Thomas C. Cooper

Processing of Idioms by L2 Learners of English

This study investigated the on-line processing strategies used by a sample of nonnative speakers of English who were asked to give the meanings of selected common idioms presented in a written context. Data were collected by means of the think-aloud procedure: Participants were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they arrived at the meanings of the idioms. Analysis revealed that most of the participants engaged in a heuristic approach to idiom comprehension, employing a variety of strategies through trial and error to find the meanings of the idioms. Models of L1 idiom acquisition did not apply well to the comprehension of idioms by the L2 users. Some pedagogical suggestions derived from the findings are included.

Measuring Written Syntactic Patterns of Second Language Learners of German.

AbstractThe present study was designed to analyze by quantitative methods a corpus of writing produced by four levels of American college students and by one group of professional German writers. Analysis was undertaken to (a) determine whether or not significant quantitative differences in the use of selected syntactic structures exist between the five groups; and (b) test the validity of the Hunt method of measuring syntactic maturity when applied to the writing of second language learners and native Germans. Basically, the Hunt method measures syntactic acquisition by quantifying the rate of occurrence of sentence-embedding transformation in writing samples. The findings indicate that developmental stages in the acquisition of written German syntax did exist in this study and that these stages were most clearly definable between every other level. Hunts method of measuring syntactic maturity was successfully applied to measuring second language acquisition. In addition, some comparisons were made betw...

Parent Involvement in Teaching Elementary-Level Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

A year-long, federally funded curriculum project between an elementary school and a state university is described in which international parents from the community were trained as instructors of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In Phase 1 of the project, classes of selected students from Grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 were formed and taught by foreign-language education graduate students who were native speakers of the 3 Asian languages. In Phase 2, after the language classes were well established, videotapes were made to help train 3 selected native-speaking parents who, in Phase 3, took over instruction of the classes. Qualitative data that were collected by interviews and observations indicated that students were very positive and benefited greatly from this parent-involvement model, which can be used easily by other schools to establish programs to teach these critical, but less commonly taught languages.