It Looks Like a Cone: Vocabulary Problems and Communication Strategies
Yi-Ching Sandra Huang
University of Essex
Research on communication strategies (CSs) in L2 has developed a pool of literature (Tarone, 1977;
Færch & Kasper, 1983; Bialystok, 1990; Poulisse, 1990) which examines communication problems, in
both written and spoken forms of L2, and provides various taxonomies (Dörnyei & Scott 1997) of CSs.
Despite the suggestion that most communicative disruption appears to be the consequence of lexical
inadequacy, rarely have researchers scrutinised the characteristics of this deficiency.
In order to provide an account of what lexical problems L2 learners are faced which could initiate CS
use during the process of speaking, 36 sets of protocols produced by 18 pairs of Taiwanese learners
of English in two informal L2 conversation conditions in an EFL context, namely speaking to an L1
peer and to a native speaker of L2, were collected and analysed. This paper outlines the findings: a)
six types of vocabulary problems the learners encountered and the differences between the two
conditions; b) fluctuation in types and number of vocabulary problems along with learners’ proficiency;
c) the effect of types of vocabulary problems on CS use. The pedagogical implication is that training
of CSs is necessary in the EFL classroom.
Teaching Technical Vocabulary in Saudi Arabian Industrial Colleges: An
Investigation of ESP and Content Area Practitioners’ Beliefs and Practices
Abdullah Ali Alghamdi
University of Essex
Abbreviations used: ESP (English for Specific Purposes) TV (Technical Vocabulary) SCT
(Specialized Courses Teachers) SLA (Second Language Acquisition) CAT (Content Area Teachers).
Study Motivation:
This study, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, has not been conducted in any gulf country
industrial domain. The preliminary study clearly revealed that teaching technical vocabulary in Saudi
Arabian industrial colleges is a problematic issue for teachers. The teachers of ESP and content
areas courses e.g. mechanics, business etc. believe and behave in a certain manner when they
approach teaching technical vocabulary to their students which make investigating teachers’ beliefs
and practices very essential in interpreting the instructional gap and overlap that occur in the study
context. Many SLA researchers, applied linguists and experienced teachers in the field argue that it is
not the job of ESP teachers to embark on "TV direct teaching" i.e. teaching TV meaning(s) and leave
this task instead to the specialists in the field. According to the specialists, ESP teachers’ job is to
teach their students how to use some strategies to learn technical vocabulary while content area
teachers should engage the task of the direct teaching of these types of words. Over the last 30 years
many issues in lexicon studies in general and technical vocabulary in particular were overlooked by
researchers in comparison to the other language aspects. However, because technical terminology is
made up of low frequency words, applicable only for a specific field of knowledge, this deters
researchers from exploring the topic and leaves the field with a noticeable gap in the literature.
Study Research Questions
1- To what extent do ESP and content area teachers view teaching technical vocabulary a
problematic issue in their institutions?
2- Do ESP and content area teachers teach TV directly (giving the meanings and explaining
what the word(s) exactly mean) or indirectly through (using its related learning strategies? or
both?
3- Is there any overlap between ESP and content area teachers in TV teaching?
4- Is there any overlap in teaching technical vocabulary among ESP and content area
themselves?
5- Do ESP teachers' beliefs match their practices?
6- Do content area teachers' beliefs match their practices?
7- Do ESP and specialized teachers share the same practices?
8- Do ESP and content area share the same practices among themselves?
Methodology
This work holds a qualitative nature. However, statistics may appear in some parts of the study where
applicable. Among the instruments which will be implemented are observing of actual running lessons
for both ESP and specialized teachers and interviewing the teachers. Initially, pre-observation semistructured interview, observation and stimulated recall will be applied. Classes for about 8-10 ESP/
content area teachers will be observed and recorded. They will be then interviewed for giving
clarification about some of their classroom behaviours. It is estimated that the rest of the teaching
faculty of ESP and content area courses will be interviewed, they number more than 20 teaching staff.
Some selected references:
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Al-kasimi, A. M. (1979). Problems of technical terminology in Arabic lexicography. ITL, 1 111-118.
Baker, M. (1998). Sub-technical vocabulary and the ESP teacher: an analysis of some rhetorical items in medical
journal articles. Reading in a foreign language, 4 91-105.
Becka, J. V. (1972). The lexical composition of specialized texts and its quantatitive aspect. Prague studies in
mathematical linguistics. 4 47-64
Bramki, D. and Williams, R. (1984). Lexical familiarization in economics text and its pedagogic implications in reading
comprehension. Reading in a foreign language, 2 (1), 169-181.
Chung, T. M. and Nation, I. S. P. (2004). Identifying technical vocabulary. System, 32 251-263.
Chung, T. M. and Nation, I. S. P. (2003). Technical vocabulary in specialized texts. Reading in a foreign language, 15
(2)
Clarke, M. (1992). Vocabulary learning with and without computers: Some thoughts on a way forward. 5 (3), 139-146.
Cowan, J. R. (1974). Lexical and syntactic research for the design of EFL reading materials. TESOL Quarterly, 8
389-400.
Writing your linguistics thesis in LaTeX
Kakia Chatsiou
University of Essex
Fed up with glosses in your examples not aligning properly? Would you like to speed up your
linguistics dissertation writing process by automating tasks like referencing, glossing and tree and
diagramme drawing?
Meet LaTeX, a “document preparation system for high-quality typesetting” (LaTeX Project, 2009).
LaTeX is most often used for “medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but can be used for
almost any form of publishing” (LaTeX Project, 2009). Contrary to What You See Is What You Get
(WYSIWYG) editors like Word, LaTeX enables authors to focus on the content of what they are
writing and not how to typeset it, by automating processes such as sectioning, cross-referencing,
generation of bibliographies, appendices and indexes.
LaTeX is also free software, which makes it easily customisable to suit particular needs, such as the
needs of linguistics scholars for example. As well as the standard features for typesetting articles,
reports and books, LaTeX has been customised to be able to effortlessly typeset numbered glossed
examples, linguistic trees and AVMs, IPA phonetic symbols, optimality theory tableaux and semantics
among others.
This workshop is addressed to Linguistics students and staff who are in the process of or intend to
typeset a thesis or other similar large document in the near future. As a result of attending this
workshop, participants are expected to:
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get to know what LaTeX is, how it differs from other editors and why it is useful for linguists
familiarise themselves with LaTeX markup syntax for sectioning, font manipulation,
referencing and cross-referencing
be able to typeset a sample document using the template provided including some of the
most common linguistically oriented objects (trees, glosses, IPA fonts)
identify some of the advantages and limitations of using LaTeX to typeset their own work (be
it a thesis, a dissertation or a report)
The workshop will not presuppose advanced IT knowledge, however a degree of computer literacy
would be useful.
References
LaTeX Project. (2009). LaTeX – A document preparation system. Available online at
http://www.latex-project.org/, accessed 16.03.2009.
DMDX: Linguistic Applications
Elena Papadopoulou, Kaili Clackson, Claire Batterham
University of Essex
DMDX is a Windows-based program designed for language processing experiments. It allows the
user to create and run reaction time (RT) experiments thus allowing for a much more precise
adaptation of a particular study/research/experiment. This workshop will familiarize users with DMDX
as well as provide information for creating a RT experiment.
On-line idiom processing by second language learners of English
Zainab Ghareeb-Ali
University of Essex
Idiomatic expressions form a very important part of natural language, thus must be accounted for by
any theory of language processing and comprehension. Examining how idioms are dealt with and
processed in a second language (L2) is an issue worth investigating since it may give language
teachers a better idea of some of the strategies L2 learners use in order to interpret figurative
language.
The proposals made by researchers about L2 idiom processing differ in terms of the status they
assign to figurative versus literal meanings when comprehending idioms. For example, while Nelson
(1992) claims that L2 learners directly access the figurative meaning of the idiom, Liontas (2002), on
the other hand, hypothesized that L2 learners comprehend idiomatic phrases by initially processing
the idiom literally and only then retrieve the figurative interpretation (i.e. literal processing must
precede the access of the idiomatic meaning).
A pilot study was conducted using the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to investigate the
processing of idiomatic expressions in second language (L2) learners, based on the assumption of
the Literal-Salience Resonant Model of L2 idiom comprehension developed by Cieślicka (2006).
Regardless of familiarity or contextual bias, this view presumes that processing idioms involves an
obligatory computation of the literal interpretations of the words making up the idiomatic string.
Therefore, the hypothesis of the current study is that literal targets (i.e. words related literally to the
idiomatic expression) should demonstrate a significant priming advantage over idiomatic targets (i.e.
words related figuratively to the idiomatic phrase) in L2 idiom comprehension. The idiomatic
expressions employed in this experiment were characterised as being non-literal and nondecomposable. Thus, individual constituents in the idiom phrase barely contribute to the overall
figurative meaning of the given idiom. All idioms were embedded in neutral contexts. The non-native
speakers who participated in the experiment consisted of 40 advanced Kuwaiti learners of English.
There was a control group of 20 native speakers of English.
The results revealed that the non-native speakers performed similarly to the native speakers in that
both language groups showed higher priming effects for target words related to the literal meaning of
the last word in the idiom string than for targets related to the overall figurative interpretation of the
idiom. This implies that literal meanings are activated more than the figurative. Thus, it is suggested
that literal reading of idioms is not optional and always comes prior to retrieving the figurative meaning
when processing idioms. In sum, findings of the current study provide support to the Literal-Salience
Resonant Model. This finding also fits with the results from an eye-tracking study by Conklin (2008),
who found that non-native speakers had longer reading times to figurative uses than to literal ones,
suggesting that the figurative meaning is not activated as quickly as the literal.
Japanese learners of English and their sociocultural identity:
A preliminary diary study
Yoko Nogami
University of Essex
The relationship between second language learning and learners’ identity has attracted the interest of
several researchers in the last decade (Ishihara 2006, in press; McKay and Wong 1996; Miller 1999;
Norton 2000; Siegal 1996). They advocate that researchers and teachers need to respect the second
language learner as an individual. The learners’ sociocultural identity cannot be seen as a fixed trait,
but it exists in an individual as a mass of multiple identities which vary contextually, and change over
time. Therefore it is a site of struggle because of the relationships of the learners with the larger social
world where they are situated, and the power relationship around them affects learners’ practice in the
second language.
Such studies have predominantly focused on immigrant ESL students including adolescents (Mckay
and Wong 1996; Miller 1999) and adults (Norton 2000). However, little is known about non-immigrant
ESL/EFL students’ sociocultural identity, let alone that of Japanese ESL/EFL students. Moreover, the
precedent studies often investigated the opportunities for learners to speak mainly with native
speakers of English, but not with non-native speakers of English, i.e. Lingua Franca communication in
depth.
The paper will discuss the methodological issues and findings based on the analysis of preliminary
data collected through two Japanese ESL learners’ diary entries in order to investigate the following
research questions: (1) How do Japanese learners of English reflect their sociocultural identity
through their day-to-day language learning/practice? (2) How differently does their sociocultural
identity appear in English as Lingua Franca and ESL communications? (3) How do power relations
between native and nonnative speakers of English affect the learners’ sociocultural identity?
Implementing diaries for the research has shown several advantageous and disadvantageous
aspects. The richness of the information that researchers can obtain by observing diary entries would
be beyond the scope of other methods such as retrospective interviewing; diary entries often include
details about events/activities that might not be significant enough for informants to recall in
interviews. On the other hand, unstructured diary entries where there is no clear demarcation of
events/activities can make it difficult to develop the coding scheme.
The initial analysis demonstrates the learners’ ambivalent and conflicting English persona and
Japanese persona through English usage, and how the learners’ English language practices are
shaped in unequal power relationships between native and nonnative speakers.
EFL Teaching Methodology at Aleppo University in Syria/Considering
Teachers’ Beliefs and their Classroom Practices
Reem Issa
University of Essex
When researchers address the issue of EFL teaching methodology, especially the issue of EGP and
ESP methodology, there appears to be two opposing positions. On one hand, Hutchinson and Waters
(1987) have claimed that although the content of learning in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) may
differ from English for General Purposes (EGP), there is no reason to suppose that the methodology
of ESP is different from EGP. On the other hand, and conversely, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998)
have argued that the difference between ESP and EGP content implies different teaching
methodologies. However, implementation of reports about EFL teaching methodology has been
mainly based on teachers’ and students’ beliefs. Such beliefs might have an effect on classroom
practices (Kagan, 1992).
To explore this possibility, the present study focuses particularly on EFL teaching methodology in
relation to teachers' beliefs and practices in the context of English teaching at the University of Aleppo
in Syria. The pilot study was implemented in four steps. Step one, based on essay data from one
language teacher at the Engineering Faculty and another one at the Medicine Faculty. Essays were
also given to two students of these teachers. In step two, semi-structured interviews were conducted
with both teachers and two of their students. Step three was based on four semi-structured classroom
observations. The final step was based on short interviews with teachers which helped me to get
more explanations and justifications of teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices, and with students
which provided evidence on whether teachers taught in the same way they normally did.
The results show that both teachers believed that there should be some differences in their teaching
methodology between ESP and EGP classes. However, although the teachers were observed to
generally follow classroom practices that are consistent with their beliefs, some points of difference
between their beliefs and practices existed. Various impediments constrained her practices, including
lack of training and other context-dependent factors. It is 2 argued that training programs and change
in the kinds of materials used are necessary for educational development to occur. However,
improved methodology can face many obstacles in the implementation process, but, at least, this
study can be practical and it can open the door for more promotion in the teaching/learning process at
the University of Aleppo in Syria.
References
• Hutchinson, T. and Waters, A. (1987). English for Specific Purposes: A Learning-centred
Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dudley-Evans, T. and St. John, M. J. (1998). Developments in ESP: A Multi-disciplinary
Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kagan, D.M.(1992). Implication of Research on Teacher Belief. Educational Psychologist 27
(1): 65-90.