<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/368">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH L2 BY IMMIGRANT CHILDREN: EAL AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION IN MULTILINGUAL IRELAND]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Since the 1990s, Ireland has experienced considerable immigration. Currently, 12% of its schoolchildren come from immigrant backgrounds. The majority of these children learn English as a second (additional) language (ESL/EAL). The Irish Department of Education and Skills (DES) provides a programme of English language support for young ESL learners. To guide this programme, English Language Proficiency Benchmarks were developed by Integrate Ireland Language and Training (IILT), a campus company of Trinity College, Dublin. IILT produced two sets of context-appropriate ‘Benchmarks’, for primary and secondary education, derived from the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This paper focuses on English L2 acquisition in Irish primary schools. It reports on how the primary level Benchmarks describe L2 proficiency development across CEFR levels A1, A2 and B1 in a manner sensitive to age/cognitive stage and curriculum requirements. It discusses assessment resources based on these Benchmarks – a version of the European Language Portfolio (IILT 2004) and the Primary School Assessment Kit (DES 2007). These tools enable assessment of and assessment for learning and promote learner autonomy. Research conducted by the author of this paper (published in 2014) into the relation between learning outcomes expressed in the Benchmarks and immigrant children’s English L2 acquisition is presented. It reports on mixed-methods analysis of data from a longitudinal study of L2 acquisition involving 18 children, aged four to ten years, from ten language backgrounds (including Croatian and Serbian). The children’s acquisition of English oral and literacy skills indicate that the Benchmarks appropriately describe L2 proficiency development. Individual and interactional influences on L2 acquisition and their pedagogical implications are discussed. The paper considers how CEFR-related approaches can support language learning, teaching and assessment in an intercultural educational environment.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2906]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/367">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[THE ATTRITION OF PORTUGUESE AS A THIRD OR ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE OVER THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[The present study aims to investigate the attrition of Portuguese as a third or additional language (L3, L4, etc., cf. de Angelis, 2007) over the summer holidays. The research questions concern the correctness of the participants’ responses, the language areas in which attrition is observed, the ways in which it manifests itself and the students’ perception of their own attrition. Since multilingual systems are dynamic and the languages are in constant interaction, when a language is not used, attrition sets in (Herdina &amp; Jessner, 2002). However, some elements of linguistic knowledge are more prone to attrition than others (Sharwood-Smith, 1989). The study was carried out with 42 Polish (L1) learners of Portuguese, 30 of whom were second-year students of Portuguese philology, and 12 were students of other Romance philologies who followed a Portuguese language course. After the summer holidays, they completed a vocabulary and grammar test and participated in oral interviews, followed by a questionnaire. In general, they produced more incorrect and partly correct (e.g. the right verb in the wrong form) than correct responses. Attrition could be observed in various language areas, from speaking fluency to grammar and vocabulary, though the subjunctive, which they had only started to study before the holidays, caused them the most difficulty. The attrition of Portuguese manifested itself in various forms, from avoidance and the inability to retrieve certain items, through the confusion of Portuguese forms, to interference from other languages. As the questionnaire indicates, the students were aware of the areas in which attrition occurred. It can be concluded that attrition is connected mainly with a decrease in the activation of a language. Given the interference from other Romance languages, it can be supposed that, as the activation of Portuguese items is lower, Spanish, French and Italian items compete for selection.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2921]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/366">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[THE EFFECTS OF INTEGRATED FFI AND ISOLATED FFI ON THE ACQUISITION OF THE ENGLISH PAST TENSE]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This paper presents the results of a classroom-based study which I conducted for my PhD thesis. It is an experimental study on the comparative benefits of Isolated and Integrated FFI in primary EFL education. Greek 5th year primary learners aged 10-11 were exposed to Integrated FFI (n= 75) on the English Past Tense and their learning gains were compared to the gains of their peers who were exposed to Isolated FFI  (n = 73), as these were first defined by Spada and Lightbown (2008). Integrated FFI was operationalised as the provision of comprehension and production structure-based communicative tasks; that is, tasks that were especially crafted to provide meaningful contexts for the practice of the English Past tense and its progressive aspect. In completing those tasks, learners focused on comprehension and the expression of meaning while they produced the target structures and received corrective feedback on their errors. Isolated FFI was operationalised as the explicit presentation and meta-linguistic explanations of the rules that govern the formation and use of the same target structures, coupled with grammatical consciousness-raising tasks, structural grammar exercises and controlled oral and written production activities. I taught the groups myself as a teacher researcher throughout the intervention, which lasted for 12 hours. The two groups were tested four times; each test was given after completing six hours of treatment and two months after the end of the intervention. The tests included grammaticality judgments, multiple-choice tests, tense formation tests, an open cloze, a question formation task, picture description, sentence matching and text completion tests. I will present the results of the statistical analyses from the comparisons of these groups. One suggestion is that, planned Integrated FFI targeting specific structures in context, if applied consistently for some time, produces equivalent learning gains to Isolated FFI even for elementary-level EFL learners whose opportunities for productive use of the language are generally limited within the classroom context.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2907]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/365">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[DEVELOPING BEGINNER TEACHERS’ PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS IN POST-LESSON REFLECTIONS]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Although reflective practice has gained popularity world-wide in recent years, some argue that the ‘reflective’ research has focused too much on different conceptualisations of reflection and not enough on how teachers actually think when they reflect. This article addresses this issue of teacher cognition by examining one skill underpinning reflective thinking, problem solving. Specifically, this study compares the problem solving of six inexperienced and three experienced teachers of English. It emerged that the experienced teachers developed sophisticated reasoning skills to help themselves analyse problems in principled ways. This article identifies what principled reasoning actually consists of and how it may be developed in inexperienced teachers of English to help them solve teaching problems and so reflect more effectively.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2911]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/364">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[CONCEPT FOR UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK FOR CROATIAN STUDENTS (IN TERMS OF LEARNING A CLOSELY RELATED LANGUAGE)]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[In creating textbooks and course books for foreign language education, the starting point is the goal of learning the language – language acquisition either on the level of communication skills for specific purposes (business or daily), or as part of the process of training philology specialists, or more specifically, linguistics specialists. In this, among other factors, authors should take into account the ethno-linguistic characteristics of the audience, so the training process should be organised differently for groups of students who study a language closely related to their native language. In studying a closely related language, a variety of phenomena is observed, such as, for example, interference, cross-language homonymy, the fact that ability to perceive and understand a foreign language always outweighs the ability to reproduce material, etc. These points are important to consider when preparing textbooks and course books, and they should be reflected in the selection of lexical material and presentation of grammar. Existing textbooks for learning Ukrainian as a foreign language are mainly not designed for a Slavic languages-speaking audience, which makes the process of training specialists in Ukrainian in Slavic countries more difficult. On the other hand, the methods of organising the material in a textbook and its structure should be designed for philology students and therefore should feature a complex and comprehensive presentation of the language material and combine various methods of teaching. We propose the principles we follow in creating a textbook for learning Ukrainian designed for Croatian students whose primary field of study is the Ukrainian language.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2916]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/363">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[HOW TO BUILD AN ENGLISH CLAUSE]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[I will be examining central aspects of English clause structure from the standpoint of Cognitive Grammar (CG). Though well known and extensively studied, these phenomena have eluded definitive treatment; they still have much to tell us. Indeed, working out their theoretical basis has contributed to further development of the CG framework (Langacker 1991, 2008a, 2012). Especially relevant are two general notions: the organization of structure in terms of baseline and elaboration; and grammar as the implementation of semantic functions.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2904]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/362">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[EXTENDING BEYOND THE CLASSROOM: SEMIOTICS AND CULTURE IN EFL COURSES]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This essay describes a semiotic analysis exercise designed to enhance students’ cultural and critical literacy, a skill necessary for language comprehension, pragmatics, and proficiency (Liton and Madanat). Rather than observing and comparing cultures as monolithic and unchangeable, students are encouraged to develop complex cultural understanding based on the reading of their surrounding semiosphere. Following Yuri Lotman’s concept of “semiosphere,” defined as a totality of signs in a certain system, students apply semiotic analysis on their local physical and media space in order to understand the signifying processes in their hybrid cultural environment. Rather than looking at the target culture as a separate Other, students observe the incursion of that culture into their own environment. The relevance of this approach is ensured by the system of signs in the Gulf – its semiosphere - being heavily influenced by mixing of Arabic and English, as well as Filipino/Tagalog, Bengali, and Hindi languages, by entertainment and media outlets of multiple cultures, and the logoed and branded presence of multinational companies. The semiosphere of the Gulf involves an array of signals that function both on the global and local scale, what Yuri Lotman describes as “a semiotic continuum filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of levels.” The exercise described in this paper invites students to use semiotics for analysis of culture and its objects, in turn increasing their integrated motivation, their agency, and their cultural literacy by getting them involved in “the processes of reflection and negotiation through which shared cultural understanding emerges” (Weninger and Kiss) while relying on standard practical techniques for teaching culture in the EFL classroom, “noticing,” “prediction,” and “research” (Cullen and Sato)]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2914]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/361">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[LANGUAGE AND GENDER DIFFERENCE IN DISCOURSE]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Many empirical researches on Gender and language have been conducted by numerous sociolinguists in order of finding out the relationship between them. These differences between women’s and men’s language consisted in terms of phonology, lexis, syntax, dominance and difference in discourse analysis. Some other studies have investigated the influence of female - male language differences on maintaining the imbalance power between the two genders. This paper will aim at finding out the relationship between gender and language in political debates in Albanian and English while trying to identify the impact of gender based language in displaying the difference and dominance in conversational interaction. Political debates in English and Albanian will be analyzed in order to distinguish cross gender and cross language differences through the use of linguistic and discourse features such as: turn taking, dominance, minimal response, overlaps, hedges, interruptions etc.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2915]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/360">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[WORD CLASS AND TEXTUAL FUNCTIONS OF ANTONYMS: A CORPUS STUDY]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[Antonymy is traditionally regarded as a paradigmatic relation, but recent studies of antonym co–occurrence in written discourse have shown that it can be investigated as a syntagmatic relation as well. Such investigations in the Untagged electronic corpus of Serbian identified two major and four minor functions of antonyms in discourse and its accompanying lexico-syntactic patterns, matching the results of similar analyses in English, Japanese, Swedish and Dutch. This paper presents a research on the relation between word class that antonym pairs belong to (e.g. adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs and prepositions) and their textual functions in Serbian written discourse. It is hypothesized that language users employ antonymous pairs in text irrespective of their grammatical class. The general conclusion is that the roles of antonyms in text are not influenced by word class as significantly as one might expect.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2918]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description><rdf:Description rdf:about="https://omeka.ibu.edu.ba/items/show/359">
    <dcterms:title><![CDATA[A CASE STUDY: EFL LEARNERS’ AND WRITING TEACHERS&#039; ATTITUDES TOWARDS PERFORMANCE BASED PORTFOLIO IN A UNIVERSITY CONTEXT]]></dcterms:title>
    <dcterms:abstract><![CDATA[This study has been carried out to investigate the attitudes of students and writing teachers towards the performance-based portfolio. In the study, both qualitative and quantitative research methods have been used. Within the process of qualitative research, teacher reflection papers have been used and interviews with the teachers and students have been made. Within the quantitative research process, an attitude survey designed by Brooks (1999) has been used and the student attitudes have been investigated. The participants of the study are 89 university students and 5 writing teachers. In the light of the findings obtained from this study, it has been concluded that the majority of the writing teachers and the interviewed students have a positive attitude towards the performance based portfolio while the findings from the student attitude survey displays the opposite. According to the findings from the general attitude survey, the majority of the students show a negative attitude towards the performance-based portfolio.]]></dcterms:abstract>
    <dcterms:publisher><![CDATA[International Burch University]]></dcterms:publisher>
    <dcterms:date><![CDATA[2015-09]]></dcterms:date>
    <dcterms:extent><![CDATA[2920]]></dcterms:extent>
</rdf:Description></rdf:RDF>