Arizona State University, Department of English

Thanks to Dr. Johnson and Ferenc Bunta for organizing the exams this term.

Please note the announcement at the end of the schedule about our reception in honor of our students finishing in our three language-related programs. We hope many of you can join us.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Dawn Bates,

Members of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen, Barbara Lafford

Title: Syllable Based Influences on the Interlanguage Phonology of Korean ESL Learners

This study used data on syllable structure in the interlanguage of Korean ESL learners in order to understand their pronunciation problems and the influence of L1 syllable structure. Ten intermediate ESL learners, native speakers of Korean, participated in the present study by reading a word list for recording. The study examines their error rate and simplification strategies in the production of English codas of nine different types, including those containing voiceless stops, voiced stops, fricatives, nasals, liquids, fricative + stop, stop + fricative, nasal + stop, and liquid + stop.

The results showed that the subjects exhibited a high error rate in all coda types except fricative, nasal, and liquid. The employed simplification strategies were seven kinds, e.g., epenthesis, unreleasing, devoicing, substitution, final aspiration, deletion, palatal glide insertion. Among the strategies, epenthesis and unreleasing characterized the most errors. Moreover, the choice between the two strategies that the subjects used to deal with English codas turned out to be related to the tenseness of the preceding vowel. Issues of sonority distance between coda members are also examined.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Marysia Johnson

Members of the Committee: Karen Adams, Dawn Bates

Title: Teaching More than Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening: A Rationale for the Integration of Culture into an ESL Curriculum

Success in learning a second language may be attributed to a number of factors. A student's aptitude, a certain factor contributing to second language acquisition, may be positively or negatively affected by his/her attitude or level of motivation. Gardner and Lambert's research in the area of motivation and second language acquisition revealed that the affective factor of motivation impacts the language learning process. Gardner and Lambert further revealed that the learner's motivation for language study is determined by to a great degree by his/her attitude and readiness to identify with the new culture.

Because motivation is so heavily linked to attitude, it can be asserted that a person's attitude toward the target language, target culture, or towards the people of that culture will significantly influence the level of motivation. It follows then that the counter influence must be plausible--that a positive understanding and appreciation of the target language and culture will foster a positive attitude, and that this attitude will increase the person's motivation for learning.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Marysia Johnson

Members of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen, Charles Grove

Title: Testing Communicative Competence in Listening Comprehension

For linguists, the concept of language has evolved and altered over the course of the twentieth century. This paper reviews the history of theories of communicative competence with particular reference to the ideas of Dell Hymes, Michael Canale and Merrill Swain, and Lyle Bachman. Two major theoretical frameworks of communicative competence are discussed and related to the communicative approach to second language teaching and testing. The validity of the Test of English as a Foreign Language as a test of communicative competence is examined, and an original test of communicative competence in listening comprehension is presented and evaluated.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Marysia Johnson

Members of the Committee: Dawn Bates, Charles Grove

Title: Reading Assessment for Advanced Adult Education Students

The Phoenix Union Adult Education program serviced 6672 students with 337,188 instructional hours in the fiscal year of 1997. In the 1998 fiscal year PU joined with Rio Salado Adult Education. They expect to double the number of students enrolled in free English for speakers of other languages in community based classes. This merger has brought a new emphasis of transitioning adult education students from free classes into traditional community college credit classes. One of the skill areas that advisors have identified as necessary to make this transition is reading comprehension. Currently the community college uses the CELSA instrument to determine if an incoming nonnative speaker can enroll in credit or noncredit classes. This applied project will present an alternative in-class assessment instrument. It will begin with a review of the current theoretical understanding of reading comprehension. The project will continue with a discussion of the definition of valid and reliable testing, especially in reference to the CELSA. Test specifications, pre-piloting and piloting, with item analysis and difficulty will conclude the project.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Dawn Bates

Members of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen, Marysia Johnson

Title: Observations on Teaching ESL in Brazil

This project is based on my teaching experiences in Southern Brazil in 1998. Also included in the data of this qualitative study are classroom observations, and teacher interviews. The study examines several issues related to the communicative approach teaching method. The focus of the study is how to most effectively teach grammar and pronunciation.

Pronunciation learning is theorized to involve the skills of both listening and speaking and that an improvement in one causes an improvement in the other. The study suggests that grammar teaching within the communicative approach would be improved by a greater focus on form.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Don L. F. Nilsen

Members of the Committee: Dawn Bates, Elly van Gelderen

Title: Idioms -- Structure, Acquisition and Processing

This Applied Project is a library research on English idioms. It starts out reviewing the on-going studies of idioms, noting that their central feature is the semantic unity / syntactic non-compositionality.

Four scales of idiomaticity are introduced. In the second part, cognitive aspects of idiom acquisition and interpretation are discussed to present the roles people's brains play in processing idioms. Thirdly, idiom is

compared to a related but distinct concept -- metaphor. A comparison of their similarities and differences reveals the utmost importance of the existence of these two linguistic phenomena. Last but not least are some tentative suggestions of idiom teaching in ESL instructions.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen

Members of the Committee: Christian Faltis, Don L. F. Nilsen

Title: The Use of Mnemonics in L2 Vocabulary Acquisition

This paper focuses on the effects of mnemonics on vocabulary acquisition within an L2 context. The mnemonic technique is compared to the contextual approach. Mnemonics is defined as the association of the target word to another word, either from the learner's L1 or L2, with similar phonological, morphological, and/or visual characteristics. The contextual approach is focused on using the new word in its appropriate context.

I studied two groups of ESL students (Spanish, L1) from the Rio Salado College Adult Education Program. One group was randomly assigned to learn a list of twelve English words: 4 nouns, 4 verbs, and 4 adjectives through the use of mnemonic associations. The other group was taught the exact same words through the context approach. Both groups were given a questionnaire to assure that they did not have any prior knowledge of the target words before the teaching occurred. A posttest was given four weeks later to measure their retention levels. The results of the experiment revealed a significant difference in the rate of retention in the two groups. The average rate of retention, in terms of meaning, was 65 % in the mnemonics group as compared to 39% in the context group. On average, the mnemonics group scored 25 percentage points higher than the context group. Moreover, the mnemonics group scored an average of 46% in the context section of the exam whereas the context group scored 33%.

This study is significant on two levels: 1) it shows that mnemonics is superior to the context approach when it comes to learning the meaning of new words, and 2) it shows that mnemonics is also effective in generating the words in their proper context.

4:30-5:30 (Bo Xiao's presentation, scheduled for Monday, may be moved to this slot.)

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Marysia Johnson

Members of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen, Charles Grove

Title: Assessment of Basic Writing Skills of Adult ESL Students

The purpose of this project was to develop a tool for assessing the writing abilities of adults entering Mesa Public Schools' ESOL program. Students are currently assigned to one of three class levels based on the results of an oral assessment administered at the time of registration. However, the literacy skills of students vary widely -- from those who are illiterate in their L1 to those who are well educated in their L1 and possess basic literacy skills in English. As a result, teachers are often faced with a class somewhat homogeneous in oral ability, but extremely divergent in writing skills. The assessment developed focuses on beginning writing skills, and is based on the grammatical competence component of Lyle Bachman's 1990 model of Language Competence. The test was piloted on 30 students currently in the Mesa program, ten in each of the three class levels.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Karen Adams

Members of the Committee: Beatriz Arias, Dawn Bates

Title: Advocacy in Teaching ESL for Arizona's Public Schools

With a national trend for increased standards in education and the political influence of English-only organizations, advocacy has become a focus topic in the field of teaching ESL. In this study, I interviewed curriculum developers and high school teachers to determine how they address advocacy issues for their programs.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

*Please note that Bo Xiao's presentation may be moved to 4:30 pm, Friday, May 7, 1999, in which case her oral examination would be in room LL 316 (formerly LL C319).

Chair of the Committee: James Ney

Members of the Committee: Christian Faltis, Alleen Pace Nilsen.

 Title: Idiom Transfer and the Teaching of English Idioms to Chinese ESL Students

Idioms are an integral part of the English language. One can not avoid teaching English idioms when teaching English as a second language. However, in practice, most ESL teachers either teach idioms incidentally and indirectly or avoid teaching them altogether. An important reason for the teachers' unwillingness to teach idioms or to teach them more directly is that they do not know how to teach idioms to their students. The purpose of this study is to try to find a practical approach to teaching English idioms to Chinese ESL students by investigating the role of transfer in the acquisition of English idioms. Literature on transfer, contrastive analysis, idioms and idiom transfer is reviewed. Suggestions for teaching idioms to Chinese ESL students are discussed. Two English-Chinese idiom lists are presented in the Appendix to provide an example of how bilingual idiom lists can be compiled.

MTESL Applied Project Oral Examination

Chair of the Committee: Elly van Gelderen

Members of the Committee: Jeff MacSwan, Gary Tipton

Title: Feature Checking and Code-Switching of Chinese-English Bilinguals

This study focuses on the code-switching language of Chinese-English bilinguals. Two groups of subjects are studied: native bilinguals and second-language-learner bilinguals. Feature checking theory is applied to analyze their language pattern and syntactic constraints on the code-switching. Chinese and English syntactic features are compared and the difference between the features and the way in which features are checked in the two languages is found to affect where code-switching will happen in a sentence. The knowledge of the English features is reflected in the code-switching performance of the bilinguals. The more proficient the subjects are in English, the more intra-sentential code-switching they have in their speech.

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There will be a reception for graduating students at 6:00 pm, Monday, May 10, at the home of Professors Don and Alleen Nilsen. Light supper will be served; all graduate students in our programs are welcome. Maps will be available at the exams.