1. Applied Linguistics (Language Teaching and Learning)
Kazem Pouralvar
Abstract
The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, ...
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The notion of expectancy grammar as a key to understanding the nature of psychologically real processes that underlie language use is introduced by Oller (1979). A central issue in this notion is that expectancy generating systems are constructed and modified in the course of language acquisition. Thus, one of the characteristics of language proficiency is that it consists of such an expectancy generating system. Therefore, it is claimed that for a proposed measure to qualify as a language test, it must invoke the expectancy system or grammar of the examinee.This article aimed at finding the relationship between textuality of a text and its realization in expectancy grammar. To this end, texts with high and low lexical collocational density (LCD) as a means of reaching textuality in a text are given to participants in the form of cloze test. Texts with high and low lexical collocational density were selected to act as cloze tests and administered on EFL learners. An independant t-test was used to analyse the mean of the scores obtained in pairs of low and high LCD texts. The results showd that texts with high lexical collocational density enjoy higher degrees of readibility and are suitable for cloze tests. In other words, the group who took cloze tests with high lexical collocational density outpeformed the group whose cloze tests had been prepared on texts with low lexical collocational density.
Dr. Ali Mohammad Fazilatfar; Hossein Kargar Behbahani
Abstract
One of the most important language skills affecting students' success in academic settings is reading comprehension and the ability to read fluently in a second language. Japanese EFL learners' less than satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to ...
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One of the most important language skills affecting students' success in academic settings is reading comprehension and the ability to read fluently in a second language. Japanese EFL learners' less than satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method. This study investigated the effectiveness of this newly designed method on Iranian EFL Learners' reading comprehension. The aforementioned method with its high priority on reading aloud enjoy four main activities: chunked reading practice, read-aloud practice, cloze test, and concurrent read-aloud and summarization. Participants of this study, selected through convenience sampling, were 140 undergraduate students whose English reading comprehension was considered poor based on the pretest. Then, the subjects were assigned in two groups of control (N=40) and experimental (N=100). The subjects in experimental group received 8 teaching sessions, while the control group received no specific training. Using a pretest-posttest design we attempted to see if read-aloud method turns of to affect our subjects' reading ability level. Therefore, some T-tests were run. The results of the statistical analyses demarcated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the posttest. The pedagogical implication of this study is that ESL/EFL instructors can implement the read-aloud method in their classes to promote their students' reading comprehension.
