ANGLES Volume IV
Writing and Vocabulary in Foreign Language Acquisition
Editors:
Dorte Albrechtsen, Kirsten Haastrup and Birgit Henriksen
List of Contents
Editors' Preface
Luxin Yang, Kyoko Baba, and Alister Cumming
Activity Systems for ESL Writing Improvement: Case Studies
of Three Chinese and Three Japanese Adult Learners of English
Alister Cumming, Keanre Eouanzoui, Guillaume Gentil,
and Luxin Yang
Scaling Changes in Learners' Goals for Writing Improvement
over an ESL Course
Dorte Albrechtsen, Kirsten Haastrup, and Birgit Henriksen
Attention to Argumentation in Leamer Text Production:
How do We Capture Learner Ability in Argumentation?
Anna Cieslicka and David Singleton
Metaphorical Competence and the L2 Learner
Paul Meara and Brent Wolter
V-Links: Beyond Vocabulary Depth
Rob Waring and Paul Nation
Second Language Reading and Incidental Vocabulary Learning
Kirsten Haastrup, Dorte Albrechtsen, and Birgit Henriksen
Lexical Inferencing Processes in L1 and L2: Same or Different?
Focus on Issues in Design and Method
Birgit Henriksen, Dorte Albrechtsen, and Kirsten Haastrup
The Relationship between Vocabulary Size
and Reading Comprehension in the L2
Review
Ulf Hedetoft: The Scholarship of Paranationalism
A review of Jørgen Sevaldsen, editor, Britain and Denmark:
Political, Economic and Cultural Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Notes on Contributors
EDITORS' PREFACE
Introduction
This volume features eight articles on writing and vocabulary acquisition - two crucial areas of study in foreign language learning and teaching. Five contributions have come from notable research environments in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland and Wales, and we are most grateful that these authors have accepted our invitation to write an article for this issue of Angles.
Three articles derive from a collaborative project between researchers from the English departments of the University of Copenhagen and the Copenhagen Business School. This project was launched in 2001 when the editors of this volume received a large grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities for the furtherance of a research programme under the title: Processes in writing and vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language. (Go to footnote)
That generous award has provided us with the financial means to strengthen already existing links with scholars in other counhies, and to establish new contacts. Among the initiatives taken as a result were invitations to expertsin the field to come to Denmark to give guest lectures. In addition, the funding enabled us to recruit researchers from other countries as consultants for the project and visits were made by us to colleagues in other countries, which provided us with stimulation and many new ideas.
We want at this point to specify the research centres, and the individual scholars, from whose expertise we have benefited in so many ways. Colleagues from these institutions have provided us with inspiration for our project, and several have contributed papers to this volume.
A link with the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE), Canada, was established in the 1970s between the late Claus Fsrch (University of Copenhagen) and Merrill Swain (Modem Language Centre at OISE, University of Toronto). The contact with OISE has been kept up over the years and further strengthened through our present co-operation with Alister Cumming (Head of the Modem Language Centre) and Razika Sanaoui (York University, Toronto).
We are fortunate that our international network also includes three distinguished centres for vocabulary acquisition research: 'The Vocabulary Acquisition Research Group' at the University of Wales, Swansea, represented here by an article from Paul Meara and Brent Wolter; The School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, represented by an article from Robert Waring and Paul Nation; 'The Trinity College Dublin Modem Languages Research Project', Ireland, represented by an article written by David Singleton (of Trinity) in co-operation with Anna Cieslicka from the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poman, Poland.
Research on learner writing
The first section of this volume is devoted to studies of writing in a second or a foreign language (L2). The contributions address methodological issues for studying learner development in L2 writing. The research team from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education have contributed two articles to this volume. In these, they report on investigations of student goals with respect to acquiring the writing skills needed to be able to cope in the discourse community of North American universities. Their data derive from interviews with 45 students at the beginning and at theend of a composition course. The analyses reported in this volume are from the first year of a longitudinal study.
In Activity Systems for ESL Writing Improvement: Case Studies of three Chinese and three Japanese Adult Learners of English, Yang, Baba and Cumming investigate the goals of six students, using activity theory to examine the possible changes in students' goals over one semester of composition instruction. This theoretical framework gives scope for an investigation of how external factors, such as the learning environment, assistance from other people, and the use of sources of various kinds, all interact with internal factors, such as motivation, beliefs and goals. Their mode of presentation allows ample space for the voices of the individual students to be heard. In the context of this volume, it is worth noting that a major goal for the students was improvement of their vocabulary.
In the second article, Scaling Changes in Learners' Goals for Writing Improvement over an ESL Course, Cumming, Eouanzoui, Gentil and Yang analyse the goals of all 45 of the students mentioned above. They apply an innovative method of analysis, termed dual-scaling, that can handle categorical data and enables the research team to capture not only the many factors involved in developing writing skills, but also the variability of this development in a group of learners from many different language backgrounds. The dual-scaling method produces plotted graphs of the students' responses which reveal either clustering of responses in relation to the goal variables investigated, or lack of such clustering, thereby providing a firm basis for the interpretation of the students' responses.
The last article in this section reports on work within the above-mentioned project Processes in writing and vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language. The aim of the project with respect to writing is to trace the development of writing skills in learners at three educational levels, namely Grade 7, Grade 10 and first year university. The focus in the investigation is on argumentative text production in both L2 and L1. In the article entitled Attention to Argumentation in Learner Text Production: How do We Capture Learner Ability in Argumentation?, Albrechtsen, Haastrup and Henriksen address the issue of the limitations of verbal protocols. The article investigates the assumption that verbal reports produced by learners while engaged on a restricted writing task can supply information on learners' ability to argue in writing - information that might not be captured in verbal protocols produced while composing essays.
Vocabulary acquisition
Vocabulary was once regarded as a peripheral area of second language acquisition, as compared with the central position held by grammar, but lexical research has for a long time now been established as a flourishing field of study in its own right. The five contributions on vocabulary acquisition in this volume illustrate the wide scope and great breadth of the issues open to investigation, each paper offering a different perspective on vocabulary acquisition.
Singleton and Cieslicka, in their article Metaphorical Competence and the L2 learner, have philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics as their major sources of inspiration. Since Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) classic Metaphors we Live By, the view of metaphor in language studies has undergone a change, and in this paper the authors concentrate on the conceptual metaphor view of figurative language. Their discussion is reinforced by insights from cross-linguistic influences and bilingual processing; however, as the title suggests, they go much further, proceeding to discuss recent research on the acquisition of metaphorical competence in a foreign language, including Cieslicka's findings from a project on Polish learners' processing of English figurative language. In addition, the authors explain how theoretical findings may be applied to foreign language teaching.
A second perspective on vocabulary acquisition is provided by Meara and Wolter's contribution V-Links: Beyond Vocabulary Depth. To characterise the nature of the vocabulary research initiated by Meara and his colleagues - a group one may refer to as the 'Swansea school' - one needs to invoke such key concepts as psycholinguistics, organisation of the mental lexicon, and experimental methods. Along with Meara's firm belief in the need for using formal models in vocabulary acquisition research, there is also an applied strand running clearly through the work of the Swansea school, namely the development of instruments for language testing. In their contribution to this volume, the authors take up certain issues much debated in the field of vocabulary research: What exactly needs to be included in the construct of vocabulary knowledge? What role is played by the size of the individual's vocabulary? (How many words does he or she know?) In what ways are words stored in the learner's mental lexicon? (How is a particular word linked to other words?) Meara and Wolter argue that both size and organisation are significant dimensions of lexical competence and elaborate on the latter aspect through presenting recent work on the development of a new test for measuring the organisational structure of the lexicon.
The title of Waring and Nation's paper, Second Language Reading and Incidental Vocabulary Learning, highlights the fact that they take up a third perspective - with reading research as a starting point. For a long time, language teachers have commonly held the notion that students will pick up new words in a foreign language through reading, especially if the content of the reading material appeals to them. Over the last decade or so, the validity of this belief has been investigated under the heading of 'incidental vocabulary learning'. Waring and Nation review empirical studies that have attempted to measure the actual effect of reading on vocabulary acquisition. They endeavour to answer the question of just how many words students actually do acquire through reading, taking into account that typically the learners will be concentrating on meaning of the content as a whole, rather than linguistic matters such as individual words. A further research motivation behind the article is the authors' interest in vocabulary teaching issues - not least in language teaching materials such as graded readers.
The last two articles in the vocabulary section report on work from the Danish research project mentioned at the outset. The aim of that project with respect to vocabulary acquisition is to investigate the structure of the learner lexicon and lexical inferencing processes in both L1 and L2 across the three educational levels previously mentioned. (Note that the sub-study on network organisation, which directly links to issues raised in Meara and Wolter's article, is not dealt with in this volume; for a preliminary presentation of this work, see Albrechtsen, Haastrup and Henriksen, 2003.) The sub-study on lexical inferencing, reported on by Haastrup, Albrechtsen and Henriksen in this volume, reflects issues discussed in Waring and Nation's paper. A major source of inspiration for the study of lexical inferencing is comprehension research and text inferencing, notably in the context of L2 reading. The focus on unknown words and word guessing processes, however, highlights the vocabulary aspect, and thus places this investigation at a point in between studies in comprehension vis-à-vis those in vocabulary acquisition. The article by Henriksen, Albrechtsen and Haastrup also deals with the vocabulary and reading relationship, but in this case a test perspective is taken.
As mentioned above, Waring and Nation concentrate on how learners acquire words incidentally while reading. Haastrup, Albrechtsen and Henriksen's article Lexical Inferencing Processes in L1 and L2 - Same or Different: Focus on Issues in Design and Method, examines more closely the types of guessing processes involved when learners come across unknown vocabulary items in reading material, comparing the strategies of two learners both in their L1 (Danish), and their L2 (English). Cross-linguistic comparisons involving learners who differ markedly in terms of educational level need to be undertaken with great care, and require researchers to devise tasks which are as closely parallel as possible with regard to the selection of texts, the topics covered and the test words chosen. The article addresses these design issues and illustrates the type of protocol analysis involved in dealing with 'think-aloud' data.
The two previously mentioned contributions emphasise the fact that there is a strong relationship between vocabulary and reading. Most vocabulary acquisition appears to take place incidentally through reading, and a substantial knowledge and understanding of the vocabulary included in written texts are needed in order to be able to read well. Henriksen, Albrechtsen and Haastrup, in their article The Relationship Between Vocabula y Size and Reading Comprehension in the L2, explore this relationship, basing their analysis on selected testing data from the Danish elicitation battery.
Notes
1. The editors welcome this chance to acknowledge their gratitude to the Danish National Research Council for the Humanities (Statens Humanistiske Forskningsråd) for the three-year research grant which has made this project possible. We thank the participating informants as well as the many students who have assisted us with respect to data collection and many hours of data transcription. We wish to express out sincere gratitude to our research assistant Sanne Larsen not only for her great talent for organisation but notably for her insightful ideas and comments on our research. Without her dedication, the project would not have been possible. (Return to text)
References
Albrechtsen, D., Haastrup K. and Henriksen, B. (2003) 'Processes in Foreign Language Writing and Vocabulary Acquisition: Learner Development in L1 and L2', in Haastrup, K. (ed.) Studies in Second Language Acquisition: Focus on Writing and Vocabulary Development in a Foreign Language. Copenhagen Working Papers in LSP, 7, 16-70.