2016 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Exploring the Relationship between Productive Vocabulary Knowledge and Second Language Oral Ability
| Project/Area Number |
16K02922
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| Research Institution | Hiroshima University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
Fraser Simon 広島大学, 外国語教育研究センター, 教授 (10403510)
安仁屋 宗正 広島大学, 総合科学研究科, 教授 (60202652)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2016-04-01 – 2019-03-31
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| Keywords | language / testing / oral / ability / productive / vocabulary |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Initial aims achieved. We conducted our first study, and anticipate two publication papers.Developed testing materials in liaison with Professor DeJong at Leiden University.Recruited second language learner participants from Hiroshima University, first language English control recruited locally.
Prepared & monitored data, hired and paid research assistants for data preparation and analysis.Presented four papers at international conferences: two papers at the AAAL Portland, one at EuroSLA Finland, one at Vocab@Tokyo.2 papers currently under review in international journals (Applied Psycholinguistics, and Language Teaching Research), one paper published in TESOL Quarterly (2017).
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
We planned to elicit students from the University of Reading. This was not possible, due to their time constraints. We also anticipated conducting testing with a larger number of Japanese first language students, which proved difficult in terms of the volume of our testing. We, therefore, alloted to test fewer local students, and included (as recommended by Professor DeJong) a first language English control group in our testing. Our intention, now, is to establish the extent to which fluency ratings according to Segalowitz' (2010) exploration of 'utterence fluency'are corrected according to L1 speech. Our first study findings (30 L1 Japanese tested in both Japanese and their L2 (English) indicate correction does take place, along with differences in comparison with our L1 English control.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We plan to conduct analyses favoured by very recent developments in the field. We plan to investigate a variety of different speaking tasks, including not only the monologic tasks we employed in our initial study. We are about to test with quasi-dialogic testing (DeJong 2016), as well as dialogic testing (Tavakoli 2016). Our analysis will also incorporate different lexical analyses (Koizumi and In'nami 2017 - to include sophistication, diversity, and appropriateness. We also intend to compare our findings with other large scale battery tests common to the Japanese system (such as TOEIC). Our initial hope is that our investigation might support class placement for speaking classes within the tertiary sector (on the basis that current testing is based on writing on listening, not speaking).
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| Causes of Carryover |
We need the sum for subsequent RA costs, we anticipate that in the next two studies that there will need to be significant spending for the research assistants.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
We anticipate processing data on a very big scale - so need to pay research assistants for data processing as well analysis, and also to pay participants for their contribution.
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