Teachers Input In Efl Classrooms A Lexical Analysis
- 1. Teachers’ input in EFL classrooms: A lexical analysis MA student: Marija Radenkovic Supervisor: Dr Imma Miralpeix Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts English Studies Department July 2010
- 2. Review of the literature The importance of Input: Input is a crucial element in the SLA process (Corder, 1985; Hedge, 1983) and theories: 1. Connectionism 2. Interactionism 3. Generavism 4. Cognitivism 2
- 3. Review of the literature The importance of vocabulary for L2 learners: “Acquisition = Vocabulary + Other types of competence” (Barcroft. 2004) • Lack of vocabulary prevents FL students from successful communication, affects their reading ability and comprehension, prevents them from achieving native-like performance, etc. • More than 80% of children in Europe currently study FL from before age of 8, and most of their oral input comes only from their teachers in FL classrooms (Donzelli, 2007). Very limited research is done on characteristics of teachers' vocabulary input in SL/FL classrooms. 3
- 4. Review of the literature Teacher’s input in FL classrooms: 1. Quantitative characteristics of vocabulary in teachers’ input • Meara, Lightbown & Halter (1997) • Lightbown, Meara & Halter (1999) • Horst (2009) • Horst (2010) 2. Qualitative characteristics of vocabulary in teacher’s input • Chaudron (1982) • Ellis & He (1999) • Tang & Nesi (2003) 4
- 5. Aims of the study This research aims at: 1 Characterizing both quantitatively and qualitatively the input coming from different non-native teachers in low-level EFL class from a lexical point of view. 2. Checking if the input provided by teachers could be a reason to explain significant proficiency changes in two groups of students in a school year. 5
- 6. Method: Participants and data Teachers T1 (2007/08) T2 (2008/09) School A Class 1 Beatriz Class 1 Martina Class 1 Laura Class 1 Nuria School B Class 2 Laura Class 2 Nuria Students 32 per class Age: 7 – 8 years (T1); 8 – 9 years (T2) Catalan/Spanish bilinguals Data School selection: Listening proficiency tests (T1 & T2) 6 transcriptions 6
- 7. Method: Procedure and tools Preliminary analysis • Rejected categories: Proper nouns, interjections, immediate repetitions, contractions modified... • Semi-automatized L1 and L3 word counting. Quantitative analysis • Tools: VocabProfile, D_Tools and CLAWS word tagger. Qualitative analysis • Chaudron’s framework – reduced and adapted. 7
- 8. Preliminary analysis results Total number of English Class Total number of words Total number of L1 words Class1 1710 (100%) 1320 (77.2%) 390 (22.8%) T1 Beatriz 1464 (8.6%) Students 246 (14.4%) Beatriz 1191 (69.6%) Students 129 (7.5%) Beatriz 273 (16.0%) Students 117 (6.8%) SCHOOL A Class1 1529 (100%) 591 (38.7%) 938 (61.3%) T2 Martina 1365 (89.3%) Students 164 (10.7%) Martina 476 (31.1%) Students 115 (7.5%) Martina 889 (58.1%) Students 49 (3.2%) Class1 775 (100%) 24 (3.1%) 751 (96.1%) T1 Laura 663 (85.5%) Students 112 (14.5%) Laura 2 (0.3%) Students 22 (2.8%) Laura 661 (85.3%) Students 90 (11.6%) Class1 1092 (100%) 29 (2.7%) 1063 (97.3%) T2 Nuria 865 (79.2%) Students 227 (20.8%) Nuria 3 (0.3%) Students 26 (2.4%) Nuria 862 (78.9%) Students 201 (18.4%) SCHOOL B 1422 (100%) 83 (5.8%) 1339 (94.2%) Class2 T1 Laura 1017 (71.5%) Students 405 (28.5%) Laura 70 (4.9%) Students 13 (0.9%) Laura 886 (62.3%) Students 453 (31.9%) Class2 1862 (100%) 141 (7.6%) 1721 (92.4%) T2 Nuria 1439 (77.3%) Students 423 (22.7%) Nuria 103 (5.5%) Students 38 (2.0%) Nuria 1336 (71.8%) Students 385 (20.7%) L1 and L3 usage differs greatly in School A and School B. Where teachers use more L1, students use it more as well. Two teachers in School A differ in their L3 input to a large extent. 8
- 9. Quantitative analysis results VocabProfile results NATION’S WORDS School A School B LISTS Beatriz Martina Laura Class1 Nuria Class1 Laura Class2 Nuria Class2 1st 1000 wordlist tokens 89.7% 89.8% 93.1% 93.8% 87.9% 81.4% 2nd 1000 wordlist tokens 6.2% 3.0% 5.6% 3.8% 8.2% 7.6% AWL list tokens 0.0% 1.3% 0.0% 0.1% 3.4% 0.0% ‘Unusual’ tokens 4.0% 5.9% 1.2% 2.3% 0.5% 11.0% D_Tools results • Lexical richness in School A increases from T1 to T2. • Results on School B are not so clear-cut. • Average D of our EFL classes ranges from 40 to 50. 9
- 10. Quantitative analysis results CLAWS word tagger results DECODED TYPE School A School B T1 (Class1) T2 (Class1) T1 (Class1) T2 (Class1) T1 (Class2) T2 (Class2) CONTENT WORDS (Open-class words) adjectives 7 14 19 20 20 20 nouns 30 69 50 63 40 75 base form of lexical verb 6 19 22 24 15 25 adverbs 7 13 14 13 12 9 FUNCTION WORDS (Closed-class words) prepositions 3 8 1 9 8 13 pronouns 3 7 10 6 9 7 • More content words than function words • Nouns are the category most widely used • School B: more nouns, adjectives, verbs and prepositions • School A: double difference between the teachers 10
- 11. Qualitative analysis results Laura Laura Nuria Nuria Categories: Subcategories: Beatriz Martina Class1 Class2 Class1 Class2 Synonyms 4 10 2 4 2 1 Syntactic structures Parallelism 2 3 2 2 1 1 Discourse structures (Lexical cohesion Repetitions 28 25 13 33 61 47 devices) Semantic-cognitive Translation to L1 14 14 - 1 4 1 relationships (equivalent) Translation to L3 2 3 - 1 1 1 Translation to L3 example: “T: …què t’agrada seria I like” (School B Class1 T1) “T: …anem a posar, let’s put, come here and you say let’s put…” (School A Class1 T2) • Non-immediate repetitions are mostly used treatments • School A: more treatments variability, mostly elaborating in L1 • School B: less treatments variability, mostly using repetitions 11
- 12. Discussion: Aim 1 Input with frequent words Vocabulary recycling. (VocabProfile) reinforcing word-knowledge (Nation, 1990; Schmitt, 2008) Different from Vassiliu (written input) More content words (nouns) Easier to learn, more imaginable (Rodgers, 1969) Repetitions and translations Poor lexical environments (according to previous research) Not necessarily wrong, according to the low-level of learners 12
- 13. Discussion: Aim 2 • Completely different situation from the one expected: less FL in School A more FL in School B • School A: • Teacher was elaborating on new vocabulary using L1 (easier for learners) • School B: • Just L3 use (probably more difficult for learners to grasp?) 13
- 14. Conclusion Explored the FL lexical input offered by non-native teachers in low-level classrooms (using quantitative and qualitative means). A number of inferences can be made from the input analyzed (and in comparison to previous studies) Non-native teachers’ input differs from input coming from native teachers (Chaudron’s study) Tried to see if teachers’ input could explain significant differences in learners’ proficiency within a year. No clear answer, more data and other indices should be taken into consideration A preliminary action to conduct studies of classrooms as lexical environments in our context 14
- 15. Limitations and further research Limitations: small amount of data, proficiency assessed only by listening tests, lack of control of some variables previous to data collection. Further research: native vs. non-native teachers comparison, planned/unplanned vocabulary controlled (uptake), learners’ previous vocabulary knowledge explored… 15
- 16. THANK YOU Acknowledgement The European Research project on Primary Schools in the framework of which the data was collected 16