School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemThe Russian language in an Australian environment: a descriptive analysis of English interference in the speech of bilingual Russian migrants( 1973)The purpose of this dissertation is to present a descriptive analysis of English interference phenomena observed in Australian Russian as spoken in the urban communities of Melbourne, Sydney and. Brisbane. The project concentrates on vocabulary and idiom (the level at which the bulk of interference phenomena occurs) but phonological and grammatical aspects are introduced in the analysis of integration processes in Chapter IV. Chapter I contains a survey of previous work on bilingualism, language contact and linguistic interference. The basic concepts pertaining to this type of investigation are discussed and defined. Fieldwork is also described. Material for the study was gathered in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It consists of tape-recorded interviews with individual informants and group conversations on the following topics: daily activities, including work and recreation, and memorable events that had occurred before and after migration to Australia. Forty-six informants were used in the investigation and they represent both adult and childhood bilinguals, and a cross-section of the different backgrounds that characterise the Russian migrant population in Australia. As well as a classification of the informants, Chapter I also contains a brief outline of the history of Russian migration to Australia and a description of Russian community activities and efforts towards Russian language maintenance in Australia. Chapter II is concerned with a discussion of the fundamental causes of interference in Australian Russian speech. Actual contextual examples of interference phenomena are described, classified and as far as possible explained using the author's own observations and the findings of other researchers in this field. The analysis shows that interference in the speech corpus may be correlated with sociocultural, structural and psychological factors and that the situations in which Russian and English are used, as well as the attitudes of the speaker, play an important role in conditioning the extent and nature of interference. Chapter III presents a classification of interference phenomena according to different modes of interference, namely, the transfer of English identities (words and expressions in their entirety of form and meaning); the transfer of English distributions (the semantic extension of Russian words on the model of English and the translation of English expressions); the transfer of English identities and distributions to form bilingual compounds and phrases. The transfer of English identities was found to outnumber other modes of interference in the corpus. Chapter IV describes the integration processes used by the informants to adapt English items to the phonological and morphological systems of Russian. The examples show a clear pattern of sound substitution of Russian phonemes for English ones, a strong tendency to assign the majority of English nouns to the masculine gender, a preference for the productive declension, conjugation and word-formation patterns. A number of words and expressions are classified as socially integrated or adopted into Australian Russian on the basis of their frequency and range of occurrence. Chapter V discusses the few examples of code-switching between English and. Russian that occur in the corpus. The Conclusion contains a recapitulation of the main findings of this project and a brief discussion of what these findings indicate about the changing function of Russian in Australia. The three Appendices contain a description of the informants, sample interviews and extracts from Unification relevant to Chapter I.
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ItemThe process of the assessment of writing performance: the rater's perspective( 2000)The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the process by which raters of texts written by ESL learners make their scoring decisions. The context is the Special Test of English Proficiency (step), used by the Australian government to assist in immigration decisions. Four trained, experienced and reliable step raters took part in the study, providing scores for two sets of 24 texts. The first set was scored as in an operational rating session. Raters then provided think-aloud protocols describing the rating process as they rated the second set. Scores were compared under the two conditions and comparisons made with the raters' operational rating behaviour. Both similarities and differences were observed. A coding scheme developed to describe the think-aloud data allowed analysis of the sequence of rating, the interpretations the raters made of the scoring categories in the analytic rating scale, and the difficulties raters faced in rating. Findings demonstrate that raters follow a fundamentally similar rating process, in three stages. With some exceptions, they appear to hold similar interpretations of the scale categories and descriptors, but the relationship between scale contents and text quality remains obscure. A model is presented describing the rating process. This shows that rating is at one level a rule-bound, socially governed procedure that relies upon a rating scale and the rater training which supports it, but it retains an indeterminate component as a result of the complexity of raters' reactions to individual texts. The task raters face is to reconcile their impression of the text, the specific features of the text, and the wordings of the rating scale, thereby producing a set of scores. The rules and the scale do not cover all eventualities, forcing the raters to develop various strategies to help them cope with problematic aspects of the rating process. In doing this they try to remain close to the scale, but are also heavily influenced by the complex intuitive impression of the text obtained when they first read it. This sets up a tension between the rules and the intuitive impression, which raters resolve by what is ultimately a somewhat indeterminate process. In spite of this tension and indeterminacy, rating can succeed in yielding consistent scores provided raters are supported by adequate training, with additional guidelines to assist them in dealing with problems. Rating requires such constraining procedures to produce reliable measurement.