This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ An investigation into progress of second language in use through student responses to a task-based course set within an EAP context Jones, Carys Lloyd The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Oct. 2021 An Investigation into Progress of Second Language in Use through Student Responses to a Task-based Course set within an EAP Context Carys Lloyd Jones VOl- r Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD of the University of London, King's College London, Department of Education and Professional Studies October 2002 ABSTRACT This study investigates students' progress in using their second language in response to an integrated-skills, task-based course within an English-for-Specific-Academic-Purposes setting. Emerging from studies concerned about a "gap" perceived as existing between preparatory contexts and higher education contexts, the course was designed to assist students' development of English as a second language through use in context. Infonned by two main fields: Linguistics and Education, its theoretical framework stems from Halliday and Vygotsky. It is an in-depth, qualitative study of a small sample of Japanese students, preparing for undergraduate study through a five-month course, comprising a series of five tasks and accompanying pre-post task activities. The data sources were: students' essays and notes, students' responses to pre-post task activities, researcher's observations. Three analytical instruments were developed; two for the essays: assessment criteria, describing holistically and qualitatively language-in-use, and providing numeric scores; and a text analytic framework, providing a fine-grained analysis of language-in-use; for the other data: a learning framework, analysing students' approaches to tasks: deep, strategic, surface. Analytic results contributed to three in-depth student profiles. All three students had different progress trajectories; but common to them was jagged rather than smooth progress. Profile 1 started reasonably high, dropping slightly, returning to a high level and remaining there; Profile 2 started relatively low, reaching a higher level immediately and maintaining this; Profile 3 started very low, rising to a higher level immediately but had difficulty in maintaining this. The text analysis findings for all students showed features of language-in-use that indicate different types of progress at the textual, inter-T-unit, intra-T-unit and lexicogrammar levels, with linguistic features exemplifying success differing from those that hinder success. Approaches to tasks showed that adoption of deep and strategic approaches led to better perfonnance than adoption of a surface approach and encouraged student reflection. Student profiles suggest a possible threshold level predicting the effectiveness of such a course for students. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of people have contributed to making this thesis possible. Most importantly, I am extremely grateful to the six Japanese students who had such faith in the course as a part of their programme. They not only consented to my conducting the research with them but also contributed willingly and wholeheartedly to the sessions. Without them the study would not have been possible. Above all, it has been a great privilege to work under the guidance of Joan Bliss. Her sensitive supervision from beginning to end has been of enormous benefit in extending my thinking and I am greatly indebted to her, particularly for her unfailing support and extreme generosity in the amount of time she has given me. I have also gained valuable insights through the complementary role taken by my second supervisor, Sara Garcia-Peralta, and am grateful to her for stimulating our discussions and for her support. I am also indebted to the former School of Education, (now the Department of Education and Professional Studies) in at least three ways: firstly, for giving me the opportunity to undertake this research. As a research community it has played a crucial role in my development. I have also benefited greatly from the support, encouragement and constructive comments of Brian Street and other colleagues, who are too many to name. I am especially grateful to Constant Leung for his recent, invaluable contributions. He has generously found the time to discuss the linguistic aspects of the study in detail, suggest new perspectives, check the coding of the text analysis and generally respond to a range of queries. Other colleagues associated with The British Association of Applied Linguistics, The Systemic Functional Linguistics Network, The Learning Centre at the University of Sidney, The Language in Higher Education Research Group, the Academic Literacies Group at the Institute of Education, the Open University and the University of Lancaster Assessment Seminar Group have also been very supportive in helping me shape the direction of my research. I am grateful to Maggie Charles for undertaking to mark the essays, and to her, Patricia Howe and Vera Whiteman for their valuable comments on parts of the thesis in the early stages. Finally, I would like to thank the Central Research Fund of the University of London for the grant I received to address the reliability of the assessment. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1 Introduction: The Context for the Thesis ................................................... .. 1 1.1 The focus of the research .••••..••••.••••..•..••••.••••.••..•••..•••.••••••••.••••.••••.•••••••••••••••••••••••••• 1 2 1.2 The background to this study •.••••.••. II ••••••• II •••••••••••••• •• •••• •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• •••• 1.3 The organisation of the thesis •••••• II II II ••• It II II ••••••• II II II II II II ••• II •••• 11.1. II •• It. II II ••••••••••• II' •••• 5 2 Theoretical Considerations for the Study ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• II 6 2.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 6 2.2 The importance of context •. II •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 6 2.3 The ontogenetic nature of language use ..................................................................... 8 2.4 Second language use and the notion of communicative competence 10 2.4.1 Interlanguage ................................................................................................. 11 2.4.2 Strategic competence ..•.••.. ............................................................................. 12 2.5 Developing second language use •.........•..•.•.••••.•.••.•.••.•..•........•••..•••.•••.•••••••....••••.••.••• 14 2.5.1 Context and pedagogy ................................................................................... 14 2.5.2 Language development and the leam.ing process .................................................... 16 2.5.3 The contribution of communicative competence debates to second language development 18 2.5.4 Second language acquisition and second language learning ..................................... 20 2.5.5 Developing strategic competence ................................................................ 24 2.5.6 Approaches to learning ............................................................................... 25 2.6 Reflections ........................................................................................................ 26 3 A Student-centred Context of Learning ...................................................... 28 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 28 3.2 The main issues ................................................................................................. 28 3.3 The EAP context of study ••••••••••••.••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 29 3.4 Task-based learning ........................................................................................... 29 3.5 The design ofa task-based course as the context ofleaming ...................................... 30 3.5.1 Tasks ........................................................................................................ 31 3.5.2 Pre-task and post-task sessions ••••••.••.•••.••...••..•.••••••..•.••.••.••••••••......•.•.••••••.••••.•••