related to their operationalization are critically scrutinized.
Journal Article
Morphological complexity in written L2 texts
Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels. The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers’ proficiency and the specific language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional diversity remains constant.
Journal Article
Prosody Trumps Orthography in Second Language Phonology: The Case of Consonant Gemination
This paper examines the understudied phenomenon of consonant gemination in the pronunciation of English among Levantine Arabic learners of English (LA learners). The very few studies that touched on gemination among LA learners attributed gemination to spelling in the target language (English). This study challenges this analysis and demonstrates that gemination is primarily a phonological phenomenon that is triggered by first language under-represented structural rules as well as Universal Grammar (UG) markedness principles. Data were elicited through semi-structured interviews with three groups of LA learners. Contrary to previous studies (on other phonological aspects), which argue that interference errors decrease over time, findings show that gemination is attested across all groups of LA learners and persists even among advanced learners. Results show that interface phenomena involving more than one phonological level pose a great challenge to second language learners.
Journal Article
The phraseological dimension in interlanguage complexity research
This article reports on the first results of a large-scale research programme that aims to define and circumscribe the construct of phraseological complexity and to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its relevance for second language theory. Within this broad agenda, the study has two main objectives. First, it investigates to what extent measures of phraseological complexity can be used to describe second language (L2) performance at different proficiency levels. Second, it compares measures of phraseological complexity with traditional measures of syntactic and lexical complexity. Variety and sophistication are postulated to be the first two dimensions of phraseological complexity, which is approached via relational co-occurrences, i.e. co-occurring words that appear in a specific structural or syntactic relation (e.g. adjective + noun, adverbial modifier + verb, verb + direct object). Phraseological diversity is operationalized as root type–token ratio computed for each syntactic relation. Two methods are tested to approach phraseological sophistication. First, sophisticated word combinations are defined as academic collocations that appear in the Academic Collocation List (Ackermann and Chen, 2013). Second, it is approximated with the average pointwise mutual information score as this measures has been shown to bring out word combinations made up of closely associated medium to low-frequency (i.e. advanced or sophisticated) words.
The study reveals that unlike traditional measures of syntactic and lexical complexity, measures of phraseological sophistication can be used to describe L2 performance at the B2, C1 and C2 levels of the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR), thus suggesting that essential aspects of language development from upper-intermediate to very advanced proficiency level may be situated in the phraseological dimension.
Journal Article
AI Language Models: An Opportunity to Enhance Language Learning
AI language models are increasingly transforming language research in various ways. How can language educators and researchers respond to the challenge posed by these AI models? Specifically, how can we embrace this technology to inform and enhance second language learning and teaching? In order to quantitatively characterize and index second language writing, the current work proposes the use of similarities derived from contextualized meaning representations in AI language models. The computational analysis in this work is hypothesis-driven. The current work predicts how similarities should be distributed in a second language learning setting. The results suggest that similarity metrics are informative of writing proficiency assessment and interlanguage development. Statistically significant effects were found across multiple AI models. Most of the metrics could distinguish language learners’ proficiency levels. Significant correlations were also found between similarity metrics and learners’ writing test scores provided by human experts in the domain. However, not all such effects were strong or interpretable. Several results could not be consistently explained under the proposed second language learning hypotheses. Overall, the current investigation indicates that with careful configuration and systematic metrics design, AI language models can be promising tools in advancing language education.
Journal Article