Alice Yin Wa Chan

Form‐focused remedial instruction:an empirical study

This article reports on an empirical study exploring the effectiveness of giving oral remedial instruction to secondary and university students using a consciousness-raising approach. The focus of remedial instruction was three high-frequency lexico-grammatical anomalies: ‘pseudo-tough movement’, the verb concern and the related adjective concerned, and the connective on the contrary. The instrument consisted of two identical tests before treatment (pre-test) and after treatment (post-test), as well as a delayed post-test with different test items. The tests were also administered to some control groups, but while the experimental groups received treatment using a rigorous consciousness-raising approach, the control groups received a milder version of it. It is found that effective acquisition took place and both the experimental and control groups show significant improvement in their performance. Where conditions of treatment were the same, students in the experimental group slightly outperformed those in the control group, suggesting that a model of remedial instruction structured in the form of proceduralized steps supported by explicit rules is more manageable and therefore more conducive to acquisition.

The Effectiveness of Using a Bilingualized Dictionary for Determining Noun Countability and Article Selection

This article discusses the use of a bilingualized dictionary, namely Oxford Advanced Learners English–Chinese Dictionary 8 (OALECD8), by advanced Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners in the determination of noun countability and associated article use. A homogenous group of 30 English majors in a local university participated in the study, which consisted of a noun countability and article selection task without and with the use of the dictionary. The results show that although bilingualized dictionaries are useful in helping learners determine noun countability and associated article use, learners often misinterpret dictionary information and model on inappropriate structures, resulting in article errors and/or wrong countability judgments. Chinese translations are also sometimes sources of errors. The results of the study provide lexicographers with signposts to the selection of noun information to be included in a learners dictionary. More explicit information about noun countability and related article use should be provided in a more user-friendly arrangement. ESL teachers are also advised to engage advanced learners in analyses uncovering the different syntactic requirements of equivalent vocabulary items in the target and source languages when using a bilingualized dictionary.