Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Vol 26 4
Vol 26 4
Vol 26 4
Editor
SANDRA SILBERSTEIN, University of Washington
Associate Editor
SANDRA McKAY, San Francisco State University
Review Editor
HEIDI RIGGENBACH. University of Washington
-
Brief Reports and Summaries Editors
GAIL WEINSTEIN-SHR, San Francisco State University
Teaching Issues Editor
SANDRA McKAY, San Francisco State University
Assistant Editors
DEBORAH GREEN, University of Washington
MARILYN KUPETZ, TESOL Central Office
Editorial Assistants
CHERYL MOEN and MAUREEN P. PHILLIPS, University of Washington
Editorial Advisory Board
Roberta G. Abraham Thom Hudson
Iowa State University University of Hawaii at Manoa
Joan G. Carson Claire Kramsch
Georgia State University University of California, Berkeley
Graham Crookes Anne Lazaraton
University of Hawaii at Manoa The Pennsylvania State University
Jim Cummins
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Michael K. Legutke
Catherine Doughty Goethe Institute, Munich
The University of Sydney David Nunan
Miriam Eisenstein Macquarie University
New York University Teresa Pica
Yehia E1-Ezabi University of Pennsylvania
United Arab Emirates University/
The American University in Cairo N. S. Prabhu
Susan Gass National University of Singapore
Michigan State University Thomas Ricento
Jean Handscombe Central Michigan University
North York Board of Education, Toronto Patricia L. Rounds
Thomas Huckin University of Oregon
University of Utah
Sarah Hudelson Andrew F. Siegel
Arizona State University University of Washington
Additional Readers
H. Douglas Brown, Patricia A. Dunkel, Fred Genesee, Ann M. Johns, Liz Hamp-Lyons, Sharon Hilles, Braj Kachru, Ruth
Larimer, Ilona Leki, Leo van Lier, Michael H. Long, Peter Lowenberg, Peter, Master, Mary McGroarty, Joan Morley,
Alastair Pennycook, Patricia A. Porter, Charlene J. Sato, Thomas Scovel, Sheila M. Shannon, Margaret S. Steffensen,
Merrill Swain, James W. Tollefson, Jessica Wilkins, Lise Winer, Vivian Zamel, Jane Zuengler
Credits
Advertising arranged by Maria Minor, TESOL Central Office. Alexandria, Virginia
Typesetting by World Composition Services, Inc.
Printing and binding by Pantragraph Printing, Bloomington, Illinois
VOLUMES MENU
TESOL QUARTERLY
CONTENTS
To print, select PDF page
nos. in parentheses
ARTICLES
Statistics as a Foreign Language—Part 2: More Things to
Consider in Reading Statistical Language Studies 629 (10-45)
James Dean Brown
Demystifying the TOEFL® Reading Test 665 (46-72)
Bonny Norton Peirce
Planning, Discourse Marking, and the Comprehensibility of
International Teaching Assistants 693 (74-92)
Jessica Williams
Discourse Structure and the Perception of Incoherence in
International Teaching Assistants’ Spoken Discourse 713 (94-110)
Andrea Tyler
The Role of Conjunctions in L2 Text Comprehension 731 (112-128)
Esther Geva
REVIEWS
Publications on Grammar Teaching 749
Grammar and Second Language Teaching:
A Book of Readings
William Rutherford and Michael Sharwood Smith
Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching
William E. Rutherford
Reviewed by Peter Master
BOOK NOTICES
Grammar Textbooks 753
Steven L. Shaw, Guest Editor
English Alive: Grammar, Function, Setting,
Gail Fingado and Mary Reinbold Jerome (Steven L. Shaw)
The English Connection: A Content-Based Grammar and Discussion Text,
Gail Fingado, Leslie J. Freeman, Mary Reinhold Jerome, and
Catherine Vaden Summers (Steven L. Shaw)
Building English Structures: A Communicative Course in English,
Chuck Seibel and Russ Hodge (Shelley Gibson)
121 Common Mistakes of Japanese Students of English,
James H. M. Webb (Ron Post)
Grammar with a Purpose: A Contextualized Approach,
Myrna Knepler (Douglas Collins)
English Structure in Focus, Polly Davis (Jean Jorgensen)
Grammar Work: English Exercises in Context (Vol. 4),
Pamela Breyer (Misaki Shimada)
Volume 26, Number 4 ❑ Winter 1992
Editor’s Note
In this Issue
■ Articles in this issue of the TESOL Quarterly set out to “demystify” aspects
of our field. The lead article, the second of two parts, explicates advanced
statistics “as a foreign language.” The next article seeks to demystify the
TOEFL reading test. Two following articles investigate discourse-level
sources of the comprehensibility problems attributed to international
teaching assistants and provide suggestions to assist nonnative-speaking
teachers achieve higher levels of comprehensibility. The last paper ex-
plores the role of conjunctions in L2 text comprehension.
625
Part 2 of James Dean Brown’s article is once again addressed to those
practitioners who find themselves avoiding statistical reports. Here,
Brown explicates more advanced “statistics as a foreign language.”
Explanatory charts and sample tables illustrate the strategies sug-
gested and render his explanations both detailed and clear.
629
4. Think about what you have read in relation to your professional
experience.
5. Learn more about statistics and research design.
Each of these strategies was discussed, and examples were drawn
from another article in the same issue of the TESOL Quarterly (Brown,
1991).
In the present article, the goal will be to expand the number of
strategies that readers can use to decipher the meaning of statistical
articles to include the following five:
6. Think about the variables of focus.
7. Examine whether the correct statistical tests have been chosen.
8. Check the assumptions underlying the statistical tests.
9. Consider why the statistical tests have been applied.
10. Practice reading statistical tables and interpreting statistics.
The issues involved in advanced statistical studies are sometimes
very complex, requiring years of study to be adequately understood.
Nevertheless, this article seeks to familiarize readers with key terminol-
ogy and furnish a framework for considering advanced statistical pro-
cedures.
There is one last concept that is crucial in thinking about the vari-
ables. A nominal variable, by definition, can include a number of
categories. These categories are also called levels, particularly in refer-
ring to the number of categories. For instance, for a variable like
gender, there are two levels, female and male. For a variable like
language course of enrollment, there might be three levels—elemen-
tary, intermediate, and advanced. Naturally, there are as many levels
as there are categories within a nominal variable.
This definition of levels will prove important in thinking about statis-
tical studies because of the concept of independence. If the levels of a
variable are made up of two or more different groups of people, they
are viewed as independent. For instance, in a study comparing the
means of an experimental group and a control group, the groups can
be independent only if they were created using different groups of
people. Many statistics can only be applied if the groups being com-
pared are independent.
However, there are studies in which it might be necessary or desirable
to make repeated observations on the same group of people. For
instance, a researcher might want to compare the means of a single
group of students before and after some type of language instruction
in what is called a pretest-posttest study. Such investigations are called
repeated measures studies, and the groups can be said to lack indepen-
dence because they are the same people. When independence cannot
be assumed, different choices of statistics must be made. Thus it is
important to understand the difference between independent levels of
a variable (which were created by using different groups of people)
and repeated levels of a variable (which were created through repeated
measures or observations of the same people).
Principal Assumptions
The principal assumptions that will be discussed here are those which
come up most frequently in language studies: independence of groups
and observations, normality of the distributions, equal variances, lin-
earity, nonmulticollinearity, and homoscedasticity.
The assumption of independence of groups implies that there must be
no association between the groups in a study. Put another way, knowing
the data in one group should give no information about the data in
another group. The most obvious violations of this assumption occur
when the same people appear in more than one group. Note that
independence of groups is far from a universal assumption. Some
statistical tests assume independence of groups, whereas others allow
for repeated measures of the same people (as discussed above). Indeed,
correlation coefficients require repeated measures if they are to be
calculated at all. When assumed for a particular statistic, independence
of groups can be checked by answering one question: Is there any
FIGURE 1
Relationship Between Scores on Tests X and Y
provide a correlation table so that the reader can see that none of the
correlations is high.
The final assumption of concern here is that of homoscedasticity. This
assumption, which is often applied to statistical procedures based on
correlation and prediction, is that the variability of scores on one
variable is about the same at all values of the other variable. One way
to check this assumption is to examine a scatterplot of the two variables,
like that shown in Figure 1, and determine whether or not the points
that deviate away from the straight line are about the same distance
from the line all the way along it. For example, those data points that
do vary away from the straight line in Figure 1 do appear to be about
equal in distance from the line. Thus the assumption can be checked
roughly by examination of scatterplots.
Mean Comparisons
Correlational Analyses
DVs are related to the correlations among the IVs, canonical correla-
tion analysis would be appropriate.
When the DV is an ordinal scale and the IV is a single ordinal scale,
the appropriate form of analysis would be Spearman rho or Kendall
tau. If there are two or more levels in the IV, as in five sets of ranks that
are to be examined for the degree to which they are all simultaneously
related, then Kendall W would be the correct statistic.
Finally, if the DV is a nominal scale and there is one interval IV
which is a naturally occurring dichotomy, or “true” dichotomy (e.g.,
male/female), the point-biserial correlation should be used. If the di-
chotomy is an artificial one (e.g., old/young based on age groupings,
where young = 39 years or less, and old = 40 years or more), the
appropriate statistic would be the biserial correlation. If the DV is
nominal and there are two or more interval scale IVs, loglinear analysis
would be useful (especially when prediction of the DV from the IVs is
of interest). If the DV is a nominal scale and there is one nominal scale
IV which is a true dichotomy, the phi coefficient should be used. If the
dichotomy is an artificial one, the appropriate statistic would be the
tetrachoric correlation.
Frequency Comparisons
Exploratory Statistics
FIGURE 6
Decision Tree for Exploratory Statistics
ship, exploring the existence of a scale, and investigating the existence
of causal relationships.
When searching out underlying variables (mostly among interval
scales) that are linearly related, principal components analysis and
factor analysis would be appropriate. However, if the relationships are
multidimensional rather than linear, multidimensional scaling would
be more appropriate. If similar subject performance across a number of
interval scales is the issue and the relationships are linear in nature,
cluster analysis would often be applied. In situations where group mem-
bership is of interest on interval scales and there is one attribute of
interest, discriminant analysis would be applied. If two or more attri-
butes are involved, n-way discriminant analysis could be used. To
investigate the existence of a scale on a nominal variable, Guttman scaling
would be used. Finally, causal relationships can be explored for interval
scales by using path analysis, and for nominal scales by using loglinear
path analysis.
Descriptive Statistics
TABLE 4
Descriptive Statistics for Student Type and Rater Faculty
Student type
ENG 100 essay ENG 100 essay Essay scores
scores scores combined
Rater
faculty n M SD n M SD n M SD
ENG 112 2.46 1.11 112 2.30 .77 224 2.38 .96
ESL 112 2.37 1.16 112 2.31 .96 224 2.34 1.06
Faculties
combined 224 2.42 1.14 224 2.30 .87 448 2.36 1,01
Note. From Brown, 1991, p. 593.
Correlational Analyses
TABLE 6
Correlation Matrix for Rater Groups
represents the relationship between the scores assigned by the B group
of ESL raters and the A group of English department raters. The same
process can be repeated for each of the statistics, and, with practice, it
should become relatively easy.
There are several other things that readers should notice about the
correlation matrix shown in Table 6. First there is a series of 1.00
correlations that run diagonally across the table. These 1.00 correla-
tions result because they represent the correlation between each vari-
able and itself. Readers can use the diagonal to help find and keep
their place in a correlation matrix. Note also that often correlation
coefficients are given only below the diagonal (or only above, as in
Table 6) because some researchers feel that presenting them both
above and below the diagonal would be redundant: It would mean
presenting two sets of the same numbers.
Some authors will choose to put the correlation coefficients above
the diagonal and other types of coefficients below the diagonal. Au-
thors will also vary in whether they use the upper portion of the table
or the lower portion. The point is that readers will need to examine
the table, use the diagonal to help orient themselves, and figure out
the meaning of each statistic from the column and row labels.
Readers may also have noticed in Table 6 that there are asterisks
next to each of the coefficients. These asterisks refer to the note just
below the table which in turn indicates that each coefficient with an
asterisk was significant at p < .05.
Table 7, taken from Patkowski (1991), illustrates a way to present
correlation coefficients that is not a matrix. Systematic examination will
reveal that there are three row labels. Looking back to the text associ-
ated with the table, you will find that these three abbreviations (math,
CRAT, and WAT) are for three variables: math scores derived from
a basic skills test, scores on the CUNY Reading Assessment Test, and
scores on the Writing Assessment Test. The column labels are for two
statistics: r for correlation coefficients and p for probability. The next
step is to figure out what variables are involved in each of the correla-
TABLE 7
Pearson Correlations Between Subjects’ Entering Scores and Grade Point Averages
Independent variables r p
Math a (n = 263) .344 .000
CRATa (n = 263) .255 .000
WAT (n = 264) .169 .006
Note.
a
From Patkowski, 1991, p. 736.
CRAT = CUNY Reading Assessment Test; WAT = Writing Assessment Test.
Group Comparisons
proficiency means for the four groups. The researcher would be most
interested in the main effects due to motivation and aggressiveness.
Essentially, the main effect for motivation is arrived at by comparing
the overall mean of the two groups that are high motivation with the
overall mean of the two groups that are low motivation. In other words,
the combined groups with n = 62 and n = 64 (as shown at the bottom
of Figure 7) would be compared to determine the main effect due to
motivation. In addition, the main effect for aggressiveness is arrived
at by comparing the overall mean of the two groups that are high in
aggressiveness with the overall mean of the two groups that are low in
aggressiveness. In other words, the groups with n = 61 and n = 65 (as
shown to the right of Figure 7) would be compared to determine the
main effect due to aggressiveness.
An interaction effect is quite different from the main effects in a study,
yet it is important in interpreting the main effects. Essentially, if there
is a statistically significant interaction effect in a study, it means that the
main effects are not in a straightforward relationship. More precisely, a
significant interaction effect indicates that the effects of one indepen-
dent variable differ at various levels of the other independent variable.
For the example given in Figure 7, it turns out that there is an interac-
tion effect for motivation and aggressiveness, as shown in Figure 8.
The fact that the lines in Figure 8 cross indicates that the high-
aggressiveness students are low in proficiency if they are low in motiva-
tion, and high in proficiency if they are high in motivation, whereas
the opposite is true for low-aggressiveness students, that is, they are
low in proficiency if they are high in motivation, and high in proficiency
if they are low in motivation (note that in some significant interactions,
the lines will only approach each other, nearly crossing). In other
words, even if there were a significant main effect for either motivation
or aggressiveness, it would be necessary to explain the interaction effect
because the motivation and aggressiveness main effects interact and
the relationship is not simple and straightforward (as it would be if the
lines were parallel and there was no significant interaction effect).
Thus, if there are significant interaction effects in a study, the authors
should explain them using a figure like Figure 8 or a prose explanation
of what they think is going on.
As will be explained below, in many mean comparison tables, statis-
tics will be reported for each main effect and for all possible interaction
effects. Statistics will also be reported for what is usually called the
residual (or error), which is all of the variance not accounted for by the
main effects and interactions.
In the process of reporting the main effects, interactions, and resid-
ual, there may be some differentiation between within-subjects and
between-subjects comparisons. Within-subjects comparisons are those
M SD Range
Comprehension/recaIl 1 21.72 6.04 15–39
Comprehension/recall 2 24.78 6.80 16–39
Cloze 33.33 9.87 17–48
Think-aloud 31.11 10.86 18–55
Note.
a
From Oh, 1992, p. 174.
CIQ = Cognitive Interference Questionnaire.
The effect for between measures is easy to spot in Table 9, and it
was significant as indicated by the F and p values on the right side of
the table. Since this is a one-way ANOVA, in which there can be no
interaction effects, there is no need to think about interactions here.
The other statistics given in Table 9 were all part of the calculations
that led to the F and p values. To give you just a taste of the relationships
that can exist in such a table, notice that the mean squares (MS) values
are all derived by dividing the sums of squares (SS) values by the
degrees of freedom (df); for example, the MS for between measures is
TABLE 10
The Results of Bonferroni Significant Difference Tests
chosen, including Scheffé, Tukey, Dunn, orthogonal comparisons. All
of these follow-up statistics are designed to find out which particular
pairs of means are significantly different. In this case, it turned out
that 5 of the 6 possible pairs of differences were statistically significant.
The exception was the cloze versus think-aloud comparison (i.e., CL
vs. TA in Table 10). Recall that all of this indicates that the significant
pairs of mean differences occurred for other than chance reasons with
at least 95% certainty (as shown in the footnote, p < .05). Following
through on Steps 3a-c above should then lead to thinking about
whether the correct statistical analysis was chosen, whether the assump-
tions of that statistical analysis were met, and whether the results are
also meaningful in light of the descriptive statistics (i.e., the actual
means involved). Readers might refer directly to Oh (1992) and read
the whole article in order to think about those three issues.
More complex designs are just more elaborate variations of the same
issues. With patience and the step-by-step approach advocated here,
any statistical table can be understood (as long as it makes sense to start
with). For example, Table 11 (from Chiang & Dunkel, 1992) is a fairly
complicated looking four-way repeated measures ANOVA design (or
TABLE 11
ANOVR Summary of Postlecture Comprehension Test Scores for Variables of Prior
Knowledge, Speech Modification, Listening Proficiency, and Test-Item Type
Source MS df F
Frequency Comparisons
CONCLUSION
that appear in the TESOL Quarterly and other journals in our field. Ten
strategies were suggested that should help readers to become more
comfortable with statistical studies. I hope that some readers have
found that these articles have whetted their appetites to expand their
knowledge of research design and statistics. It is important for as many
people as possible within the field to have a critical understanding of
statistical studies so that a large number of critical readers help ensure
the quality of those studies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Andrew F. Siegel and Ann Wennerstrom for their insightful
comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.
THE AUTHOR
REFERENCES
®
Demystifying the TOEFL
Reading Test
BONNY NORTON PEIRCE
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
665
others, the context bias of the TOEFL (Angoff, 1989), the TOEFL from
a communicative point of view (Duran, Canale, Penfield, Stansfield, &
Liskin-Gasparro, 1985), and TOEFL examinee characteristics (Wilson,
1982). However, as Raimes (1992) has suggested, research of this na-
ture has not succeeded in demystifying the TOEFL for many TOEFL
candidates and TESOL professionals, nor has it addressed more basic
assumptions about what the TOEFL actually tests, why, and how. Given
the fact that the TOEFL is currently undergoing review as part of the
TOEFL–2000 project (Chyn, DeVincenzi, Ross, & Webster, 1992; ETS,
1991), a close examination of TOEFL test development procedures is
timely.
In this paper, I wish to demystify the TOEFL reading test at a
descriptive and theoretical level by drawing on my practical experience
in the Test Development department at ETS from 1984 to 1987 and by
drawing on theoretical insights from recent research in genre analysis. I
will begin the paper with a brief description of the TOEFL as a whole,
introduce some basic terminology used in psychometric testing, and
describe the procedures I followed in the development of the TOEFL
reading test. Thereafter, I will use a passage I assembled, reviewed,
and pretested for a particular TOEFL reading test to illustrate how
these test development procedures are put into practice and how the
statistical analysis of individual items is used in the test development
process. Thereafter, I will critically examine some of the assumptions
I brought to the test development of the reading test, focusing on
notions of authenticity, background knowledge, and test validity. I will
then present the argument that a standardized reading test is best
understood as a specific genre which presupposes an unequal relation-
ship between test makers and test takers within the context of larger
and frequently inequitable social structures. In this view, such a rela-
tionship has a significant impact on the social meaning of texts consti-
tuted within this genre. I will use these insights from genre analysis to
help explain my case study data as well as to locate the TOEFL reading
test within the larger social context of the TOEFL internationally. I will
frame my concluding remarks with reference to possible innovations in
TOEFL test development.
THE TOEFL
Given the fact that the candidates have only 45 min for Section 3 of
the TOEFL, which includes a vocabulary and reading section, and
consequently less than 30 min for the reading section, one of my
primary concerns as a test developer was to ensure that I used the
candidates’ time efficiently. I tried to ensure that there were as many
items in a set as the passage could sustain; content that added little to
the coherence of the passage and was not used for testing purposes
was deleted from the text. I assumed it would be frustrating for candi-
dates to grapple with portions of text and then have little opportunity
to demonstrate their comprehension of this content. Furthermore, I
tried to use closed rather than open stems. If the stem is open, that is,
if there is no question mark at the end of the stem to consolidate the
Because all TOEFL reading passages have been removed from one
context and transplanted in another context, I tried to help the candi-
dates orient themselves to the content of the passages being tested.
Because TOEFL passages do not have titles, I tried to ensure that the
first item in a reading comprehension set addressed the main idea or
subject matter of the passage. I hoped this would give candidates an
organizing principle to help them in their attempts to develop a better
understanding of more detailed aspects of the text. I was aware, how-
ever, that many texts do not have a main idea at all—they may be
descriptive or narrative with little coherent argument as such. In such
cases, a stem like What does the passage mainly discuss? would be preferable
to What is the main idea of the passage? Furthermore, I assumed it would
be generally helpful to candidates if the order of items in the set
followed the order of information in the text itself. This would enable
candidates to locate tested information with relative ease and enable
them to build on their understanding of “old” or “given” information
in the text. I used line references as much as possible, provided that
they did not compromise the intent of the item (e.g., a scanning item).
I was aware, however, that items which address the prevalent tone of
the passage cannot always be directly associated with a particular line
or sentence in a passage and are best left to the end of the item set.
There are two issues that pertain to the defensibility of items: the
items in combination and the items individually. With reference to the
items in combination, I tried to ensure that the items did justice to the
content and level of difficulty of the text. This is where the art of test
development was central to the test development process. I had to use
judgment and imagination to assess interesting (and uninteresting)
characteristics of the passage and develop items that gave the candi-
dates sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of
these characteristics. For example, if the text was detailed and complex,
I did not wish to underestimate the candidates’ reading ability by asking
trivial questions. In addition, I knew the same information from the
passage could not be tested twice—albeit in different forms. To do so
would place some candidates in double jeopardy. Conversely, the stem
in one item could not reveal the answer to a question in another item.
The Passage
The Items
Note that the items are numbered in the 70s because they have been
inserted into the final form of a TOEFL Vocabulary and Reading
Comprehension section (normally 60 items) and numbered accord-
ingly. The two items I am discussing are those that were presented to
the TSR and the TOEFL coordinator. The revised items that were
finally published in pretest form during an administration of the
TOEFL are given in the Statistical Analysis section below. The complete
set of pretested items is given in the Appendix.
Item 71 assesses a candidate’s understanding of information that is
not given explicitly in the passage but is strongly implied by the author
in Lines 2 and 3 of the text.
71. It can be inferred from the passage that in the United States corn is
(A) the least expensive food available
(B) used primarily as animal feed
(C) cut only at night
(D) used to treat certain illnesses
Phrases used to introduce this item type would include It can be
inferred from the passage that; The passage supports which of the following
conclusions?; The author implies that. Comment 2 below was written by
the TSR, Comment 3 by the coordinator.
2.71. B—I think this only refers to Middle West corn. S: “. . . that Middle
West corn is”—(A) only option that doesn’t start w. verb. S: Sold at very
low prices (for (B) could say “grown” instead of “used”)
Statistical Analysis
Once the passage and items had passed through all the reviews
and I had adjusted the items where I thought necessary, the test was
pretested in a TOEFL administration (see the Appendix). The results
of the pretests were forwarded to the Statistical Analysis department
at ETS, which completed an item analysis on each item and forwarded
the results to the Test Development department. The work of the test
developers at this stage was to assess the results of the item analyses,
decide which items worked, which needed to be revised, and which
needed to be discarded. How does a test developer know whether an
item has “worked”? In standardized reading tests a successful item is
one that discriminates successfully between “good” and “poor” candi-
dates. The level of difficulty of an item, on the other hand, is a function
of the percentage of candidates who choose the correct key. The latter
statistic is not difficult to compute. However, the test developer needs
to be assured that the relative difficulty of the item is a function of the
relative levels of proficiency of the candidates—as measured by the
test—and not a function of a poorly constructed or ambiguous item.
TABLE 1
Item 71
DISCUSSION
Authenticity
Background Knowledge
Test Validity
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REFERENCES
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Annual Language Testing Research Colloquium, Vancouver, Canada.
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Research Rep. No. 29). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Bachman, L., Vanniarajan, A. K. S., & Lynch, B. (1988). Task and ability analysis
as a basis for examining content and construct comparability in two EFL profi-
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Belsey, C. (1980). Critical practice. London: Methuen.
Chyn, S., DeVincenzi, F., Ross, J., & Webster, R. (1992). TOEFL–2000: Update.
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presented at the 13th Annual Language Testing Research Colloquium,
Princeton, NJ.
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(1985). TOEFL from a communicative viewpoint of language Proficiency(TOEFL
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1991–92. Princeton NJ: Author.
Educational Testing Service. (1991b, Spring). Newsline. Princeton, NJ: Author.
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NJ: Author.
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memory, practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Henning, G. (1987). A guide to language testing. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House.
Hill, C., & Parry, K. (1992). The test at the gate: Models of literacy. TESOL
Quarterly, 24 (3), 433-461.
Kress, G. R. (1989). Linguistic processes in sociocultural practice. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kress, G. R. (1991). Critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics,
1990, 11, 84–99.
Madsen, H. ( 1983). Techniques in testing. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, R. (1987). Three dreams of language. College English, 49, 449–458.
Peirce, B. N. (1989). Toward a pedagogy of possibility in the teaching of English
internationally: People’s English in South Africa. TESOL Quarterly, 23 (3), 40l–
420.
Questions 70–78
Running a farm in the Middle West today is likely to be a very expensive
operation. This is particularly true in the Corn Belt, where the corn that fattens
the bulk of the country’s livestock is grown. The heart of the Corn Belt is in Iowa,
Illinois, and Indiana, and it spreads into the neighboring states as well. The soil is
(5) extremely fertile, the rainfall is abundant and well-distributed among the seasons,
and there is a long, warm growing season. AH this makes the land extremely valuable,
twice as valuable, in fact, as the average farmland in the United States. When one adds
to the cost of the land the cost of livestock, seed, buildings, machinery, fuel, and
fertilizer, farming becomes a very expensive operation. Therefore many farmers are
(10) tenants and much of the land is owned by banks, insurance companies, or wealthy
business people. These owners rent the land out to farmers, who generally provide
machinery and labor. Some farms operate on contract to milling companies or
meat-packing houses. Some large farms are actually owned by these industries.
The companies buy up farms, put in managers to run them, provide the machinery
(15) to farm them, and take the produce for their own use. Machinery is often equipped
with electric lighting to permit round-the-clock operation.
70. What is the author’s main point? 74. The author mentions all of the
following as features of the Corn Belt
(A) It is difficult to raise cattle. EXCEPT
(B) Machinery is essential to today’s
farming. (A) rich soil
(C) Corn can grow only in certain (B) warm weather
climates. (C) cheap labor
(D) It is expensive to farm in the (D) plentiful rainfall
Middle West.
75. According to the passage, a plot of
71. It can be inferred from the passage farmland in an area outside the Corn
that Middle West corn is Belt as compared to one inside the
Corn Belt would probably be
(A) sold at very low prices
(B) grown primarily as animal feed (A) less expensive
(C) cut in the morning (B) smaller
(D) used to treat certain illnesses (C) more fertile
(D) more desirable
72. In line 3, the word “heart” could best
be replaced by which of the following? 76. As described in the passage, which of
(A) spirit the following is most clearly analogous
m the relationship between insurance
(B) courage company and tenant farmer?
(C) cause
(D) center (A) Doctor and patient
(B) Factory owner and worker
73. It can be inferred from the passage (C) Manufacturer
that the region known as the Corn Belt (D) Business executive and secretary
is so named because it
77. The word “their” in line 15 refers to
(A) is shaped like an ear of corn
(B) resembles a long yellow belt (A) companies
(C) grows most of the nation’s corn (B) farms
(D) provides the livestock hides for (C) managers
leather belts (D) machinery
693
ITA pronunciation is often a problem but may diminish in impor-
tance over time. Many of the undergraduates who had had an ITA
over an entire term maintained that the ITA’s accent was an obstacle
in the beginning but that they eventually adjusted to it, making the
appropriate phonological substitutions and even reporting that they
became accustomed to systematic grammatical errors. This suggests
that there may be important aspects of the comprehensibility problem
other than pronunciation and grammar. This study will focus on
one such area: the contributions which discourse marking makes to
comprehensibility.
THE STUDY
Subjects
The data in this study were collected over a 2-year period from 24
teaching assistants in various university departments at a major U.S.
university. Eight were native Korean speakers and 14 were native
Mandarin speakers. All had studied English formally for between 5
and 12 years. They had been in the United States for between 3 months
and 4 years. During the time of the study, they were all participating
in a preparation course for ITAs. Also included in this study were 5
native-speaking teaching assistants (NSTAs). These baseline data were
necessary in order to determine the effect of planning on the use of
discourse marking and comprehensibility in general before going on
to make claims about its effect on NNS production.
Data Analysis
Discourse Marking
The data analysis was carried out in several steps. Before turning to
the question of comprehensibility, it was first necessary to establish
the effect of planning on the presence and explicitness of discourse
marking. The use of Chaudron and Richards’ (1986) discourse cues,
specifically macrocues, was the focus of this investigation, in particular,
the level of explicit marking of key statements in ITA and NSTA
explanations. As noted above, a key statement is one that is central to
the structure of the argument or explanation. One way a key statement
may be marked is by indicating speaker intention, as in Example 1:
1. Today I want to spend a few minute to explain what trigonometric function
are.
Another form of marking is the identification of the actual function
of the statement within the explanation, as in Example 2:
2. The second element of physiology is study about transport system. For
example, our heart will transport blood to all the part of our body.
Some statements may be marked for both speaker intention and
function in the explanation, as in Example 3:
3. Now I’d like to give you the definition of molecule.
In contrast, some statements may go unmarked, as in Examples 4
and 5:
4. This cotangent involving adjacent and opposite.
8. Restatement: That means between these times the car we think it’s the same
acceleration. [follows an example of a moving vehicle as an illustration
of the principle of constant acceleration]
10. Introduction/new topic: I want speak something about temperature. [the first
statement in the presentation]
11. Summary: That’s what it mean a binary operation. [follows a lengthy expla-
nation and examples of binary operations]
Comprehensibility
RESULTS
TABLE 1
Marking of Key Statements
TABLE 2
Kinds of Marking in Key Statements: ITA Unplanned
TABLE 3
Kinds of Marking in Key Statements: ITA Planned
TABLE 5
Kinds of Marking in Key Statements: NSTA Planned
TABLE 6
Combined Ratings Given to NSTAS and ITAs
TABLE 7
Grammatical Accuracy and Complexity for ITAs
DISCUSSION
For the ITAs, the planned explanations were found to contain more
explicit marking and more of it than the unplanned explanations. They
also contained fewer unmarked key statements. Thus, Hypotheses 1a
and lb were supported. The same difference was not found in the
planned and unplanned production of the NSTAs. There seems to be
minimal difference between the planned and unplanned conditions
for the NSTAs, at least insofar as the absolute use of marking is
concerned. There is a greater degree of explicitness used by the NSTAs
in the planned versus the unplanned condition, although it is not clear
how strong this trend is, given the small quantity of data, especially in
the unplanned condition. Unsupported was the idea, contained in
Hypotheses 2a and 2b, that NSTAs do considerably more marking
than ITAs, at least in the planned condition. This is contrary to earlier
findings by Williams et al. (1987) and Rounds (1987). Again, because
of the small amount of unplanned NSTA data, it is difficult to compare,
but it appears that the kind of marking which NSTAs and ITAs do in
the unplanned condition is also similar. In addition, Table 1 shows that
in the planned condition, the degree to which NSTAs mark their
discourse moves at all is very similar to that of the ITAs. However,
ITAs tend to be somewhat more explicit, as shown in Tables 3 and 5.
The biggest difference remains between the ITA planned and un-
planned conditions. Yet, in spite of the sometimes minimal difference
in marking and explicitness between the ITA planned and the NSTA
data and, in some cases, even the more explicit marking by ITAs,
undergraduate and ESL specialist raters understood the NSTAs far
more easily. This would indicate that the NSTAs do not need to mark
as much or as explicitly as the ITAs in order to be understood; the
NSTA presentations are easily understood without their doing so. For
the NSTAs, the lack of planning time seemed to make much less
difference in whether and how much they marked their key statements.
As NSs, they have other ways of making their presentations compre-
hensible. Tyler's research (1988, 1989) certainly indicates that compreh-
ensibility, or lack thereof, has multiple sources. It is likely that NSTAs
choose to exploit other means of expressing themselves clearly, rather
than make extensive use of macromarkers. For ITAs, on the other
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of
Post-Secondary Education. This is an expanded version of presentations made at
the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference, Washing-
ton, DC, and the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), Eugene, OR. I would
like to thank Barbara Hoekje and Margie Berns as well as two anonymous TESOL
Quarterly reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
THE AUTHOR
REFERENCES
Anderson-Hsieh, J., & Koehler, K. (1988). The effect of foreign accent and speak-
ing rate on native speaker comprehension. Language Learning, 38, 561–613.
Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Boffman, T. ( 1989). Attainment of syntactic and morpholog-
ical accuracy by advanced language learners. Studies in Second Language Learning,
11, 17–34.
Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13, 145–
204.
Brown, G. (1978). Lecturing and explaining. London: Methuen.
Carrier, C., Dunham, T., Hendel, D., Smith, K., Smith, J., Solberg, J., & Tzenis,
C. (1991, April). Evaluation of teaching effectiveness of international teaching
assistants who participated in the teaching assistant program. In International
teaching assistant development at the crossroads: Interpreting evaluation data for change.
Symposium presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational
Researchers Association, Chicago, IL.
Chaudron, C. (1983). Foreigner talk in the classroom—An aid to learning? In H.
Seliger & M. Long (Eds.), Classroom oriented research in second language acquisition
(pp. 127–143). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Chaudron, C., & Richards, J. C. (1986). The effect of discourse markers on the
comprehension of lectures. Applied Linguistics, 7, 113–127.
Crookes, G. (1988). Planning, monitoring and second language development: A review
(Tech. Rep. No. 6). Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, Center for
Second Language Classroom Research.
Crookes, G. (1989). Planning and interlanguage variation. Studies in Second Lan-
guage Acquisition, 11, 367–384.
Danielewicz, J. (1984). The interaction between text and context: A study of how
713
problem” is a more accurate understanding of how the presence and/
or absence of particular discourse-level patterns in ITA speech may
affect the native listener’s ongoing interpretation of the discourse.
Recent pedagogical work has recognized that use of discourse structur-
ing cues affects comprehensibility (Davies, Tyler, & Koran, 1989; Pica,
Barnes, & Finger, 1990). For instance, Pica et al. (1990) encourage
ITAs to attend to discourse structuring cues in order to improve the
comprehensibility of their spoken discourse. However, studies aimed
at identifying these discourse structuring cues and how they may affect
native listener understanding are few (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford,
1989; Tyler, 1988; Tyler, Jefferies, & Davies, 1988). This paper reports
on a qualitative discourse analysis the purpose of which is to begin to
identify those elements.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
METHOD
Procedure
The Speakers
A. 1. today our topic is introduction to the traffic signal 2. aaa we will talk about five
things 3. the first one is 4. when and where you should have traffic signal 5. and when
and where we should not have traffic signal 6. so that’s the first one on your handout the
warrants for traffic signal installation 7. and then we will see 8. what kind of traffic signal
available in present days 9. also we will see the main equipment for traffic signals 10.
after that we will talk about the major elements for a design a traffic signal and the tool
for design
B. 11. O.K. first of all let’s see the warrants for traffic signal installation 12. there is a
book 13. call called Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices 14. any traffic signal used in
the public roadway in the United States its color size shape lighting composition whatever
15. should conform with that manual 16. so aaa I put the first warrant on your handout
17. let’s see the first case of of this warrant 18. that’s for a volume
Note. The discourse is divided into two sections labeled A and B for ease of exposition and
does not indicate any theoretical claims in terms of the existence of the paragraph as
a unit in oral discourse. The native speaker who read the transcript aloud read from
a version of the transcript which used conventional punctuation; thus, the reader did
not attempt to imitate the stress, pausing, and intonation as originally produced by the
Chinese speaker. Numbers represent syntactically defined clauses.
The original audience for the Chinese speaker was composed of the
ESL instructor, the other international students in the ITA training
course, and 3 additional native speakers of U.S. English. The discourse
struck these listeners as circuitous and difficult to follow. Of the 15
additional English listeners who heard the transcript read by a native
speaker, not one was able to catch more than three of the five points
enumerated in the section labeled A. When asked in an open-ended
question for their general assessment of the discourse, they used such
descriptors as muddled, rambling, and speaker seemed unsure of his main
point. None of the 15 described the discourse in terms synonymous
with clear or easy to follow. The analysis which follows sheds some light
on this assessment. Although there are problems at many linguistic
levels which should be dealt with in a complete analysis, here I will
concentrate only on lexical discourse markers, lexical specificity, syntac-
tic incorporation, and prosodies (which will be addressed briefly in the
section on interactive effects).
Lexical Specificity
Interactive Effects
1. what I’d like to go over with you today 2. is this process 3. and how it relates to cell
structure and function alright uh 4. there are four ways 5. that that substances can pass
into and out of the cell 6. the first 7. which we’re going to discuss today is diffusion 8.
and that’s just the process of scattering or spreading of of small particles from an area of
greater concentration to an area of lesser concentration 9. in the case of the perfume you
have a concentrated perfume 10. so it’s going from greater concentration to an area of
lesser concentration of perfume 11. the second means of getting substances into and out
of cells ah is called osmosis 12. and we’ll discuss that later on probably this week 13. an-
other way is active transport 14. which is a process 15. which requires energy 16. and
and it usually goes against the gradient 17. in this situation (points to the perfume bottle)
everything is going from greater to lesser 18. in the the case of active transport you go
from an ah an area of lesser concentration against the ah concentration gradient 19. and
that requires ah energy 20. but we’ll discuss those this also later this week 21. and the ah
fourth is called phagocytosis and ah plandicytosis 22. and they are two processes of sim-
ply engulfing 23. ahum if ah if if ah something if a drop or a particle were outside 24.
and the cell involved the a a the membrane to surround and engulf it 25. that’s what
these are two despicable processes of the cell
Note. Numbers represent syntactically defined clauses.
Lexical Specificity
Syntax
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A version of this paper was presented at the 22nd Annual TESOL Convention in
Chicago, 1988. I wish to thank Catherine Davies, Georgia Green, and Ann Jefferies
for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank two anonymous
reviewers whose careful reading and comments resulted in a more insightful final
analysis.
THE AUTHOR
REFERENCES
731
conjunctions in text should facilitate the instantiation of textual sche-
mata (Kieras, 1985), help to direct readers’ attention to important text
information (Lorch & Lorch, 1986), and help in checking information
in memory (Spyridakis & Standal, 1987). The question of whether
explicit text signaling facilitates comprehension has been the focus of
a number of studies. Typical research studies addressing this question
compare the effect on comprehension of reading intact texts with
texts from which conjunctions have been removed. Results have been
contradictory. Some studies lead to the conclusion that comprehension
is not affected, whereas others suggest that conjunctions facilitate com-
prehension under some reader and text conditions. Spyridakis and
Standal (1987) found that signaling facilitated comprehension of ex-
pository texts by college students when passages were “neither too easy,
nor too difficult” (p. 285). There is evidence in the L1 literature to
suggest that understanding conjunctions as marking the focus of topi-
cal relations between sentences is a gradual process that is mastered by
literate adults (Johnson & Pearson, 1982; McClure & Geva, 1983;
Zinar, 1990). Geva (1987, 1990) reports that texts in various academic
disciplines vary in terms of the incidence of explicit text structure
markers and the extent to which such markers focus on microlevel or
macrolevel propositions. This study suggests that readers in different
disciplines encounter different conjunctions, the function of which
varies within the text, and that their understanding of conjunctions
may affect differently readers in different disciplines.
Skilled and less skilled readers have been shown to differ in the degree
to which they infer logical relations in text (Bridge& Winograd, 1982;
Evans & Ballance, 1980; Geva, 1986a; Geva & Ryan, 1985; Irwin, 1980).
For instance, Marshall and Glock (1978–1979) found that the presence
in text of connective such as however and on the other hand facilitated
learning for junior college students, but had a minimal effect on univer-
sity students. Meyer, Brandt, and Bluth (1981) showed that connective
facilitated recall among ninth-grade students who were poor compre-
henders but did not among skilled readers. Irwin (1980) examined the
effects of clause order and explicitness of causal relationships by fifth-
grade and college-level students. Irwin found that fifth-grade students
achieved higher comprehension scores in the explicit causal relation-
ships group than did students in the implicit causal relationships group.
Results of Irwin’s college-level study suggest that when the causal rela-
tionships appear in the text in a reversed order, explicitness of causal
relationships facilitates comprehension even for adults.
Geva (1983) found that community college students who were less
skilled readers failed to comprehend cause-effect relations when the
content of the cause-effect relations appeared in expository texts in
reverse order. By succumbing to the “order of mention pitfall” (Geva,
METHOD
Subjects
Materials
The specific task used in this study focuses on the conjunctions but
and although. There are 10 but items, 10 items in which although appears
in an initial position (initial although), and 10 items in which although
appears between the two clauses (medial although). Subjects have to
decide whether Continuation a or b should follow the first 2-clause
sentence. Since but is a coordinating conjunction, the continuation
sentence should follow the second clause semantically. Sentences with
although are more complex to process because although is a subordinat-
ing conjunction. In this case the continuation sentence should follow
the main clause semantically. The main clause however, may be first
or second, depending on whether although appears in an initial or
medial position in the sentence. McClure and Geva (1983) have shown
that L1 fourth-grade children do not choose a continuation on the
basis of semantic coherence for but items, nor do they attend to the
marking of focus by although. Eighth-grade children choose a continua-
tion sentence on the basis of semantic coherence but ignore the marking
of focus. Highly literate and proficient speakers of English use both
roles consistently and intuitively. This research investigates whether
adult L2 learners with different levels of proficiency have extracted
such a rule and whether they are sensitive to the more subtle implica-
tions of conjunctions.
Three 1-page expository texts were used, one dealing with Luther’s
basic philosophy, one dealing with basic principles in pump operation,
and one dealing with a comparison of liquid fuel and solid fuel rockets.
Each of these texts could appear in one of three versions: explicit
(intact), implicit (all conjunctions omitted), and highlighted (all conjunc-
tions printed in bold typeface). The completion of this academic text
comprehension (ATC) task by each subject involved reading one ex-
plicit text, one implicit text, and one highlighted text. Test booklets
consisted of three texts and the accompanying comprehension ques-
tions, but different students received different combinations of the
manipulated texts. Order of text presentation was counterbalanced
as well. The different combinations formed a Latin square design.
Following the rationale for conjunction highlighting offered by Geva
and Ryan (1985), each text was followed by four multiple-choice, high-
level comprehension questions focusing on logical relationships in the
texts. Thus, the ATC scores can range from 0 to 12. The total correct
score of the ATC is treated as an overall measure of comprehension
of academic discourse.
Procedure
Initially, all students were told that this was a study of how L2
university students comprehend college-level texts. Data collection of
RESULTS
The last question asked in this study was whether each of the three
conjunction tasks, requiring L2 readers to consider logical relationships
in increasingly more demanding contexts, plays a unique role in pre-
dicting text comprehension. To answer this question, a multiple regres-
sion analysis (stepwise) was carried out. In this analysis, student scores
on the ATC were treated as the dependent variable, and student scores
on the intrasentential task (FBT), the intersentential task (SCT), and
the cloze were entered as predictor variables. As can be seen in Table
3, which summarizes the results of this analysis, the cloze is the most
important predictor, explaining 21% of the variance, and the intersen-
tential task is also significant, explaining an additional 9.5% of the
variance. The intrasentential task, which focuses on basic comprehens-
ion of the meaning of conjunctions and the ability to deal with local
coherence, is not a significant predictor. That is, the FBT provides no
further predictive information after the SCT and cloze are taken into
account.
TABLE 3
Predicting Academic Text Comprehension:
Multiple Regression Analysis (Stepwise) Summary Table
Predictors F DF p R2 (adjusted)
Cloze 12.66 1,42 .000 .213
SCT 10.62 2,41 .001 .309
FBT ns
Note. SCT = sentence completion task; FBT = fill-in-the-blank task.
DISCUSSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research reported here was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada grant (Contract No. 410–84–0108) to the author.
THE AUTHOR
Esther Geva is Assistant Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
She has published widely on comprehension and use of conjunctions. In recent
years, her research and teaching have focused on reading processes and reading
development in LI and L2 among normally achieving and learning disabled learn-
ers and on assessment and instructional issues in multicultural contexts.
REFERENCES
749
allow students to make their own hypotheses about the forms of the
language, just as they did in acquiring their first languages.
The most serious challenge to the grammarless communicative ap-
proach is the suggestion that complete inattention to the grammar of
the second language may lead to the development of a pidginized or
fossilized interlanguage, what Higgs and Clifford (1982) describe as
“terminal 2/2 +,” a score certain applicants receive on the 5-point For-
eign Service Institute (FSI) scale of language mastery which is charac-
terized by high vocabulary and low grammatical competence. Such
learners find it very difficult if not impossible to advance beyond this
stage and are, hence, terminal. In short, the role of grammar in the
ESOL classroom is once again a point of contention.
With full knowledge of this state of affairs, William Rutherford and
Michael Sharwood Smith have assembled a book of readings entitled
Grammar and Second Language Teaching (Grammar/Teaching) that is then
refined and clarified in Rutherford’s own view of this material in Second
Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching. The intention of the editors
of Grammar/Teaching is to “explore the dimensions of pedagogical
grammar (PG), or the means by which acquisition of second or foreign
language grammar may be expressly facilitated” and ultimately to
“work toward articulation of a coherent theory of PG” (p. 1). These
goals are realized through 15 published articles by well-known authori-
ties in applied linguistics, which are grouped into three major seg-
ments: theoretical considerations, definitions of pedagogical grammar,
and realizations of pedagogical grammar in the classroom. This volume
attempts to make explicit certain unanalyzed presumptions that lie
behind the “grammar-is-futile” point of view. Furthermore, it sets
the stage for the empirical analysis of Sharwood Smith’s pedagogical
grammar hypothesis, which claims that PG will accelerate second lan-
guage acquisition (SLA) to a greater extent than is possible in “natural”
(i.e., untutored) settings.
In Second Language Grammar, Rutherford has essentially revamped
his own treatise on grammar and consciousness-raising in Grammar/
Teaching, even though the publication date of the latter precedes the
former by a year. Unlike Grammar/Teaching, which requires consider-
able mental agility to unearth the information relevant to constructing
an overall philosophy of the teaching of pedagogical grammar, Second
Language Grammar unfolds like a story, gradually and intelligently
constructing an approach to pedagogical grammar that is only hinted
at in Grammar/Teaching. Rutherford begins by placing the nature of
second language learning (SLL) in its proper context. If SLL were
nothing but the accumulation of entities (i.e., grammatical constructs),
certain learner behaviors would occur (e.g., target structures would
REVIEWS 751
.
that “an adequate stock of useful vocabulary but little grammatical
competence will initially serve some learner needs better than gram-
matical competence coupled with an impoverished lexicon” (p. 169).
Despite the disarming simplicity of Rutherford’s prose, the bulk of
the material in Second Language Grammar requires a breadth of
knowledge of linguistics that will be overwhelming to most readers.
Many will no doubt hope that Rutherford will write a textbook incorpo-
rating all of these ideas (he has to some extent in his 1977 text Modern
English), but this would directly contradict his notion that language-as-
organism requires learners to become managers of their own learning.
Since each learner is different, no set curriculum can be effective.
Facilitation at any level ultimately requires more work of the teacher,
at least until the teacher is comfortable with this new role. What Second
Language Grammar does is to provide a framework which may lead
to a unified notion of what constitutes language learning, language
teaching, and language acquisition.
REFERENCES
Higgs, T. V,. & Clifford, R. (1982). The push toward communication. In
T. V. Higgs (Ed.), Curriculum, competence, and the foreign language teacher. Lin-
colnwood, IL: National Textbook Company.
Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
Rutherford, W. (1977). Modern English. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
PETER MASTER
California State University, Fresno
Grammar Textbooks
Grammar classes and textbooks, long neglected or relegated to the
periphery as necessary evils, have undergone changes in recent years
in order to become part of the communicative approach now used in
many ESL classes. Many teachers have come to realize that grammar
needs to be formally taught if students are not to fossilize at a beginning
interlanguage stage. As Master has written in his review of two peda-
gogical grammar theory books, which precedes this collection, it is
dubious whether the field of TESOL can separate the teaching of
grammar from other skills and functions and still produce successful
language learners. Publishers have recently produced a number of
grammar books which can be incorporated into integrated language
classes and which claim to be communicative. The teacher’s task of
selecting a textbook becomes quite difficult, though, when nearly every
grammar textbook published today bears a subtitle or banner including
the words communicating or contextualized. A close examination often
shows that the “communicative approach” goes no further than the
title. Sometimes, the purported communicative approach of a gram-
mar text includes nothing more than asking students to work in pairs
to practice grammar drills. Instructors should inspect textbooks, new
and old alike, for the underlying assumptions which drive the approach
and content being used.
Grammar textbooks have been flooding the TESOL market in recent
years. The textbooks reviewed below were chosen because they claim
communicative, integrated, or contextualized approaches. Not in-
cluded are some of the most widely known older texts. Most of the
texts have been published within the last 2 years, although several date
to the mid- 1980s. It is hoped that the following brief reviews will assist
instructors in making wise selections.
STEVEN L. SHAW, Guest Editor
University of Washington
753
English Alive: Grammar, Function, and Setting (2nd ed.).
Gail Fingado and Mary Reinhold Jerome. New York: Newbury
House, 1991. Pp. xxi + 369.
Fingado and Jerome have updated and improved their popular gram-
mar textbook, making it more user friendly. The new edition has a cleaner
layout, updated topics, two new review chapters, and two new chapters on
the present unreal conditional and the passive voice.
As the authors state in the introduction, this textbook combines the
“three major elements needed to communicate in a language” (p. viii).
Those elements, as suggested by the title, are grammar and its various
functions in numerous settings. English Alive successfully incorporates
these elements into meaningful activities which encourage students to use
grammar and language in context.
The text is intended for beginning-level adult students who have had
minimal exposure to English grammar. The first 25 chapters, including
three review units, focus on specific grammar points. Most of the tenses
(continuous, future, past, and perfective) are covered in addition to mod-
als, infinitives, gerunds, comparative/superlative forms, conditionals, and
some passives. This is enough material for a semester or year-long course,
depending on the level of the students.
Each chapter uses an interesting content focus to introduce one or
two related grammatical structures along with numerous activities. These
topics range from crime and culture to manners and marriage. Most
chapters begin with a dialogue (tapes of these dialogues are available
from the publisher) followed by comprehension questions. This provides
students with a contextual framework in which to place the grammatical
structure being studied. Throughout the rest of the chapter, each gram-
matical point is carefully explained and numerous activities provided for
practice. Most of these activities are controlled fill-in-the blank exercises
supplemented by a dialogue, role play, or short reading passage. Each
chapter concludes with synthesizing activities which range in type from
interviews and writing assignments to questions for open discussion.
The remaining 10 chapters are devoted to function and what Fingado
and Jerome call setting. Functions covered include invitations, giving di-
rections, making suggestions, and requests and favors. The last 6 chapters
integrate the previously studied grammar points into settings, which are
usually labeled situational frameworks. These include traveling, eating in
restaurants, visiting a friend, going to the doctor, using the telephone, and
shopping for clothes.
Fingado and Jerome have taken on an ambitious task and provided
teachers with a unique beginning-level grammar textbook. Instructors
looking for an integrated-approach text should be pleased with this new
edition. Teachers will appreciate the new layout and clear presentations;
STEVEN L. SHAW
University of Washington
STEVEN L. SHAW
University of Washington
RON POST
University of Washington
JEAN JORGENSEN
University of Washington
STEVEN L. SHAW
University of Washington
REFERENCE
Raimes, A. Exploring through writing: A process approach to ESL composition (2nd ed.).
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
WENDY ASPLIN
University of Washington
GLENN GAINER
The Institute of Language and Business Communication
767
attempted to isolate the effects of syntactic simplification on listening
comprehension. The purpose of this study, which consists of two experi-
ments, is to explore the absolute and relative effectiveness of syntactic
simplification and repetition on listening comprehension.
In Experiment 1, the effects of syntactic simplification on listening
comprehension were explored. In Experiment 2, the relative effects of
syntactic simplification and repetition on listening comprehension were
investigated. In both experiments, the interaction between main effects
and proficiency levels were tested.
EXPERIMENT 1
Method
Subjects. The subjects for this experiment were 76 native Japanese-speak-
ing English majors (54 first-year students and 22 seniors) at Fukuoka
University. Results of a 20-item pretest indicated that as a group, the
seniors were significantly more proficient in listening comprehension than
the first-year students.
Treatment. Two versions of a short lecture about the African American
civil rights leader Malcolm X were prepared. One version contained a low
degree of subordination (7.46 average words per T unit and 1.20 S nodes
per T unit). The second version contained a higher degree of subordina-
tion (14.19 words per T unit and 2.49 S nodes per T unit).
Procedures. Two 44-item cloze tests were prepared, each based on one
version of the short lecture. Content words which were difficult to guess
from the context were chosen for deletion. The subjects at both proficiency
levels were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. One
group heard the syntactically simplified version of the short lecture, and
the other group heard the more complex version. After listening to each
section the subjects were given 1 min to fill in the missing cloze items.
Results
Results of a 2 x 2 ANOVA (SAS GLM Type III) indicate that groups
hearing the syntactically simplified version scored significantly higher on
the recall cloze test than the groups hearing the more complex version:
F (1,72) = 21.28, p < .0001; K-R 21 reliability = .84. No interaction effect
was found between lecture version and proficiency level.
EXPERIMENT 2
In order to address the question of the relative effectiveness of syntactic
simplification in comparison with repetition and to reexamine the findings
of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was conducted.
Results
The results of 2 x 2 x 2 ANOVA indicate that comprehension scores
for the groups hearing the syntactically simplified version were higher than
the scores for the groups hearing the complex version with no repetition,
F (1,46) = 8.63, p < .01. Also, results indicate that scores for the groups
hearing the complex version with repetition were higher than the scores
for the groups hearing the complex version without repetition: F (1,52) =
27.60, p < .0001; K-R 21 reliability = .73. No significant difference was
found between scores for groups hearing the syntactically simplified ver-
sion and the complex version with repetition.
Our attempt to find interaction effects for the syntactically simplified
version versus the complex version with repetition was invalidated by a
sampling error. An analysis of individual group cells revealed no signifi-
cant difference between proficiency levels for first-year and senior groups
hearing the complex version with repetition.
DISCUSSION
The results of both experiments indicate that syntactic simplification is
an aid to comprehension. It is noteworthy that significance was obtained
in two different types of tests which measure different levels of listening
comprehension (Chaudron, 1985). The recall cloze test gives the listener
more time to process the input and more opportunity to make use of
contextual clues, whereas the partial dictation test measures comprehen-
sion at the first level of intake. No interaction effect was found between the
effect of syntactic simplification and proficiency level in either experiment.
REFERENCES
Cervantes, R. (1983). Say it again Sam: The effect of exact repetition on listening compre-
hension. Unpublished manuscript. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu.
Chaudron, C. (1983). Simplification of input: Topic reinstatements and their
effects on L2 learners’ recognition and recall. TESOL Quarterly, 17 (3), 437–458.
Chaudron, C. (1985). Intake: On models and methods for discovering learners’
processing of input. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7, 1–14.
Fujimoto, D., Lubin, J., Sasaki, Y., & Long, M. ( 1987). The effect of linguistic and
conversational adjustments on the comprehensibility of spoken second language discourse.
Unpublished manuscript. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu.
Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. New York:
Pergamon Press.
Long, M. H. (1985). A role for instruction in second language acquisition: Task-
based language training. In K. Hyltenstam & M. Pienemann (Eds.), Modelling
and assessing second language acquisition. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Pica, T., Young, R., & Doughty, D. ( 1987). The impact of interaction on compre-
hension. TESOL Quarterly, 21 (4), 737–758.
THE STUDY
The Corpus
The top 50 songs in English were taken from the September 12, 1987
edition of Music & Media’s Hot 100 Chart. This date had been designated
4 months in advance in order to be nonbiased in the selection, following
Gerbner’s (1985) model of message systems analysis and Brooks’s (1982)
plea that we be “tasteless” in our research.
Word Count
A word-frequency count revealed a type-token ratio (TTR) of .09 with
a total of 13,161 words. The averdge TTR per song is .29, which implies
that each word is repeated about three times in an average song of 263
tokens. Actually 25% of the corpus is composed of just 10 different words:
4 pronouns (you, I, me, my), 4 function words (the, to, a, and), the future
auxiliary gonna, and the noun/verb love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This article reports the results of the first half of my doctoral dissertation (Uni-
versity de Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Murphey, 1990a). The second half surveyed
the literature to discover the uses that teachers made of music and song in their
classes.
REFERENCES
Bronckart, J. P. ( 1985). La fonction du discours. Paris: Delachaux & Niestle.
Brooks, W. (1982). On being tasteless. Popular Music, 2, 9–18.
de Guerrero, M. C. M. ( 1987). The din phenomenon: Mental rehearsal in the
second language. Foreign Language Annals, 20, 537–548.
Flesch, R. ( 1974). The art of readable writing. New York: Harper & Row.
Fry, E. (1977). Fry’s readability graph. Journal of Reading, 20, 242–252.
Gerbner, G. (1985). Mass media discourse: Message system analysis as a component
of cultural indicators. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and communication: New
approaches to the analyses of mass media discourse and communication (pp. 13–25).
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Krashen, S. D. (1983). The din in the head, input, and the language acquisition
device. Foreign Language Annals, 16, 41–44.
Murphey, T. (1989). The where, when and who of pop song lyrics: The listener’s
prerogative. Popular Music, 8, 58–70.
Murphey, T. (1990a). Music and song in language learning: An analysis of pop song
lyrics and the use of music and song in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang Verlag.
Murphey, T. ( 1990b). The song stuck in my head phenomenon: A melodic din in
the LAD? System, 18, 53–64.
Murphey, T., & Alber, J. L. (1985). A pop song register: The motherese of
adolescents as affective foreigner talk. TES0L Quarterly, 19 (4), 793–795.
Parr, P. C., & Krashen, S. D. ( 1986). Involuntary rehearsal of second language in
beginning and advanced performers. System, 14, 275–278.
Rotzoll, K. B. (1985). Advertisements. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse and commu-
nication: New approaches to the analyses of mass media discourse and communication
(pp. 94–105). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Vygotsky, L. S. ( 1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original
work published 1934)
In his TESOL Quarterly article (Vol. 24, No. 4), Yoshinori Sasaki is
premature in drawing the conclusion that “[the Universal Grammar]
model is untenable as a scientific theory of language acquisition”
(p. 769). In constructing his logical argument that no marked syntactic
parameter could ever originate, Sasaki misconstrues the way in which
the notion of an innate Universal Grammar (UG) must be integrated
into a theory of language acquisition and change. He argues that
because no phonological, morphological, semantic, or pragmatic infor-
mation enters into syntactic rules, no logically possible way exists to
establish a marked parameter, and therefore no speaker’s parameters
could ever be “set” in a marked “position” by the experience of trig-
gering utterances. His argument primarily addresses the compatibility
of UG with an account of historical change; I will discuss this issue first
and then the “logical difficulty” of the UG model.
Much of David Lightfoot’s career (e.g., 1974, 1979, 1980, 198la,
1981b, 1982, & 1991) has been spent examining evidence of language
shift from a generative perspective. The evolution of language reaches
an apogee in what he terms reanalysis. Beginning at an arbitrary initial
state of the language, and with the assumption of an innate language
faculty consisting of core principles and parameters and a marked
periphery, he enumerates some factors that stimulate reanalysis: pro-
cessing problems, stylistic expressiveness, contact with foreign lan-
guages/pidgins/creoles, novelty, chance, and other nongrammatical
factors. These factors introduce irregularity into a language, and which
of these irregularities is perpetuated by grammaticization is unpredict-
able. These reanalyses are forced by the attempts of succeeding genera-
tions to acquire a language based on evidence that includes novel
constructions or usage. Using principles of UG and the linguistic evi-
775
dence encountered, the child sets parameters that provide a maximally
economical grammar which generates this “evidence.” According to
Lightfoot (1982),
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The contributions of Fritz Newmeyer and Sandra Silberstein to earlier drafts has
improved my thinking, which however remains my own.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Foris.
Hyams, N. (1986). Language acquisition and the theory of parameters. Dordrecht,
Netherlands: ReideI.
Kuno, S. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lightfoot, D. (1974). The diachronic analysis of English modals. In J. Anderson &
C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the first international conference on historical linguistics.
Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel.
Lightfoot, D. (1979). Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lightfoot, D. (1980). Trace theory and explanation. In E. Moravesik & J. Wirth
(Eds.), Current approaches to syntax (Syntax and Semantics Vol. 13). New York:
Academic Press.
Llghtfoot, D. (198 la). The history of NP movement. In C. Baker &J. McCarthy
(Eds.), The logical problem of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Llghtfoot, D. (198 lb). Explaining syntactic change. In N. Hornstein and
D. Lightfoot (Eds.) Explanation in linguistics: The logical problem of language
acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
First, I would like to thank Guy Modica for his thoughtful commen-
tary. In this response, I examine whether his proposal truly provides
a scientific solution to the problem. Since some of the crucial underlying
assumptions of his argument are not explicitly stated, I will clarify them
first. In particular, Modica’s argument is entirely based on a dichotomy
of dual storage formats of linguistic knowledge: One is encoded in
terms of parameters and the other is not. The following discussion will
center around the scientific validity of this assumption.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I appreciate encouraging remarks on this project from Susan Flynn, Talmy Givön,
Katsutoshi Ito, Lester Loschky, and Dan Slobin. I also acknowledge comments on
my previous article from Noam Chomsky and Michael Harrington. All remaining
errors are mine.
REFERENCES
Bohannon, J., & Warren-Leubecker, A. (1985). Theoretical approaches to
language acquisition. In J. B. Gleason (Ed.), The development of language.
Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Gregg, K. R. (1984). Krashen’s monitor and Occam’s razor. Applied Linguistics, 5,
79–100.
Krashen, S. D. (1981). Second language acquisition and second language learning.
Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford:
Pergamon Press.
McLaughlin, B. (1978). The monitor model: Some methodological considerations,
Language Learning, 28, 309–332.
McLaughlin, B. (1987). Theories of second-language learning. London: Edward
Arnold.
Slobin, D. (1977). Language change in childhood and in history. In J. MacNamara
(Ed.), Language learning and thought. New York: Academic Press.
Slobin, D. (1979). Psycholinguistics (2nd ed.). London: Scott, Foresman.
Zechmeister, E., & Nyberg, S. (1982). Human memory. Monterey, CA: Brookes.
Reading Aloud
An Educator Comments . . .
SUZANNE M. GRIFFIN
Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
Until the early 20th century, reading aloud was the prevalent method
of teaching reading in Western cultures. Subsequent to the rise of
silent reading instruction in the early 1900s, three schools of thought
developed about oral reading instruction. The first group saw oral
reading as a means to more proficient silent reading; the second viewed
oral reading as a detriment to the development of proficient silent
reading; and the third approached oral reading as an art form whose
techniques were worth mastering. The debate about the relative value
of silent and oral reading diminished in the 1950s with the acknowledg-
ment by some that reading aloud and reading silently involve different
skills (Allington, 1984).
One important benefit of reading aloud as opposed to silent reading
is that reading aloud develops an awareness of sound-symbol relation-
ships. Because of this benefit, some applied linguists recommend read-
ing aloud for beginning-level ESL classes (Bright, Koch, Ruttenberg,
& Terdy, 1982; Rivers, 1968). Learners at the beginning levels have
limited experiences with the spoken language. As a result, they are not
successful in predicting the pronunciation of words they encounter in
printed texts. Reading aloud expands learners’ auditory experiences
with the target language by exposing them to words that they would
not ordinarily hear in spoken form.
Whereas there is evidence that oral reading may slow the reading
speed of advanced ESL learners and inhibit their comprehension
(Smith, 1971), the awareness that oral reading helps develop decoding
strategies has led some to argue for the inclusion of some oral reading
THE AUTHOR
Suzanne M. Griffin, State Director of Adult Education in Washington, chaired the
1991 TESOL Convention. She has been involved in the TESOL profession since
1968 as a teacher, textbook author, video producer, researcher, program adminis-
trator, and policy maker.
PATRICIA L. ROUNDS
University of Oregon
Not long ago, as I traveled around Sri Lanka as an English for special
purposes (ESP) consultant, again and again the teachers asked me what
I thought about having students read aloud. Apparently a previous
teacher trainer had disparaged it, and they wanted to know my opinion.
I also condemned it. I gave them my reasons. But they were not all
satisfied. How could teachers help students improve their reading skills
if they didn’t have them read aloud? Wasn’t it important that students
know the correct pronunciation of the words they were reading? How
could the students read words they couldn’t pronounce? I countered
that this was certainly not true for proper names. I gave them an
example: I knew from my written schedule that I would visit Sri Jaya-
wardenapura University. I knew what this combination of symbols
meant, but I didn’t know how to pronounce it correctly. The teachers
countered: Didn’t they need to monitor their students’ pronunciation?
I replied that the taxi driver who took me to the opposite side of town
THE AUTHOR
Patricia L. Rounds teaches and does research and teacher training at the University
of Oregon and occasionally teaches and consults elsewhere in the United States
and in other countries.
REFERENCES
Frodesen, J. (1991). Grammar in writing. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching
English as a second or foreign language (pp. 264–276). New York: Newbury House.
Hart, L. (1983). Human brain and human learning. New York: Longman.
Haverson, W. (1991). Adult literacy training. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching
English as a second or foreign language (pp. 185–194). New York: Newbury House.
Hawkins, B. (1991). Teaching children to read in a second language. In M. Cele-
Murcia (Ed.), Teaching English as a second or foreign lnguage (pp. 169–184). New
York: Newbury House.
Holdaway, D. (1985), Stability and change in literacy learning. Exeter, NH:
Heinemann.
Hosenfield, C. (1977). A preliminary investigation of the reading strategies of
successful and nonsuccessful second language learners. System, 5, 110–123.
Smith, F. (1983). Essays into literacy. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.