Kenneth Reeder

The emergence of illocutionary skills

A psycholinguistic experiment elicits highly reliable judgements from young English-speaking children aged 2; 6–3; 0 about illocutionary force of utterances presented in controlled contexts. Puppet play simulated extralinguistic features judged capable of constituting felicity conditions upon the illocutionary acts Request and Offer. The experimental data bear upon two questions: (1) What set of features, linguistic and pragmatic, constitute cues for the discrimination of illocutionary force by young children? (2) What is the lower developmental bound of the emergence of discrimination of illocutionary force for Requests and Offers? While grasp of illocutionary force for Offers was well-established by 2; 6, discrimination skills for Requests probably continues to develop between 2; 6 and 3; 0. Relevant pragmatic features are explicated, and a model of the comprehension of illocutionary force proposed in the light of the results.

Using Time-Series Research Designs to Investigate the Effects of Instruction on SLA.

This paper argues that the study of second language acquisition theory and pedagogy can be enhanced through the use of time-series research designs. As quasi-experiments, time-series designs have features that improve internal validity. In addition, because these designs only require a small number of subjects, they are very practical, encouraging a greater number of empirical investigations of the many claims within the field and permitting the use of authentic measures that have high construct validity. The longitudinal nature of the designs also enhances construct validity, potentially yielding new insights into the effects of instruction on SLA. The designs utilized in two time-series studies (Kennedy, E., 1988, The Oral Interaction of Native Speakers and Non-Native Speakers in a Multicultural Preschool: A Comparison between Freeplay and Contrived NS/NSS Dyads , unpublished masters thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Mellow, J. D., 1996, April, A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Instruction on the Development of Article Use by Adult Japanese ESL Learners , unpublished manuscript, University of British Columbia, Vancouver) are reviewed in order to illustrate the design features, the questions that may be investigated, and the issues that are raised in interpreting data.

Falling Through the Cultural Gaps? Intercultural communication challenges in cyberspace.

In this paper we report findings of a study of online participation by culturally diverse participants in a distance adult education course offered in Canada, and examine two of the study’s early findings. First, we explore both the historical and cultural origins of “cyberculture values” as manifested in our findings, using the notions of explicit and implicit enforcement of those values. Second, we examine the notion of “cultural gaps” between participants in the course and the potential consequences for online communication successes and difficulties. We also discuss theoretical perspectives from Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, Genre and Literacy Theory and Aboriginal Education that may shed further light on “cultural gaps” in online communications. Finally, we identify the need for additional research, primarily in the form of larger scale comparisons across cultural groups of patterns of participation and interaction, but also in the form of case studies that can be submitted to microanalyses of the form as well as the content of communicator’s participation and interaction online.

Relationships between early literate experience and knowledge and children's linguistic pragmatic strategies

Abstract A three-year study of 67 three- and four-year-olds assessed the impact of literate aspects of home environment and early knowledge about literacy upon strategies for comprehension of directive illocutionary acts. It was hypothesized that children inclined toward what Olson has termed a ‘literate bias’ in language use would tend to locate meaning within the linguistic element of illocutionary acts rather than making appropriate use of context in the comprehension process. Baseline measures of literate experience and knowledge were administered in the first year of the study. These included Shapiros Home Literacy Environment Index, Clays Concepts About Print test, and two subtests of Downings Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness battery. Metaliteracy factors were then derived from these and several additional early literacy measures. An illocutionary act comprehension task employed puppet play set in realistic contexts, with the linguistic element of each task item presented both in full and in phonologically-distorted form. This provided a means of assessing the extent to which subjects required intact linguistic information in order to assign illocutionary force to an utterance. Children on the higher ends of the home literacy environment scale and several of the measures of print concepts demonstrated more linguistic rather than contextual dependence, and did so up to a year sooner than children on the lower ends of the scales, regardless of chronological age. The results offer support to the claim that there is a bias in one general pragmatic process for those children who have been more extensively socialized into literate uses of language.

Children's speech act comprehension strategies and early literacy experiences

Our previous research showed a developmental shift in young childrens speech act processing, from more context-dependent to more lan guage-dependent strategies. To what extent is this shift related to early literacy experiences and knowledge? The first study examined the speech act comprehension of 64 three- and four-year-old subjects from a university preschool. Subjects were required to choose one of two paraphrases which most closely matched the pragmatic intention of a stimulus utterance. These stimulus forms were presented with puppets in a simulated preschool context previ ously shown to predispose childrens interpretations of stimulus items toward request uptakes. Subjects were exposed to both grammatical and ungrammatical examples of a range of these request types. Dif ferences in literacy experience were identified by means of a parental questionnaire. All subjects discriminated pragmatic intention significantly more reliably on grammatical items than on ungrammatical ones, but children with more extensive experiences of literacy performed poorly on the ungrammatical input, regardless of age. A second study of 41 children investigated the links between their early concepts about literacy and speech act comprehension strategies. Performance on the speech act comprehension task was analysed by grouping subjects according to their performance on two separate measures of early concepts of literacy, Clays Concepts About Print, and Downings Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness, with age group confounded. Children on the higher ends of both literacy measures again experienced difficulty when confronted with ungrammatical input in the speech act comprehension task. Results of both studies are interpreted in the context of the develop ment of linguistic awareness, and within the larger framework of the development of metacognitive representational ability.

Dilemmas in Designing Multimedia Software for Learners of English as a Second or Foreign Language

AbstractThis article reports several dilemmas that a team of university- and industry-based designers encountered as they collaborated on the design and development of a software program for teaching academic writing to intermediate English as a second or foreign language learners. The findings show that software design includes more than following a list of guidelines. Each step of the process introduces decision points as designers define a program’s purpose, content, and execution. Because many of those choices are equally valid within their own framework of values, some of these decision points create dilemmas for designers. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the effectiveness of educational software design by informing interested professionals about possible design dilemmas.

Speech Recognition Software Contributes to Reading Development for Young Learners of English

Thirty-six English language learners aged 6;8 to 12;6 years received practice with The Reading Tutor, which uses speech recognition to listen to oral reading and provides context-sensitive feedback. A crossover research design controlled effects of classroom instruction. The first subgroup worked with the software for 3.5 months, and following a weeks crossover period, the second subgroup worked for a subsequent 3.5 months. Both groups were assessed to obtain comparable gains both in regular classroom with English as an Additional Language EAL support and in the classroom condition with EAL support plus the Reading Tutor. Oral reading fluency was assessed by the DIBELS measure. Fluency was also calculated by the program, and grade level of materials mastered was assessed by the softwares logs. Both groups made significant gains in oral reading fluency and grade level of materials mastered, according to measures internal to the software. For one period, gains in fluency following experience with the program appeared to have been slightly larger than gains with regular classroom instruction and EAL support only.

Children's Attributions of Pragmatic Intentions and Early Literacy.

This study aimed to determine if there were systematic links between young school‐aged childrens awareness of others’ communicative intentions and early descriptive‐expository and narrative writing proficiency. Forty‐one English‐speaking children aged 6;2 to 8;9 years were shown a directive speech act in a puppet‐played scenario. An interview determined the types of illocutionary intention attributed to the Speaker in the staged speech act, and the basis upon which subjects believed they had made that attribution. Attributions and explanations were rated for sophistication. Samples of the participantss narrative and expository‐descriptive writing were judged for global quality and several quantitative and structural features. In the expository‐descriptive writing task, the older group of children who demonstrated superior pragmatic attribution ability scored significantly higher on the measure of overall writing quality and number of words produced than the younger group of children with superior pragmatic attribution ability. A similar pattern was found for the narrative writing task. The results suggest that the well‐documented improvement in writing ability around age seven involves a pragmatic component, and that such development is variable in systematic ways across different features and genres of writing.

Children's attributions of speakers' pragmatic intentions

but it does not come easily to a foreigner learning, Finnish. What about Finnish children’? How do they learn gemination’? A study was conducted to explain how gemination develops in a child’s spontaneous speech: at what age, in which morphemes and in which order. The data come from one cirl, and they were gathered unselectively and intensively both by hand and on audiotape from her speech at the age 1;?-5;(). There were 3038 potential gemination instances in these data. A clear developmental process was seen from