Author: gustavorernesto

PDF #34 – Zhou Li-na – Loan Words in Modern English and Their Features 

Loan Words is a term adopted from a source language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. With rapid process of globalization, interconnections among countries in areas of economics, politics, culture, science, and technology get strengthened.

As a result of this, English, as the world language, has borrowed a large number of words from foreign languages like French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese Japanese, Greek, Spanish, Arabian, etc. According to surveys, the percentage of modern English words derived from each language is 29% from French, 29% from Latin, 26% from German, and 6% from Greek, the rest accounting for 6%. This paper probes into loan words in modern English with the aim to facilitate English learning in EFL (English as a Foreign Language).

A deeper understanding on loan words?

A loanword is distinguished from a calque (or loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by word-for-word translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.

Examples of loanwords in the English language include café (from French café, which literally means “coffee”), bazaar (from Persian bāzār, which means “market”), and kindergarten (from German Kindergarten, which literally means “children’s garden”).

The word calque is a loanword from the French noun calque (“tracing; imitation; close copy”); while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are calques of the German nouns Lehnwort and Lehnübersetzung.

Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.

Strictly speaking, the term loanword conflicts with the ordinary meaning of loan in that something is taken from the donor language without it being something that is possible to return.

The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language (the superstrate)

Loan Words in Modern English

English has gone through many periods in which large numbers of words from a particular language were borrowed. These periods coincide with times of major cultural contact between English speakers and those speaking other languages. The waves of borrowing during periods of especially strong cultural contacts are not sharply delimited, and can overlap. For example, the Norse influence on English began already in the 8th century A.D. and continued strongly well after the Norman Conquest brought a large influx of Norman French to the language.

It is part of the cultural history of English speakers that they have always adopted loanwords from the languages of whatever cultures they have come in contact with. There have been few periods when borrowing became unfashionable, and there has never been a national academy in Britain, the U.S., or other English-speaking countries to attempt to restrict new loanwords, as there has been in many continental European countries.

After reading “Loan Words in Modern English” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs.

PDF #33 -Heike Behrens – Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquistion

It was long considered to be impossible to learn grammar based on linguistic experience alone. In the past decade, however, advances in usage-based linguistic theory, computational linguistics, and developmental psychology changed the view on this matter.

So-called usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition state that language can be learned from language use itself, by means of social skills like joint attention, and by means of powerful generalization mechanisms. This paper first summarizes the assumptions regarding the nature of linguistic representations and processing.

Usage-based theories are nonmodular and nonreductionist, i.e., they emphasize the form-function relationships, and deal with all of language, not just selected levels of representations. Furthermore, storage and processing is considered to be analytic as well as holistic, such that there is a continuum between children’s unanalyzed chunks and abstract units found in adult language.

In the second part, the empirical evidence is reviewed. Children’s linguistic competence is shown to be limited initially, and it is demonstrated how children can generalize knowledge based on direct and indirect positive evidence. It is argued that with these general learning mechanisms, the usage-based paradigm can be extended to multilingual language situations and to language acquisition under special circumstances.

What is the exact form and content of the uniquely human capacity to learn language? There must be a genetic component in this capacity because every normally developing child is able to learn language, and there must be an environmental component because no one is born with a specific language.

After reading this article, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF # 32 – Piet Van de Craen, Katrien Mondt, Laure Allain and
Ying Gao, Why and How CLIL Works. An Outline for CLIL Theory

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a powerful and empowering way to learn languages. At the same time the approach is in line with European language policies on the promotion and implementation of multilingualism (Commission 2005; High Level Group 2007). As a result, most CLIL research is policy-driven research.

While we do not want to question this,  it is equally legitimate to look at CLIL from a completely different point of view, namely to consider CLIL as an innovative approach to language pedagogical practices in line with modern research about language learning and teaching as well as motivational aspects, cognitive development and learning and the brain. In this paper, an intricate approach towards CLIL is put forward, which – at the same time – is presented as a research paradigm for the future.

General aims of CLIL

Maljers et al. (2007) present an overview of European CLIL practices by having authors from twenty countries reflect on CLIL practices in their respective countries. One question presented to the authors was “Describe the aims of CLIL”. It is striking to see that most authors consider as the primary aims of CLIL teaching and learning: (i) the promotion of linguistic diversity; (ii) promoting language learning; (iii) increasing the learner’s proficiency; and (iv) internationalization. These are, of course, important goals but it seems to us that CLIL opens much more opportunities for learning than were hitherto put forward.

After reading “Content and Language Integrated Learning” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #31 – Ewa Dabrowska – Words as Constructions

The average English speaker with secondary school education knows about 60,000 words; many speakers know 100,000 words or more (Miller 1996). ‘Knowing a word’ involves knowing a variety of things: its phonological form, grammatical properties, meaning, and, for some words at least, the social contexts and genres in which it is normally used (e.g. the word horsy is used primarily in informal spoken language, while equestrian is much more formal).

It is also a matter of degree: a person may have only passive knowledge of a particular word, i.e. be able to recognize it but not produce it, or have only a rough idea of its meaning: for example, one might know that trudge is a verb of motion without being aware what specific kind of motion it designates. At the other extreme, many speakers have very detailed representations which enable them to distinguish trudge from near-synonyms such as plod, yomp, and lumber.

How is such knowledge acquired? To answer this question, it will be useful to make a distinction between ‘basic’ and ‘non-basic’ vocabulary. By ‘basic vocabulary’ I mean words designating relatively concrete entities which are learned early in development in the context of face-to-face interaction, where the extralinguistic context offers a rich source of information about meaning.

After reading “Words as Constructions” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #30 – Croft – Beyond Aristotle

Aarts (2004) argues that the best way to model grammatical categories is a compromise preserving Aristotelian form classes with sharp boundaries on the one hand, and allowing gradience in terms of the number of syntactic properties that a category member possesses on the other.

But the assumption of form classes causes serious theoretical and empirical problems. Constructions differ in their distributional patterns, but no a priori principles exist to decide which constructions should be used to define form classes.

Grammatical categories must be defined relative to specific constructions; this is the position advocated in Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). Constructionally defined categories may have sharp boundaries, but they do not divide words into form classes.

Nevertheless, the most important traditional intuitions for parts of speech (Aarts’ chief examples) are reinterpretable in terms of crosslinguistic universals that constrain distributional variation but do not impose Aristotelian form classes, gradable or not, on the grammars of particular languages.

What is the nature of grammatical categories? The answers to this question have mirrored the answers to the more general question of categorization. For many centuries, the answer has been the Aristotelian one: categories have sharp boundaries, and are defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. In the last century, however, a new approach arose, partly based on philosophical considerations, partly on the basis of psychological experiments.

In these experiments, gradient category behavior is consistently observed. This model goes under the name of ‘prototype theory’. But the theoretical interpretation of gradient category behavior has been a matter of controversy. A common view is to take it as denying the existence of sharp boundaries.

Aarts (2004; henceforth MLG) proposes a model of grammatical categories that includes both gradience and Aristotelian grammatical categories with
sharp boundaries.

After reading “Beyond Aristotle” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #29 – Al-Surmi, Mansoor – Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension

Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension – This paper is a contribution to the studies conducted for investigating the relationship between text linguistic signals and reading understanding. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that discourse markers facilitate reading understanding . The specific question addressed is whether the presence of discourse markers facilitates reading understanding at a global level (i.e., at the discourse level).

Two groups of L2 learners were given a text followed by multiple choice comprehension questions. One group was given the actual text, while the other group was given the same text with discourse markers removed. The results indicated that there were no differences in the performance of the two groups. The study concluded that presence or absence of discourse markers may have no effect on the overall representation of coherent information needed for reading understanding.

Reading comprehension is an outcome of text processing that involves the construction of a coherent cognitive representation of the information in the text. That representation is established by integrating the information provided in text units and understanding the coherence relations that bond those text units to each other (Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Cohesion, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), are realized through four main elements: connectives such as conjunctions and some lexical expressions, cataphoric and anaphoric references, substitution as in using pronouns instead of nouns, and ellipsis. These features act together to structure text information in a coherent way for readers.

According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers’ comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through examining the subjects’ recognition of DMs. To carry out the research, 86 Iranian sophomores majoring in English took a test of DMs alongside a RC test. The correlation between their scores on the two tests was calculated using the software SPSS. The analysis revealed that there is high correlation between the students’ knowledge of DMs (i.e., their correct recognition of discourse markers) and their reading comprehension (rxy = .71). Moreover, high correlation carries a strong regression power and scores on a test of DMs could be a good indicator of the test takers’ reading ability.

After reading this article you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

English Approaches to Discourse – The present study is an investigation of how English has been conceptualized in the discourses of ten Brazilian English language teachers with diverse language teaching experiences.

PDF #28 – Eduardo Figueiredo – Conceptualizations of English in the discourses of Brazilian language teachers

Discourses of major agents in Brazilian English language teaching (ELT) – mainly the media, language schools, and the Ministry of Education through its national guidelines – usually associate English with notions of mobility, empowerment, and international ownership. 

The understanding of how English language educators conceptualize the language thus provides a valuable perspective on how these discourses may be taken on and reproduced by teachers. Such understanding is also relevant because educators have firsthand experience in what actually goes on inside schools, thus being able to provide important accounts that are based on real life examples of their practices.

The accounts of the teachers presented here signal that there is a belief that mobility and empowerment – often associated with English – do not necessarily come with the language, but are actually often seen as assets that one must have in order to be able to learn it in the first place. According to the teachers interviewed in this study, this is usually the case with students who
have no interest in learning the language simply because they do not envision themselves traveling outside of Brazil. Therefore, based on these participants’ accounts, the case of Brazil seems similar to those of other expanding circle countries – such as Argentina, China, Japan, and Ukraine, to cite a few (see, for instance, Hu, 2008; Niño-Murcia, 2003; Nishino & Watanabe, 2008; Nunan, 2003; Tarnopolsky, 1996; Zappa-Holman, 2007) – where larger discourses about English (promoted by pedagogical policies, for instance) are all too often very detached from the realities of local schools, teachers, and students.

After reading “English Approaches to Discourse” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #27 – The History of Teaching English as a Foreign Language from a British and European Perspective

This article offers an overview of historical developments in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching methodology over the last 250 years. Being based on periods rather than methods, it is intended as an alternative kind of account to the ‘method mythologies’ which have tended to dominate professional thinking for the last thirty years.

Thus, we structure our account according to four periods characterized by main concerns and overall approaches, revealing greater continuity and overlap among teaching theories and practices than in accounts which accept discrete, bounded ‘methods’ as the primary unit of organization. Confronting a conception of the past typically presented as universal but in fact reflecting a USA-centric perspective, our alternative, UK-focused and, to some extent, European version of history asserts the value of explicit geographical contextualization and indicates a new direction for the history of EFL teaching — ‘beyond method’, and in multiple locations.

In the Western world back in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, foreign language learning was associated with the learning of Latin and Greek, both supposed to promote their speakers’ intellectuality. At the time, it was of vital importance to focus on grammatical rules, syntactic structures, along with rote memorisation of vocabulary and translation of literary texts. There was no provision for the oral use of the languages under study; after all, both Latin and Greek were not being taught for oral communication but for the sake of their speakers’ becoming “scholarly?” or creating an illusion of “erudition.” Late in the nineteenth century, the Classical Method came to be known as the Grammar Translation Method, which offered very little beyond an insight into the grammatical rules attending the process of translating from the second to the native language.

It is widely recognised that the Grammar Translation Method is still one of the most popular and favourite models of language teaching, which has been rather stalwart and impervious to educational reforms, remaining a standard and sine qua non methodology. With hindsight, we could say that its contribution to language learning has been lamentably limited, since it has shifted the focus from the real language to a “dissected body” of nouns, adjectives, and prepositions, doing nothing to enhance a student’s communicative ability in the foreign language.

After reading “The History of Teaching English” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.