School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemAustralian Indigenous language learner’s guides for revitalisation: language acquisition and materials evaluation( 2019)Given that many Australian Indigenous communities have undergone language loss and wish to (re)learn their heritage language, and that existing learner’s guides for these languages written by linguists are limited in their pedagogical capacities, this study is set out to investigate the current state and possible improvement of learner’s guides in response to Penfield and Tucker’s (2011) call for applied linguists with an expertise in language acquisition to step into this area. Specifically, this present study first adopts the learner-centred second language acquisition (SLA) stance and interviews four community-based language workers to identify the learning goals and needs of Indigenous communities. The study also evaluates nine existing learner’s guides published over the past four decades with Tomlinson’s (2010, 2011, 2016) principles proposed for SLA materials development as the fundamental framework. Findings suggest that one of the major learning goals of Indigenous communities be communicative competence, which matches with Tomlinson’s (2016) emphasis. Additionally, comprehensibility is the most salient issue of learner’s guides at present. To compare the insights of the interviewees in this study and the results of the learner’s guides evaluation, it is found that the SLA frameworks adopted in this study can indeed inform future development of learner’s guides for Australian Indigenous languages, but the application requires modifications in order to achieve cultural appropriateness, especially considering the colonial history of Australia. Beyond learner’s guides per se, the governing principle of future learner’s guides development is to have community consultation, involvement, and ideally, initiation. Positioned as an initial attempt to bridge language revitalisation and SLA, this study provides novel perspectives to both fields, introducing a theoretically and practically informed approach to develop pedagogical materials for Indigenous languages and an insight into a less studied audience in SLA research.
-
ItemThe effects of study-abroad: the acquisition of English embedded wh-questions by L1 Cantonese speakers( 2018)Motivated by the growth of study-abroad (SA) population and the various findings in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature, this thesis investigates the effect of the SA context on the acquisition of English embedded wh-questions by first-language (L1) Cantonese speakers. 21 (11 at-home, AH and 10 SA) Cantonese learners of English participated in the study. The data were elicited by an oral production task (OPT), a grammaticality judgement task (GJT), a language contact profile (LCP) and an interview. The focus of the OPT and GJT was the inversion error made by the participants in the production and judgement of English embedded wh-questions, while the LCP and interview aiming at figuring out the possible factors of the participants’ knowledge of the target feature or the lack thereof. Moreover, the study set out to examine the difficulties of different wh-words (what, who, which, when, where, how and why) and whether the argument (what, who, which) – adjunct (when, where, how and why) asymmetry existed. The results showed no significant difference between the scores of the SA group and the AH group, suggesting that SA does not have a superior effect on the acquisition of L2 syntax. Diverse difficulties of different wh-words and the argument-adjunct asymmetry were found. These findings were discussed in light of the concepts of explicit and implicit knowledge as well as usage-base approaches. The study has pedagogical and theoretical implications.