DOCSLIB.ORG

Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension DOCUMENT RESUME ED 463 559 CS 510 988 TITLE Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension- INSTITUTION Rand Corp., Santa Monica, CA. Science and Technology Policy Inst.; RAND Education, Santa Monica, CA. SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. REPORT NO MR-1465-OERI ISBN ISBN-0-8330-3105-8 PUB DATE 2002-00-00 NOTE 177p.; Prepared by the RAND REading Study Group (RRSG). AVAILABLE FROM Distribution Services, RAND, 1700 Main St., P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 ($20). Tel: 877-584-8642 (Toll Free); Fax: 310-451-6915;e-mail: [email protected]. For full text: http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MRl465. PUB TYPE' Books (010) -- Reports - Evaluative (142) EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MFOl Plus Postage. PC Not Available from EDRS. DES~RIPTORS *Content Area Reading; *Critical Reading; Elementary Secondary Education; Literacy; *Reading Comprehension; *Reading Research; *Research and Development; *Research Needs IDENTIFIERS Rand Corporation; *Research Priorities; Strategic Reading ABSTRACT In 1999, the United States Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) asked RAND to examine how OERI might improve the quality and relevance of the education research it funds. The RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG) was charged with developing a research framework to address the most pressing issues in literacy. The RRSG focused on the highest priorities for research in reading comprehension, particularly how to best promote %he development of proficient reading and prevent reading comprehension difficulties. Other questions addressed were: How can teachers be prepared to deliver effective comprehension instruction? and How can an assessment system for reading ccmprehension be developed that includes the design of valid and reliable measures of self-regulated, strategic reading that are sensitive to instructional interventions? This book sets out the RRSG's framework and presents the groupls conclusions about improving the research infrastructure for teaching reading comprehension. The book proposes a reading research agenda and addresses issues that the community of reading researchers urgently needs to address over the next 10 to 15 years. Appendixes contain an expanded review of the research on variability in reading comprehension, and an outline of a sample request for application. (Contains approximately 345 references.) (NKA) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. n-l (i Ill1 I IU n II n L Toward an RED Program in Readin9 Comprehension U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educalional Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 0 This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. ' Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. RAND Reading Study Group Catherine Snow, Chair ~ I HAS BEEN GRANTED BY ' I Prepared for the Office of Educational Research I I TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES and Irn p r ovement (OERI) INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) I\ i J Science 6 Technology Policy Institute RAND I EDiCATiON i RAND Reading Study Group Catherine Snow, Chair Prepared for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) Science 6 Technology Policy Institute RAND I EDUCATION 3 The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI),U.S. Department of Education. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Snow, Catherine E. Reading for understanding : toward a research and development program in reading comprehension / Catherine Snow. p. cm. “MR- 1465.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8330-3105-8 I. Reading comprehension-Research. 2. Reading-Research. I. Title. LB1050.45 S.57 2002 428.4‘34~21 2001048905 RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND@ is a registered trademark. RAND’S publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of its research sponsors. Cover designed by Barbara Angel1 Caslon 0 Copyright 2002 RAND All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from RAND. Published 2002 by RAND 1700 Main Street, PO. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington, VA 22202-5050 201 North Craig Street, Suite 102, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-1516 RAND URL: http:/ lwww.rand.org/ To order RAND documents or to obtain additional information, contact Distribution Services: Telephone: (310) 451-7002; Fax: (310) 451-6915; Email: [email protected] One of the most vexing problems facing middle and secondary school teachers today is that many students come into their classrooms without the requisite knowledge, skills, or disposition to read and comprehend the materials placed before them. In an effort to inform the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) on ways to improve the quality and relevance of education research and development, RAND convened 14 ex- perts with a wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives in the field of reading. The RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG) was charged with proposing strategic guidelines for a long-term research and development pro- gram supporting the improvement of reading comprehension. This report is the product of that group’s efforts and of the valuable commentary provided by various members‘ of the reading research and practice communities. This report should be of interest to those involved with the planning of educa- tion research and development (R&D)programs by public and private agencies, and it should also be of interest to researchers who study reading instruction and practitioners who teach reading. This report is the first in a series of three RAND reports dealing with the topic of education R&D. The second report, scheduled for draft publication in summer 2002, will propose an R&D program for mathematics education and the third report, scheduled for draft publication in fall 2002, will address R&D manage- ment issues. Funding for the RRSG research was provided under a contract with OERI. The research was carried out under the auspices of RAND Education and the Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI),a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by RAND. iii 5 iv Reading for Understanding Inquiries regarding RAND Education and the S&TPI may be directed to the fol- lowing individuals: Helga Rippen, Director Dominic Brewer, Director Science and Technology Policy Institute RAND Education RAND, 1200 South Hayes Street RAND, 1700 Main Street Arlington, VA 22202-5050 Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138 (703) 413-1100 ~5351 (310) 393-0411 ~7515 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] (CONTENTS ... Preface .................................................................................................... 111 Figures ..................................................................................................... vii Tables ...................................................................................................... ix Executive Summary .................................................................................. xi Acknowledgments .................................................................................... xxiii RAND Reading Study Group and RAND Staff ............................................. xxv Chapter One INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 1 Study Methodology ............................................................................ 1 Research Challenges ........................................................................... 2 The Issues Motivating This Study ........................................................ 4 Much Is Already Known About Improving Comprehension .................. 8 The Need for a Definition of Reading Comprehension ......................... 9 Chapter Two DEFINING COMPREHENSION ........................................................... 11 The Reader ......................................................................................... 13 The Text ............................................................................................. 14 The Activity ........................................................................................ 15 The Context ....................................................................................... 16 Chapter Three VARIABILITY IN READING COMPREHENSION ................................... 19 Variability in Readers .......................................................................... 19 Sociocultural Influences .................................................................. 20 Group Differences ........................................................................... 21 Inter-Individual Differences ............................................................ 22 Intra-Individual Differences ............................................................ 23 Variability in Text ............................................................................... 24 .. vi Reading for Understanding Variability in Activity .........................................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Formal Grammars of Early Language
    Formal Grammars of Early Language Shuly Wintner1, Alon Lavie2, and Brian MacWhinney3 1 Department of Computer Science, University of Haifa [email protected] 2 Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University [email protected] 3 Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon university [email protected] Abstract. We propose to model the development of language by a series of formal grammars, accounting for the linguistic capacity of children at the very early stages of mastering language. This approach provides a testbed for evaluating theories of language acquisition, in particular with respect to the extent to which innate, language-specific mechanisms must be assumed. Specifically, we focus on a single child learning English and use the CHILDES corpus for actual performance data. We describe a set of grammars which account for this child's utterances between the ages 1;8.02 and 2;0.30. The coverage of the grammars is carefully evaluated by extracting grammatical relations from induced structures and comparing them with manually annotated labels. 1 Introduction 1.1 Language acquisition Two competing theories of language acquisition dominate the linguistic and psycho-linguistic communities [59, pp. 257-258]. One, the nativist approach, orig- inating in [14{16] and popularized by [47], claims that the linguistic capacity is innate, expressed as dedicated \language organs" in our brains; therefore, certain linguistic universals are given to language learners for free, requiring only the tuning of a set parameters in order for language to be fully acquired. The other, emergentist explanation [2, 56, 37, 38, 40, 41, 59], claims that language emerges as a result of various competing constraints which are all consistent with general cognitive abilities, and hence no dedicated provisions for universal grammar are required.
    [Show full text]
  • Distributional Properties of Verbs in Syntactic Patterns Liam Considine
    Early Linguistic Interactions: Distributional Properties of Verbs in Syntactic Patterns Liam Considine The University of Michigan Department of Linguistics April 2012 Advisor: Nick Ellis Acknowledgements: I extend my sincerest gratitude to Nick Ellis for agreeing to undertake this project with me. Thank you for cultivating, and partaking in, some of the most enriching experiences of my undergraduate education. The extensive time and energy you invested here has been invaluable to me. Your consistent support and amicable demeanor were truly vital to this learning process. I want to thank my second reader Ezra Keshet for consenting to evaluate this body of work. Other thanks go out to Sarah Garvey for helping with precision checking, and Jerry Orlowski for his R code. I am also indebted to Mary Smith and Amanda Graveline for their participation in our weekly meetings. Their presence gave audience to the many intermediate challenges I faced during this project. I also need to thank my roommate Sean and all my other friends for helping me balance this great deal of work with a healthy serving of fun and optimism. Abstract: This study explores the statistical distribution of verb type-tokens in verb-argument constructions (VACs). The corpus under investigation is made up of longitudinal child language data from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). We search a selection of verb patterns identified by the COBUILD pattern grammar project (Francis, Hunston, Manning 1996), these include a number of verb locative constructions (e.g. V in N, V up N, V around N), verb object locative caused-motion constructions (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • ON the TEST ABILITY of THEORIES of LANGUAGE EVOLUTION Rudolf P Botba Department Ofgeneral Linguistics, University Ofstelienbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa*
    ON THE TEST ABILITY OF THEORIES OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION Rudolf P Botba Department ofGeneral Linguistics, University ofStelienbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa* 1. Introduction Theories of the evolution of human language express by their very nature claims of a historical sort: claims about why, when, where or how language emerged and/or developed in some distant past. I An essential feature of these claims is that they are made in the absence of sufficient historical evidence about the evolutionary events, biological processes, physical forces, environmental pressures, kinds of (pre)linguistic entities and so on involved in the evolution of language. The paucity of this historical evidence - i.e., evidence derived from data contained in natural or man-made records of these evolutionary events etc. - is generally seen as one of the most formidable obstacles to serious work on language evolution.2 The paucity of historical evidence about the evolution of language has given rise to a kind of speculation on language evolution which has long been considered scientifically unrespectable. Thus, in 1873, the eminent American philologist William Whitney depreciatingly characterized such speculation as " ... mere windy talk, the assertion of subjective views which commend themselves to no mind save the one that produces them, and which are apt to be offered with a confidence, and defended with a tenacity, that are in inverse ratio to their acceptableness. This has given the whole question a bad repute among sober-minded philologists". (Whitney, 1873, p. 279). And, in the same year, Alexander Ellis, the then president of the Philological Society of London, declared: "We [philologists - R.P.B.] shall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wasteRaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculations on the origin of all tongues." Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • Language and the Learning Curve: a New Theory of Syntactic Development
    SSLA, 30, 389–409+ Printed in the United States of America+ BOOK REVIEWS doi:10+10170S0272263108080509 LANGUAGE AND THE LEARNING CURVE: A NEW THEORY OF SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT. Anat Ninio+ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006+ Pp+ xiv ϩ 206+ £24+95 paper+ Ninio presents an interesting and ambitious attempt to account for syntactic develop- ment from a lexicalist perspective with support from the power law of practice and complexity theory+ She argues strenuously against a rule-based account of acquisition, preferring instead a purely word-specific syntax throughout acquisition and into adult language and sees the minimalist syntax merge0dependency operation coupled with ana- logical learning as the only machinery required+ This volume has a number of strengths, including the particularly good review of the range of accounts available for early two-word combinations and the presentation of merge0dependency+ The discussion of the power law of practice raises some impor- tant issues and reminds us that we should always be prepared to revisit the idea that language acquisition is skill acquisition like any other, even if we ultimately disagree with this idea+ Finally, the appeal to complexity theory and the suggestion that children hook into the world of speakers like Internet navigators hook into the Internet is pro- vocative+ It leads to the interesting claim that children neither reinvent nor internalize language but simply choose which items to learn to produce via the same pragmatic principles that adults use in choosing what to say+
    [Show full text]
  • The Earliest Utterances in Dialogue: Towards a Formal Theory of Parent/Child Talk in Interaction∗
    The Earliest Utterances in Dialogue: Towards a Formal Theory of Parent/Child Talk in Interaction∗ Jonathan Ginzburg and Sara Moradlou CLILLAC-ARP (EA 3967) & Laboratoire Linguistique Formelle (LLF) (UMR 7110) & Laboratoire d’Excellence (LabEx)–Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL) Universite´ Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cite,´ Paris, France [email protected], [email protected] Abstract young children say, we assume the mechanisms of this understanding process deserve formal analysis Early, initial utterances by children have received and, unless compelling reasons to the contrary be relatively little attention from researchers on lan- given, incorporation within some notion of gram- guage acquisition and almost no attempts to de- mar. It is clear that such a notion will rely, even scribe them using a formal grammar. In this pa- more than is the case for adult spoken interaction, per we develop a taxonomy for such utterances, in- on a detailed theory of context. spired by a study of the Providence corpus from In this paper we develop a taxonomy for early CHILDES and driven by the need to describe how child utterances. In contrast to previous work, the contents of early child utterances arise from an summarized in section 2 which was strongly based interaction of form and dialogical context. The re- on speech act theory and paid little attention to sults of our corpus study demonstrate that even at the fine structure of semantic combinatory mecha- this early stage quite intricate semantic mechanisms nisms, our own taxonomy, developed in section 3, are in play, including non-referential meaning, akin based on the Providence corpus from CHILDES to non–specific readings of quantifiers.
    [Show full text]
  • Classifying Communicative Acts in Mother-Infant Interaction
    See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290858660 Classifying communicative acts in mother-infant interaction Article in Journal of Communication Disorders · January 1994 CITATIONS READS 7 230 4 authors, including: Anat Ninio Catherine E. Snow Hebrew University of Jerusalem Harvard University 76 PUBLICATIONS 2,166 CITATIONS 261 PUBLICATIONS 16,933 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Pamela Rosenthal Rollins University of Texas at Dallas/ Callier Center for Commu… 33 PUBLICATIONS 703 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Pathways to early social communication View project Interactive approach to language development View project All content following this page was uploaded by Pamela Rosenthal Rollins on 10 March 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. J. COMMUN. DISORD. 27 (1991). 1.57-187 CLASSIFYING COMMUNICATIVE ACTS IN CHILDREN’S INTERACTIONS ANAT NINIO, CATHERINE E. SNOW, BARBARA A. PAN, and PAMELA R. ROLLINS H&-w Urliwn,it~.Jerrtscrlem and Hori,crrtl hiwtxiry, C’mrhrid~cy~ Describing speakers’ repertoires of communicative intents and rules for expressing those intents is crucial to any complete description of the language capacity. Many different systems for classifying speakers’ communicative intents have been devel- oped and used in research analyzing both the acquisition of speech acts and the nature of the communicative deficits shown by various language-impaired popula- tions. We argue, though. that these systems have typically been limited in scope, in applicability across the full developmental range, or in their theoretical foundations. The criteria for an adequate system for analyzing communicative intents are dis- cussed.
    [Show full text]
  • Is Early Speech Situational? the Relation of Early Utterances to The
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 339 479 PS 020 073 AUTHOR Ninio, Anat TITLE Is Early Speech Situational? TheRelation of Early Utterances to the Context. SPONS AGENCY United States-Israel BinationalScience Foundation, Jerusalem (Israel). PUB DATE Apr 91 CONTRACT 83F-84-00267-1; BSF-2467-81 NOTE 32p.; Paper presented at the BiennialMeeting of the Society for Research in Child Development(Seattle, WA, April 18-20, 1991). PUB TYPE Reports - Research/Technical (143) -- Speeches/Conference Papers (150) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Child Language; *Classification; *ContextEffect; Foreign Countries; Hebrew; *Infants;*Language Acquisition; Language Research; LongitudinalStudies; Mothers; *Parent Child Relationship;Social Environment; Speech Communication IDENTIFIERS Israel ABSTRACT A study on children's speech isprefaced by an extensive theoretical discussion. Anattempt to construct a taxonomy that captured psychologically real,discrete types of communicative acts in mother-child interactions wasbased on the insight that verbal utterances are social acts that aremeaningful in particular social situations. The taxonomy wasformulated from an analysis of mother-infant interactions and a study ofsociological theories. The key distinction made in the taxonomy isbetween the presence and separation of the communicants.Utterances are classified into several types, including: negotiations,markings, evaluations, conversations, performances, acknowledgements,metacommunication, and text editing. In all, the taxonomydistinguishes 65 types of talk. FroM this taxonomy, other researchershave developed abridged verbal utterance coding systems. The studyinvestigated the possibility that utterances are produced as responses tosituations or as expressions of communicative intent. The speechinterRctions of two samples.of Israeli Hebrew-speaking, mother-infant dyads wereanalyzed. Results indicated that even though infants made morecontext-embedded utterances at 10 months of age than atle months, those utterances accounted for only 30 percent of allutterances.
    [Show full text]
  • A Descriptive Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Head Start Teachers Regarding Early Literacy Development
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1992 A Descriptive Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Head Start Teachers Regarding Early Literacy Development Nancy Lessel Lind Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Lind, Nancy Lessel, "A Descriptive Study of the Beliefs and Practices of Head Start Teachers Regarding Early Literacy Development" (1992). Dissertations. 3236. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3236 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1992 Nancy Lessel Lind LOYOIA UNNERSITY CHICAGO A DESCRIPTNE STUDY OF THE BELIEFS AND PRACTICES OF HEAD SfART TEACHERS REGARDING EARLY LITERACY DEVELOPMENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ERIKSON INSTITUTE BY NANCY LESSEL LIND CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 1992 Copyright by Nancy Lind, 1992 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all the members of my committee for their generous contributions of time helping me develop and write this study. Special thanks are due to my chairman, Joan Mclane, for her steady support and gentle encouragement. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Department of Human Services of the city of Chicago and all the Head Start delegate agencies that authorized the research.
    [Show full text]
  • Quasy 2019 First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax
    Quasy 2019 First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019) Proceedings August 26, 2019 held within the SyntaxFest 2019, 26–30 August Paris, France c 2019 The Association for Computational Linguistics Order copies of this and other ACL proceedings from: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 209 N. Eighth Street Stroudsburg, PA 18360 USA Tel: +1-570-476-8006 Fax: +1-570-476-0860 [email protected] ISBN 978-1-950737-65-9 Preface The first edition of Quasy was part of the first SyntaxFest, a grouping of four events, which took place in Paris, France, during the last week of August: the Fifth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2019) • the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy) • the 18th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2019) • the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2019) • The use of corpora for NLP and linguistics has only increased in recent years. In NLP, machine learn- ing systems are by nature data-intensive, and in linguistics there is a renewed interest in the empirical validation of linguistic theory, particularly through corpus evidence. While the first statistical parsers have long been trained on the Penn treebank phrase structures, dependency treebanks, whether natively annotated with dependencies, or converted from phrase structures, have become more and more popu- lar, as evidenced by the success of the Universal Dependency project, currently uniting 120 treebanks in 80 languages, annotated in the same dependency-based scheme. The availability of these resources has boosted empirical quantitative studies in syntax. It has also lead to a growing interest in theoretical ques- tions around syntactic dependency, its history, its foundations, and the analyses of various constructions in dependency-based frameworks.
    [Show full text]
  • Language and the Learning Curve: a New Theory of Syntactic
    102 Book Reviews LANGUAGE AND THE LEARNING cilitates future performance. Thus, CURVE: A NEW THEORY OF SYN- when the cumulative number of verbs TACTIC DEVELOPMENT. Anat Ninio. in a particular construction is plotted Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. over time, a power-law speed-up pp. 206. Price: £26.00, US $59.50. ISBN function is seen (Chapter 2). Children 9780199299829. do not generalize a verb’s valency frame to semantically similar verbs How do children acquire the syntax of (Chapters 3 and 4): The age at which a their native language? One popular child will use a particular verb in a view is that children are born with particular construction is predicted by some knowledge of syntax and that the overall number of verbs—not by the acquisition consists largely of linking number of semantically similar verbs— these abstract rules to the particular that she has previously used in this language that the child is learning (e.g. construction. Pinker, 1989). The opposite view is that One problem for Ninio’s account children form abstract syntactic con- concerns the origin of the ‘Merge’ op- structions by abstracting across utter- eration. The central claim of this ac- ances in the input that instantiate them count is that ‘children do not form (e.g. Tomasello, 2003). Ninio rejects abstract rules’ (p. 4), but what is a ‘very both these accounts, instead arguing general principle’ (p .31) that can that ‘children learn a lexicalist syntax, combine items as diverse as the1man in which the syntactic structure and saw1it if not an abstract rule? of the sentence is projected from the Furthermore, Ninio assumes that lexicon’ (p.
    [Show full text]
  • Guidelines for Papers Or Articles
    Guidelines for Papers or Articles Title TESOL Symposium on Teaching English to Younger Learners (USA/Mexico) Abstract Audience: ELT educators worldwide, especially in the U.S. and Mexico Type of paper: presentations Overview of the symposium: The TESOL Symposium on Teaching English to Younger Learners was held on November 9, 2002, at Southwestern College, Chula Vista, California, USA. Designed with ESL and EFL perspectives in mind, the program was developed by ESOL professionals in the United States and Mexico. The featured speakers were Mary Lou McCloskey, Myriam Monterrubio, and Catherine Snow. Rosalia Salinas led the closing session. Abstract for each paper: Seven Instructional Principles for Teaching Young Learners of English Mary Lou McCloskey, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA Current research—combining both classic principles and recent findings—on how language is learned, characteristics of young learners, and how brains process language provide important theoretical basis to teachers of young learners of English. This presentation will summarize key aspects of this research into seven instructional principles of an activity-based, communicative model for teaching English to young learners. Examples of classroom structures and strategies that demonstrate these principles in action will be depicted. Mary Lou McCloskey is a faculty member of applied linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia USA, where she also earned her Ph.D. in educational leadership. She holds a M.S. in early childhood education from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York USA. Some of her other professional experience includes teacher educator and consultant to programs on ESOL curriculum and teacher development, designer and teacher of Georgia ESOL endorsement courses, and curriculum development of Pre-K–12 ESOL programs.
    [Show full text]
  • Negative Evidence on the Verb Island Hypothesis*
    Psychology of Language and Communication 2003, Vol. 7, No. 1 ANAT NINIO The Hebrew University, Jerusalem NO VERB IS AN ISLAND: NEGATIVE EVIDENCE ON THE VERB ISLAND HYPOTHESIS* The Verb Island hypothesis (Tomasello, 1992) is a theory of how children develop verbal argument structure constructions. It claims that young children’s verbs are islands, each developing its own mini-syntax independently of other verbs. Simple patterns are learned by imitation; more complex ones develop from the simpler antecedents for each verb separately. Recent research findings do not support the insularity hypothesis, showing considerable inter-item transfer in children’s earliest syn- tax. The present study tested the second claim of this theory regarding the construction of complex schemas from simpler antecedents. The original analysis of searching the Travis corpus for antece- dents of 3-word sentences was repeated, concentrating only on novel verbal argument constructions. The results showed that 40% of the verbs in novel SVO constructions had no antecedent uses in the corpus, and none of the VIO patterns had. Regardless of the presence or absence of antecedent paradigms, the development of the SVO pattern for new verbs was facilitated by other verbs previo- usly learned in the same syntactic construction. The findings make it unlikely that more complex verbal argument structure constructions develop by combining less complex constructions for the relevant verbs. New constructions are probably learned from the linguistic input, the learning task facilitated by transfer from the syntax of other verbs. Apparently, children’s developing grammar is not a collection of verb-islands but a system from day one.
    [Show full text]