foreign language education(matt madden, zena moore) reports on a study of different students'...

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AUTHOR Madden, John, Ed.; Johanson, Robert, Ed.; Carpenter, Mark,Ed

TITLE Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education, 1997.INSTITUTION Texas Univ., Austin. Foreign Language Education Program.ISSN 0898-8471PUB DATE 1997-00-00NOTE 74p.; For individual articles, see FL 025 213-216.PUB TYPE Collected Works Serials (022)JOURNAL CIT Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education; v3 n1 Fall 1997EDRS PRICE MF01/PC03 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Academic Persistence; *Code Switching (Language);

Comparative Analysis; *English (Second Language); EnrollmentInfluences; *Error Correction; French; Higher Education;Japanese; Korean; Language Attitudes; Language Enrollment;Language Research; *Native Speakers; PronunciationInstruction; Second Language Instruction; *Second Languages;Student Attitudes; Student Attrition; Teacher Behavior;*Writing Instruction

ABSTRACTFour papers on second language learning are include.

"Comparing Native and Nonnative Speakers' Error Correction in ForeignLanguage Writing" (Catherine A. Jolivet) examines differences between nativeand nonnative French speaking teachers in their error correction on students'compositions. "ESL Students' Opinions About Instruction in Pronunciation"(Matt Madden, Zena Moore) reports on a study of different students' attitudesabout pronunciation instruction. In "Factors of Attrition in JapaneseLanguage Enrollments" (Yoshito Saito-Abbott, Keiko Samimy), influences onuniversity-level Japanese language enrollment and attrition are examined. "AnAnalysis of a Common Structure in Korean-English Code-Switching: A Test ofthe Matrix Language Framework" (Mi-Ae Lee) looks at the morphosyntacticmechanism of a common Korean-English code-switching pattern. (MSE)

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Texas Papers in

Foreign LanguageEducation

ISSN # 0898-8471

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Volume 3 Number 1 Fall 1997

Articles

1 CATHERINE A. JOLIVET Comparing Native and NonnativeSpeakers' Error Correction in Foreign Language Writing

15 MATT MADDEN and ZENA MOORE English Language LearnerAttitudes Toward Pronunciation

33 YOSHITO SAITO-ABBOTT and KEIKO SAMIMY Factors of Attritionin Japanese Language Enrollments

53 MI-AE LEE An Analysis of a Common Structure in Korean-EnglishCode-Switching: A Test of the Matrix Language Framework

Book Review

69 Input Processing and Grammar Instruction in Second LanguageAcquisition (Reviewed by KAROL HARDIN)

Foreign Language Education ProgramThe University of Texas at Austin' PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND

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DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIALHAS BEEN GRANTED BY

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2TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)

Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education(TPFLE)

Editors:John Madden, Robert Johanson, Mark Carpenter

Editorial Advisory Board:Charles Nelson, David Clark

Faculty Advisor:Zena T. Moore

TPFLE is the official journal of the Foreign Language Education Programof the University of Texas at Austin.

Publication of TPFLE has been made possible by a grant fromthe RGK Corporation

Foreign Language Education ProgramThe University of Texas at Austin

3

Texas Papers inForeign Language

Education

Contemporary Issues inForeign and Second Language

Learning and Teaching

Volume 3 Number 1 Fall 1997

Foreign Language Education ProgramThe University of Texas at Austin

4

Contributors:

CATHERINE A. JOLIVET is Assistant Professor of French and Coordinator ofBeginning French courses at George Washington University. She receivedher Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education with a specialization in French. Herresearch interests lie in the areas of writing in the foreign language classroom,error correction in the foreign language curriculum, students' attitudes andthe study of a foreign language, Francophone literatures, as well ascontemporary cultural, social, and political issues in France and theFrancophone world.

MATT MADDEN recently completed his master's degree in Foreign LanguageEducation at the University of Texas at Austin.

ZENA MOORE is Assistant Professor in the College of Education at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. Although her primary area is foreignlanguages, she moves beyond the traditional horizons by including in herresearch aspects of language and cultures, with special emphasis on popularcultures.

MI-AE LEE is a doctoral student in Foreign Language Education at theUniversity of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include issues inlanguage learning strategies and the Vygotskian approach to second languageacquisition.

YOSHITO SAITO-ABBOTT received her Ph.D. in Foreign Language Educationand Instructional Design and Technology from The Ohio State University.She is currently teaching Japanese language at The California StateUniversity, Monterey Bay, and she is a site director of the California ForeignLanguage Project for the Central Coast area.

KEIKO SAMIMY received her Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education from theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Presently she is AssociateProfessor of Foreign and Second Language Education at The Ohio StateUniversity.

KAROL HARDIN is currently a doctoral student in Spanish linguistics withemphasis on pragmatics and its applications to the Spanish languageclassroom. She has served as lecturer for three years at Baylor University.

5

Comparing Native and Nonnative Speakers' Error Correction inForeign Language Writing

CATHERINE A. JOLIVET

The purpose of the study reported here was to determine whether ornot there were differences between native and nonnative speak-ers/instructors of French when they corrected second-year students'compositions. The data for analysis consisted of students' compositionswhich were corrected and returned to them. The subjects of the studywere teaching assistants (TAs) at a large state university. The methodsused were both qualitative and quantitative. In order to examine thedifferences between native and nonnative speakers of French, aMANOVA was run. The results indicated that there were no signifi-cant differences between the two groups in the number of errors cor-rected nor in error categories. Native and nonnative speakers alikeshowed a lack of interest in the content of the compositions. It ap-peared that nonnative speakers of French were as capable as nativespeakers of identifying and correcting students' mistakes. Implicationsfrom the study point to several areas in need of further research, suchas TA preparation specifically as it involves error correction and theteaching of writing in the foreign language classroom.

INTRODUCTIONCompositions have typically been the most common types of assign-

ment given to foreign language students. Instructors usually correct the com-positions mostly for their grammatical content, sometimes neglecting theideas, creativity, and originality of their more individual and personal con-tent. Moreover, instructors typically offer systematic formats for correctinggrammatical errors. For example, if a student turns in a composition aboutlast summer's vacation (in order, no doubt, to verify the use of the past tensesin French), the instructor corrects the grammatical aspects of the composition,and gives it back to the student, who reads his or her grade and puts the com-position away for good, never to look at it again. Since it is now known andrecognized that recognized that the best possible way to learn a foreign lan-guage is to do so in context, it does not make much sense to teach writing asan isolated act.

For the most part, beginning and intermediate level college languageclasses are taught by teaching assistants, the majority of whom are not nativespeakers of the target language. Some researchers found that corrections per-formed by nonnative instructors differ from corrections performed by

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2 Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education

native speakers (Heilenman, 1991;Davies, 1983). It appears that nonna-tives feel more comfortable correct-ing grammar than they do meaning-ful content. They also tend to correctmore mistakes than natives do. Thepresent study proposed to examinethe differences that existed betweennative and nonnative speakers ofFrench when correcting intermedi-ate students' compositions. The re-searcher's hypothesis was that therewould be differences in the numberof errors corrected by native andnonnative speakers. Specifically,that nonnative speakers will makemore corrections.

This study will answer thefollowing three research questions:

1. Are there any differences inthe number of correctionsperformed by native andnonnative speaking instruc-tors of university intermedi-ate French classes when theyevaluate compositions?

2. Are there any differences be-tween nativespeakers inwhere errorperformed?

and nonnativethe categoriescorrection was

3. Are there any differences be-tween native and nonnativespeakers when and if theypaid attention to content?

BACKGROUNDSeveral studies conducted in

student written production estab-

lished the background for the pres-ent study. Green and Hecht (1985)1conducted a study comparing nativeand nonnative evaluation of learn-ers' errors in written discourse.Their purpose was to establish cate-gories, causes and gravity of errors,and to examine differences in nativeand nonnative assessment of them.Results of the Green and Hecht 1985study showed that more than halfthe errors recorded were grammati-cal in nature and that errors werecaused by a variety of possibilities.As far as error gravity was con-cerned, results demonstrated littleagreement between graders. There-fore, it can be said that, overall,German graders were the most se-vere in the category of grammaticalerrors. Natives were more influ-enced by meaning in their judgmentof error gravity. German graders fo-cused more on form, and conse-quently communication of meaningwas somewhat secondary and oftensimulated.

Kobayashi (1992) conducted astudy investigating how nativespeakers of English and nativespeakers of Japanese at professorial,graduate, and undergraduate levelsevaluated ESL compositions writtenby Japanese students. Two composi-tions (A and B) were written by twoJapanese students and were evalu-ated by 269 subjects, all of whomwere in language related disciplines(some were undergraduate students,some graduate students, others wereprofessors). There were 145 nativespeakers of English and 124 native

7

speakers of Japanese. The subjectswere assigned either composition Aor B and asked to evaluate them forthe following: grammaticality, clar-ity of meaning, naturalness, and or-ganization, using a 10-point scale.

Findings were analyzed infour areas. The first was grammati-cality. Overall, Japanese subjects ofall academic levels evaluated bothcompositions more positively thatdid the English native-speakinggroup. For both compositions, thehigher the academic status of thegroups, the smaller the differenceswere between English and Japanesesubjects. Among the English native-speaking group, the higher thestatus, the more positive were therating for both compositions.Among the Japanese native -speaking group, the ratings variedwidely for the two compositions. Incomposition A, the Japanese gradu-ate students gave the most positiveevaluations, whereas the professorsgave the most negative. In composi-tion B, the findings were reversed.

In the area of clarity of mean-ing, when comparing native speak-ers of English and Japanese with thesame status, English native speakingprofessors and graduate studentsgave more positive evaluationsthan did the equivalent Japanesespeaking group. However, the Japa-nese undergraduates evaluated thecompositions significantly morepositively than did the English-speaking undergraduate students.Among the English native-speakinggroups, the higher the academicstatus, the more positive the evalua-

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Error Correction in FL Writing 3

tion. This was not true for Japanesenative speaking groups.

In the area of naturalness, ifone discarded the graduate students'evaluation of composition B, nativespeakers of English were more rigidin their judgment than their Japa-nese counterparts. A possible expla-nation for the finding may be thatnative speakers have stricter criteriafor naturalness in their languagethan do nonnative speakers, whichin turn, may be explained by the factthat nonnative speakers have diffi-culty judging naturalness in a sec-ond language, whereas nativespeakers rely on their intuition.

In the last area of organiza-tion, English native-speaking pro-fessors and graduate students gavemore positive evaluations for bothcompositions than did their Japa-nese counterparts. However, theJapanese undergraduates evaluatedboth compositions far more posi-tively than the English undergradu-ate students.

Takashima (1987) examinedto what extent nonnative speakerswere qualified to correct free compo-sitions. In order to investigate theissue, a Japanese university graduatewho majored in English was askedto write a composition. A Japaneseteacher of English and two nativespeakers of English, who were alsocollege level teachers, were asked tocorrect the composition. The cor-rected versions were compared andthe results showed: (a) that the non-native corrected as many mistakes asthe natives; (b) the nonnative modi-fied the composition in a different


way from the native speakers, andsometimes to the detriment oforiginal meaning; (c) the nonnativewas relatively good at correctingmistakes in punctuation and spell-ing and (d) the nonnative's lack ofknowledge of certain grammaticalrules or proper usage had some ef-fect on his/her ability to correct thecomposition.

In light of the above pre-sented studies, it appears that nativespeakers are generally more compe-tent than nonnative speakers whenthey correct compositions. It also ap-pears that native speakers correct er-rors that affect comprehension andmeaning, whereas their nonnativecounterparts tend to be more gram-mar-driven in their corrections. Thepresent study proposed to examinestudents' writing in context and tocompare native and nonnativespeakers of French when theyevaluated students' compositions.

POPULATION ANDPARTICIPANTS

The subjects were universitystudents enrolled in all eight sec-tions of third and fourth semesterFrench at a large southeastern U.S.state university.

The group of instructors wereeight teaching assistants in the De-partment of French at the same stateuniversity. Four were French nativespeakers and four were English na-tive speakers from the USA.

DATA SOURCESThe researcher obtained pho-

tocopies of the first and final drafts

of all the students' compositionswhich the TAs had already cor-rected, graded, and returned to thestudents. The semester composi-tions were all syllabus-assigned andthe researcher chose the second writ-ten assignment. The compositionswere collected only after they hadbeen returned to the students so asto prevent the study from biasingthe grades the students received, andalso to guarantee that the instructorsdid not change their grading methodfor the purpose of the study. Thetopic of the composition was com-mon to all eight sections of second-year French courses. The researcherdid not inform the instructors of herdesire to collect the compositions.She just made sure that they wouldbe a mandatory assignment for allsections. Length of the compositionwas limited to one page, typed anddouble-spaced, thus allowing forcontrol for handwriting discrepan-cies.

The deadline for turning inthe composition was the same for allsections, so that students had ap-proximately the same amount of in-struction at the time they did the as-signment. Even though some werein their third semester and others intheir fourth, there were no signifi-cant differences in the written pro-duction of the third and fourth se-mester students.

SAMPLESOnce collected, the final drafts

of the compositions were put in as-cending order from lowest to high-est score within each section, based

9

on the grade assigned by the TA.There were approximately fifteencompositions per section and therewere eight sections in all, making atotal of 220 compositions. They wereplaced in one of the following twogroups: low (Cs and Ds) or high (Asor Bs). The number of randomly se-lected compositions in each groupand in each section formed the data-base for statistical analysis. Sixty-four(64) randomly selected compositionswere analyzed.

METHOD AND DESIGN

MethodThe research design incorpo-

rated both quantitative and qualita-tive procedures and sought to an-swer the three research questions (a)on differences in the number of cor-rections performed by native andnonnative speaking instructors ofuniversity intermediate Frenchclasses when they evaluate composi-tions; (b) on differences between na-tive and nonnative speakers in thecategories where error correctionwas performed and (c) on differencesbetween native and nonnativespeakers as to the content of thecompositions.

The third research questionwas dealt with qualitatively throughthe analysis of a questionnaire andan interview, as well as through theresearcher's interpretation of par-ticipants' comments found in thecompositions.

The randomly selected com-positions were placed into twogroups: those corrected by native

1 0


speakers of French and those cor-rected by nonnative speakers ofFrench.

The types of error correctionpresent in the data from each groupwas examined by the researcherwho is a native speaker of Frenchand by another native speaker ofFrench, using a previously estab-lished correction grid. This correc-tion instrument was partially bor-rowed from Magnan's study o nGrammar and the ACTFL Profi-ciency Interview (1988, p. 270). Mag-nan (1988) isolated seven grammati-cal categories which, she explained,are "based on knowledge of French,experience with the areas of studentdifficulty and experience with OPItesting" (p. 270). The seven errorcategories selected by Magnan were(1) Verb Conjugation, (2) Tense/Mood, (3)tives, (5)

Determiners,Prepositions,

(4)(6)

Adjec-Object

Pronouns, and (7) Relative Pro-nouns. Using this framework,2Magnan grouped the items into thefollowing four categories: (1)verb-clause error, (2) noun-clauseerror, (3) spelling error, and (4) pro-noun error.

To assess interrater reliabilitybetween the researcher and theother native speaker of French, thePearson product-moment correla-tion coefficient was calculated. Acorrelation of .92 indicated very highinterrater reliability.

DesignThe design was a 2 (native/

non-native) X 2 (low/high) X 4(number of teachers nested within


the design, a ratio was calculated: thenumber of errors corrected by theteacher divided by the total numberof errors present in each error cate-gory. In order to calculate the ratio,the number of errors corrected andthe total number of errors present ineach composition and in each errorcategory were counted. For example,the number of noun clause errorscorrected by the teacher was counted;the number of noun-clause errorsnot corrected was also tabulated; thetotal number of noun-clause errorswas obtained by adding the numberof errors corrected and the numberof errors left uncorrected. The pro-cedure was repeated for each subjectin each error category.

ANALYSIS

Procedure for Research Question 1To determine whether or not

there were differences in the num-ber of corrections performed by na-tive and nonnative speakers/ in-structors of university intermediateFrench classes when they evaluatecompositions, a multivariate analy-sis of variance (MANOVA) was per-formed on the data, namely, on thepercentage of corrected error means.

Procedure for Research Question 2In order to determine any dif-

ferences between native and nonna-tive speakers in the categories whereerror correction was performed, theresearcher ran four ANOVAs, onefor each error category. The resultsof each ANOVA provided F valuesfor each error category under analy-

sis, and therefore indicate in whichcategory or categories the native andnonnative speakers corrected differ-ently.

Procedure for Research Question 3To determine any differences

between native and nonnativespeakers when and if they paid at-tention to content, the followingprocedure was used. Each participat-ing TA was invited to respond to aquestionnaire about pedagogicalbackground and whether or notcomposition evaluation guidelineshad been provided that semester.The participants also provided theirown evaluation tools if they hadany.

Each participant was also in-terviewed so as to determinewhether they considered all errorsmarked in the grade and whetherthey believed all errors marked andconsidered in the grade to be ofequal importance.A sample questionnaire and a list ofthe interview questions are pre-sented in Appendices A and B. Todetermine the answer to Question 3,the researcher read the instructors'comments (if any) on both first andfinal drafts of the compositions andanalyzed the focus of the comments(linguistic accuracy, content, interest,organization, etc.).

RESULTS

Statistical ResultsThe means of error correction

for native and nonnative speakersin each error category and for the

11

high and low groups are presentedin Table 1.

The multivariate analysis ofvariance (MANOVA) answeredQuestion 1. The MANOVA is a testof the means presented above. Its re-sults yielded significant F(1, 124) =16.960, p < .05 for the main effects ofthe variable, High/Low, indicatingthat there were significant differ-ences in the number of errors cor-rected according to which group(high or low) a composition be-longed. In other words, there weredifferences in the number of correc-tions according to what grade acomposition received.

No significant F values wereyielded for the main effects of thevariable Native/Nonnative. For themain effects of Native/Nonnative,F(1, 124) = 1.129, p > .05. The lack ofsignificant value for the main effectsof Native/Nonnative can be inter-preted as a lack of differences be-tween native and nonnative speak-ers of French when they correctedthe compositions overall.

The answer to the first re-search question was therefore nega-tive: there were no significant dif-ferences between native and nonna-tive speakers/instructors in thenumber of errors corrected. How-ever, there were significant differ-ences in the number of errors cor-rected according to the group, (Highor Low), in which the compositionswere placed. More errors were cor-rected in the low group of composi-tions than in the high group.

Since the main effects ofHigh/Low were significant, univari-

12


ate F-tests were conducted in orderto determine if the effect was signifi-cant for all variables. Results arepresented in Table 2.The main effects of High/Low weresignificant in all error categories.Therefore, it can be concluded thatthe number of corrections greatly in-fluenced the grade that a composi-tion received. There were significantdifferences in the number of errorscorrected by native and nonnativespeakers of French in the High andthe Low compositions in all of theerror categories. However, since themain effects of Native/Nonnativewas not found to be significant, theanswer to Research Question 2 wasnegative; there are no significant dif-ferences between native and nonna-tive speakers of French in the errorcategories where correction was per-formed. The results can be to meanthat native and nonnative speakersalike corrected more errors in all theerror categories in the Low group ofcompositions than they did in theHigh group.

Qualitative ResultsThis section will answer ResearchQuestion 3 and is divided into threeparts: the questionnaire results, theinterview answers, and the com-ments found on the students' pa-pers.

Questionnaire ResultsOf the four native speakers of

French, one had completed a coursein pedagogy, two had completedmore than one course, and one had


Table 1Native and Nonnative Error Correction Means

Native NonnativeHigh Low Average High Low Average

Verb .43 .85 .64 .50 .63 .57Noun .47 .92 .70 .48 .77 .62Spelling .37 .68 .53 .36 .69 .54Pronoun .63 .89 .76 .62 .69 .65

Table 2Main Effects of High/Low - Univariate F-Tests with 1, 124 D.F.

Variable Hyp. SS ErrorSS Hyp. MS ErrorMS F Sig. of F

Verb 2.50320 18.3013 2.5032 .14759 16.960* .000Noun 4.34019 11.8761 4.3401 .09578 45.316* .000Spelling 3.20678 17.9111 3.2067 .14444 22.200* .000Pron. .85969 14.2941 .85969 .11528 7.4576* .007

no experience in pedagogy. Of thefour native speakers of English,three had done one course in peda-gogy, and one had more than onecourse. None of the participants ofthe study was majoring or minoringin pedagogy. None of the TAs hadbeen given formal guidelines per-taining to composition correction.Three of the four native speakers ofFrench and three of the four nativespeakers of English indicated theyhad devised their own personalguidelines.

Interview AnswersThree native speakers of

French and three native speakers ofEnglish reported that they did nottake into consideration all the errorsmarked on the student's paperwhen they awarded the grade. Onenative speaker of French and onenative speaker of English indicatedthat they did count all errors whenthey awarded the grade. All partici-pants reported that they did not con-sider all errors to be of equal signifi-cance.

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Instructors' CommentsGenerally speaking, non-

native speakers of French made veryfew comments on the papers. If theydid, their comments focused primar-ily on grammatical accuracy. Noneof the comments emphasized con-tent, interest, originality, or organi-zation, in any specific ways.

In general, native speakersmade more comments on the stu-dents' work than did the nonna-tives, but their comments remainedas focused as the nonnative speak-ers' comments on students' linguis-tic accuracy. There was the one ex-ception of one native speaker ofFrench who asked questions aboutactual meaning. The answer to Re-search Question 3 is therefore nega-tive. There were no differences be-tween native and nonnative speak-ers of French in the area of content.

DISCUSSIONThe results of the MANOVA

yielded no significant differences be-tween native and nonnative speak-ers of French in the number of cor-rections they performed in the Highand Low groups of compositions.

The fact that native speakersof French corrected as many mis-takes as did nonnative speakers inthe Low compositions was surpris-ing. The researcher's hypothesis,based on prior studies (Politzer, 1978;Davies, 1983; Magnan, 1982; Green &Hecht, 1985; Kobayashi, 1992; andTakashima, 1987) was that nonna-tive speakers of French would cor-rect more mistakes than nativespeakers. In the studies mentioned


above, native speakers tended toshow more leniency toward errorsthan did nonnatives. Only one pre-vious study by Ensz, (1982) showedthat native speakers of Frenchtended to correct more oral produc-tion errors than nonnative speakers.Perhaps, then, this behavior is par-ticular to native speakers of French.It has been said that the French arevery protective and possessive oftheir language. In fact, Ensz (1982)concluded that

While an American accent andsome Anglicisms may be mod-erately tolerated, Americanspeakers of French should bemost concerned that they speakwith the greatest possiblegrammatical accuracy. (137-138)

Perhaps correcting errors made bylearners is an example of this behav-ior.

Native and nonnative speak-ers corrected more errors in the Lowcompositions than they did in theHigh group in all of the error catego-ries; however, the results showed nodifferences between native andnonnative speakers of French inthese categories. Therefore, the find-ing indicates that the nonnativespeakers of French were as compe-tent as native speakers when identi-fying grammatical mistakes.

The interview answers per-taining to which errors the partici-pants counted in the grade showvery little consistency with what wasfound when examining the compo-sitions. More than one native

14


speaker and one nonnative speakerseemed to count all errors markedon the paper in the grade. In themargins of the student composition,they had clearly written "1/2" foreach error identified. Equally puz-zling was the finding that more thanthree of the participants seemed toconsider all errors marked on thepaper to be of equal importance.Their grading system resembled theabove-mentioned formula. The in-consistencies found between whatthe participants disclosed of theirgrading systems and what happenedin reality seem to show that the par-ticipants may think that they werefollowing a specific correction pat-tern, but they in fact were not.

One of the very interesting re-sults provided by the questionnairewas that none of the participantshad been given formal guidelinespertaining to composition evalua-tion. It appears that this area of for-eign language instruction wassomewhat neglected and left up toeach individual.

Equally interesting was thefinding that out of the eight TAs,two (one native and one nonnativespeaker of French) had no personalguidelines for the evaluation ofcompositions. All other participantshad devised their own systems.They were largely based on linguisticaccuracy, whether the TA was a na-tive speaker of French or not.

Another striking findingupon examining the compositionswas the virtual absence of instruc-tors' comments. Most of the compo-sitions were returned to the students

bare of any feedback, negative orpositive. The great majority ofrough drafts bore no comments atall. Those which did had been cor-rected by native speakers of French,and then again, the main focus ofthe comments were on length, lin-guistic accuracy, and only once werethere comments on content.

Final drafts also showed veryfew comments. However, there wasa difference between native andnonnative speakers of French in thequantity of the comments theywrote. Overall, native speakerswrote significantly more on stu-dents' compositions than nonna-tives did. Nonnative speakers'comments focused primarily ongrammatical accuracy. So did thecomments written by three of thenative speakers of French. However,one native speaker commented onmeaning and content as well as sty-listics.

The general lack of commentswas in complete disagreement withcurrent research (Semke, 1984);Omaggio, 1993; Cohen & Cavalcanti,1988) in writing and error correction.This research recommends that in-structors evaluate compositions notonly for their grammatical compo-nents, but also and most impor-tantly for their content. The datagathered and examined here showedthat native and nonnative speakersof French alike still viewed writingvery much as a form-driven act.

CONCLUSIONSStudents' compositions in the

target language are examples of in-

15

terlanguage at work. They containmany mistakes in linguistic accu-racy. As recent studies demonstrate,the systematic correction of all mis-takes does not necessarily aid stu-dents in acquiring grammaticalstructures; however, a certain degreeof attention must be paid to errors inaccuracy. Just how much attentionmust be devoted to those errors re-mains to be determined. This re-search was conducted in hopes thatit could help define more precise in-dicators as to what kinds of errorsshould be corrected. If the primarygoal of language learning is to beable to communicate with nativespeakers of a given language, thenthe question is, What do nativespeakers of French consider seriouserrors?

Most Important Error CategoriesJudging from the results, all

error categories (verb, noun, spell-ing, and pronoun) were given agreat deal of attention. It appearsthat native speakers of French be-have as "intolerantly," or at leastidentify as many mistakes in thesecategories, as do nonnatives.

Composition ContentWhile the majority of the par-

ticipants stated in the questionnairethat they graded compositions bothon grammatical accuracy and con-tent, none of them actually madeany comments as to whether the es-says were interesting or not, originalor unimaginative, or whether theywere well or poorly organized.


It appears that, in spite ofwhat current research recommendsas far as composition correction isconcerned, instructors continue topay attention solely to the gram-matical component of their stu-dents' compositions.

IMPLICATIONS ANDRECOMMENDATIONS

The implications that can bedrawn from the results of the pres-ent study touch on three areas: TApreparation, error correction, andclassroom instruction. The lack ofknowledge on composition correc-tion can be interpreted as a lack ofknowledge on testing in general.Foreign language teachers are ex-pected to create tests almost on adaily basis without any knowledgeof test construct, of devising rubrics,of setting criteria and of grading thetests. Methods courses must empha-size not only teaching but also test-ing, and such courses must prepareour teachers to design good essaytype tests with accompanying rubricsand grading criteria.

Another area of concern dealswith interlanguage. Compositions,especially at the early stages of lan-guage proficiency, will contain sam-ples of interlanguage, therefore, ourprofession needs to address themany kinds of foreign languagelearner interlanguage mappings.Such studies, as Garrett (1991) sug-gested need to concentrate on inter-language as presented in contextual-ized and communicative writingsamples.

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NOTES:1. In Green and Hecht's study (1985),

sixty German students (aged 15)wrote replies in English to Eng-lish letters of elicitation. Each let-ter was graded by three Germanteachers of English and five na-tive speakers of English, all ofthem teachers (three taught Eng-lish, one foreign languages, andanother physics). Forty-six nativespeakers of English (all students)also wrote replies to the same let-ters of elicitation. Each letter wasgraded by two native speakers ofEnglish (other than the five na-tive speakers mentioned previ-ously) who also taught English.The letters written by nativespeakers of English served as theauthenticity check for the task.Overall, there was a large meas-ure of disagreement over errorsbetween the native and the non-native speaking groups and avery low interrater reliability.

2. The seven categories developedby Magnan (1988) were collapsedinto four in this study because,after looking at the collected data,the researcher realized that thestudents' writing did not containmuch sophistication in severalareas such as verb tense/mood,object pronouns, prepositions,and relative pronouns.

REFERENCESCohen, A. & Cavalcanti, M. (1988).

Feedback on compositions:Teacher and student verbal re-ports. Paper at TESOL AnnualMeeting.

Davies, E. (1983). Error evaluation:The importance of viewpoint.ELT Journal, 37(4), 303-311.

Ensz, K. (1982). French attitudes to-ward typical speech errors ofAmerican speakers of French.Modern Language Journal, 66 (2)33-39.

Garrett, N. (1991). Theoretical andpedagogical problems of separat-ing 'grammar' from 'com-munication.' In F. Barbara (Ed.),Foreign Language AcquisitionResearch and the Classroom (pp.74-87). Lexington, MA: D.C.Heath.

Green, P., & Hecht, K. (1985). Nativeand nonnative evaluation oflearners' errors in written dis-course." System, 13 (2), 77-97.

Heilenman, L. K. (1991). Writing inforeign language classrooms:Process and reality. In J. Alatis(Ed.), Linguistics and LanguagePedagogy: The State of the Art(pp. 273-288). Washington, D.C.:Georgetown University Press.

Kobayashi, T. (1992). Native andnonnative reactions to ESL com-positions. TESOL Quarterly, 26(1), 81-112.

Magnan, S. (1988). Grammar and theACTFL Oral Proficiency Inter-view: Discussion and data. Mod-ern Language Journal, 72 (3),266-276.

Omaggio, A. (1993). Teaching lan-guage in context. Boston: Heinle& Heinle.

Politzer, R. (1978). Errors of Englishspeakers of German as perceivedby German natives. Modern Lan-guage Journal, 62 (2), 253-261.

17

Semke, H. (1984). Effects of the redpen. Foreign Language Annals,17 (3), 195 -202.

Takashima, H. (1987). To what ex-tent are nonnative speakersqualified to correct free composi-tion? A case study. British Jour-nal of Language Teaching 25 (1),43-48.

APPENDIX AQUESTIONNAIRE

1. Please indicate if you are a nativeor nonnative speaker of French.

native _nonnative

2. Please indicate if you are a nativeor nonnative speaker of English.

native _nonnative

3. If you are both a nonnativespeaker of French and English,please indicate your native lan-guage(s).

4. What is your formal training inpedagogy (if any)?

none

one course

more than one course

it is your minor areaof specialization

it is your minor areaof specialization

5. Were you given any formalguidelines pertaining to the cor-


rection of compositions this se-mester?

yes no

6. If you answered yes to question#5, please indicate the guidelinesyou received.

7. If you answered no to question#5, please indicate whether youhad personal guidelines.

yes no

8. If you answered yes to question#7, please indicate what yourguidelines were. What criteriadid you use in correcting yourstudents' compositions? (i.e.grammatical accuracy, vocabu-lary, etc.)

APPENDIX BINTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. When you grade/correct compo-sitions, are all errors markedconsidered in the grade a studentreceives? In other words, do allerrors marked on the student'spaper count in the grade?

yes no, explain:

2. When you grade/correct compo-sitions, are all errors marked andconsidered in the grade of equalimportance and weight in thegrade? In other words, do all er-rors marked and considered inthe grade weigh the sameamount in the grade?

yes no, explain:

3. Please indicate whether you are:

O


a native speaker of Frencha nonnative speaker ofFrench

is

ESL Students' Opinions About Instruction inPronunciation

MATT MADDENZENA MOORE

The goal of this study was to make preliminary observations about theattitudes of a group of ESOL learners toward pronunciation in theirlanguage learning experience. Not many studies have included lan-guage learner's opinions about their own learning. This study attemptsto begin adding their voices to the dialogue. A secondary goal of thestudy was to compare findings across sections, such as male versus fe-male, speakers of Indo-European versus those of non-Indo-Europeanlanguages, and humanities students versus science students. The studyfound only slight differences across groups of students, but found ingeneral that students valued pronunciation as a very important part ofinstruction; they needed more correction to their pronunciation bothin and out of the classroom; and they wanted more emphasis placed o npronunciation. The findings challenge pedagogical principles about er-ror correction and instruction in pronunciation.

INTRODUCTIONPronunciation is often simplified to mean the production of pho-

netic/phonemic sounds of a language. Teachers and students assume thatmastering pronunciation is simply a matter of perfecting the production of aninventory of consonants and vowels. While there is no denying that phonet-ics at the segmental level is certainly crucial in pronunciation, suprasegmen-tal, or prosodic, features of language, such as stress and intonation, are equallyimportant. Yet these aspects of pronunciation receive little attention in theESL classroom, probably because English does not have straightforward rulesabout suprasegmentals and stress compared to other languages, such as Czech,Polish, and Swahili (Ladefoged, 1993).

Effective teaching of pronunciation, according to Pennington andRichards and Richards (1986), must include segmental features, voice-settingfeatures, and prosodic features. Segmental features are the minimal phoneticunits in a language, the phonemes, which, along with their allophones, makeup the sound inventory of a language. Voice-setting features are the "generalarticulatory characteristics of stretches of speech" (Pennington and Richards,p. 209) which account for a speaker's voice quality, like the huskiness demon-strated by many Japanese and Arabic males and the high pitch used by women

20

1 6 Texas Papers in Foreign Language Education

in some cultures. These voice set-tings features are often carried overto the speaker's L2 pronunciationwith a distinct and recognizablevoice quality.

The third set of featureswhich Pennington and Richards(1986) identified is prosodic features,or suprasegmental features, whichinclude stress, intonation, and coar-ticulation. Stress is the emphasis ofone syllable over other syllables. Ac-cording to Orion (1988) multisyllabicwords show a stressed/unstresseddistinction (syllable or word stress),and phrases and sentences showstress on their most salient words(word or sentence stress). Stress isused to emphasize or contrast words,or to indicate syntactic function, asin the case of words which changefrom nouns into verbs due solely toa shift in stress, like object (noun)and object (verb). Intonation is the"pattern of pitch changes" that oc-curs over a stretch of speech(Ladefoged, 1993, p. 109). Intonationintroduces and emphasizes salientinformation and carries affective in-formation about the speaker's atti-tude, indicating whether a stretch ofspeech is a statement, a question, acommand, or any other type of ut-terance. Finally, coarticulation is"the overlapping of adjacent articu-lations" (Ladefoged, 1993, p. 292).

Pronunciation and the LanguageLearner

In the last two decades, re-searchers have recognized the affec-tive domain as a significant variable

in second language acquisition. Pro-nunciation is the most obvious andunavoidable marker of a languagelearner's proficiency, and regardlessof whether that proficiency corre-lates to other components, it makessense that it could be a source of con-siderable anxiety and stress. On theother hand, nonnative pronun-ciation may be seen by the languagelearner as a mark of identificationwith a certain group, such as animmigrant community (Penningtonand Richards, 1986).

Teaching PronunciationPennington and Richards

(1986) outlined two competing ap-proaches to teaching pronunciation:the "phonemic-based view" and the"discourse-based view." The tradi-tional phonemic-based view empha-sizes the correct pronunciation ofisolated sounds and words, and itmay be the more popular teachingtechnique. Teaching methods suchas Audiolingualism and the SilentWay favor a phonemic-based ap-proach to teaching pronunciation.

The newer discourse-basedview of pronunciation instruction ismore appropriately used in No-tional-Functional Syllabi, the Natu-ral Approach, and, to a lesser extent,in methods like Total Physical Re-sponse, which emphasize compre-hension and communication overaccuracy and fluency. As a result,pronunciation tends to be de-emphasized or overlooked in suchinstruction.

In a review of current theories21

ESL Students' Opinions About Pronunciation 17

and methods, Knowles (1995) foundthat the phonemic-based approachstill dominates the methodology,and the emphasis is still "on formrather than meaning" (p. 287).Knowles further notes that "there islittle consideration of problems fromthe student's point of view" andconcludes that "it is clear that we donot yet have an adequate theoreticalbasis for the teaching of spoken lan-guage" (p. 288)The dominant viewin pedagogy is that correction shouldbe avoided (Brown, 1990), partly be-cause correction is associated withlearning and not with acquisitionand partly because correction cancause anxiety in the languagelearner, thus preventing effectivelearning. However, the ACTFL Pro-ficiency Guidelines make distinc-tions between pronunciation skillsfor all levels. For example, a novice-high level speaker's "pronunciationmay still be strongly influenced byLl," and the advanced-plus speaker"often shows remarkable fluencyand ease of speech" (ACTFL Profi-ciency Guidelines, 1988). The guide-lines suggest that teachers shouldgive as much attention to teachingpronunciation as they do other lin-guistic features, like vocabulary andgrammar. Yet, based on limited re-search findings, it would appear thatcontrary to the arguments on effec-tive teaching techniques, the mostsignificant factor in developing cor-rect pronunciation is not the teach-ing technique but the individuallearning style (McDonald et al.,1994).

Pronunciation and LanguageAcquisition

In first language acquisition,children learn pronunciation induc-tively by absorbing and reproducingthe sounds in their environment.Neufeld and Schneiderman (1980)pointed out that a five-year-old childspeaks with a native accent and ahighly-developed sensitivity toprosody even before s/he has mas-tered the more complicated su-prasegmental features of the nativelanguage. A child learns all compo-nents of pronunciation simultane-ously. Though a child may not havemastered subtle shades of irony orskepticism, s/he does display compe-tence in prosodic features throughan ability to express doubt, puzzle-ment, and mockery, as well as anability to comprehend various sen-tence types.

Thus, while Neufeld andSchneiderman (1980) distinguishedtwo orders of competence, they ar-gued that these components shouldbe seen as developing simultane-ously, and not necessarily in se-quence, suggesting that the fullrange of pronunciation componentsshould be taught from the beginningof instruction.

Finally, oral proficiency im-plies development of several seg-ments of speech: pronunciation, ac-cent, appropriateness of response,comprehensibility, intonation, vo-cabulary, and grammatical accuracy.Higgs (1984) believes that teachersshould apportion their attention to

22


the speech segments depending o nthe level of the students. Specifically,acquiring vocabulary and perfectingpronunciation should be the foci ofinstruction at the novice and inter-mediate levels. The pedagogical im-plications are even more strikingwhen we consider that the greaternumber of our students fall withinthese ranges.

DESCRIPTION OF STUDYResearch on pronunciation is

relatively scarce compared to that onother components of language learn-ing, such as grammar, communica-tive competence, and socioculturalawareness, except for the numerousstudies of native speaker reaction tonormative pronunciation (Giles etal., 1995; Munro & Dering, 1995; Al-brechtsen et al., 1980). The goal ofthis paper is to make preliminaryobservations about the attitudes of agroup of English learners towardpronunciation in their languagelearning experience. Furthermore,language learners' opinions aboutlearning are rarely solicited in cur-rent research. The present study at-tempts to begin adding their voicesto the dialogue.

Research QuestionsThe primary goal of the study

was to investigate students' experi-ences in pronunciation and theirperceptions of the definition andimportance of good pronunciation.A secondary goal was to investigatepossible differences between groups,such as gender, major areas of study,and nationalities.

The SubjectsAll 49 subjects, who were in-

termediate-level ESL students study-ing at a large state university, wererespondents to a survey question-naire. They fell between the ages 23and 33. Of the respondents, 23 weremale, 22 were female and 4 did notindicate their gender. The studentsrepresented a wide range of nation-alities. Thirty-six students spokeAsian languages. Eight were speak-ers of Spanish, three of Portuguese,and one each of German, Italian,Kyrgyz, and Russian. Nineteen werehumanities students, and sixteenwere science students, and the restdid not indicate their majors.

Method and Data CollectionA pilot questionnaire was

drafted and administered to a groupof 25 students in the semester priorto the actual study. A modified ques-tionnaire, designed with four catego-ries, became the data-collecting in-strument. (See Appendix.) The firstpart asked for biographical informa-tion. The second part of the ques-tionnaire dealt with students' lan-guage learning histories. The thirdpart of the questionnaire elicitedlearners' personal attitudes aboutpronunciation, including their opin-ions about the definition of goodpronunciation and their own judg-ments and native speakers' judg-ments of their pronunciation profi-ciency. Finally, a fourth part askedquestions about correction, both in-side and outside the classroom.

23


Limitations of the StudyBefore the results of the ques-

tionnaire are discussed, it is impor-tant to invoke the limitations of thisstudy. It should be stated that theanalyses of the results apply only tothe population under study-49 in-ternational students studying inter-mediate-level ESL at a large stateuniversity. Any inference aboutmore general populations is hypo-thetical and would need to be sub-stantiated by further research. On theother hand, the size and diversity ofthe subjects might well indicate thatthe sample is representative of itspopulation.

Another limitation of thestudy was in the area of analysis. Be-cause the study focused on studentsopinions and perceptions, dataacross gender, academic areas, andlanguage groups were comparedonly in four areas: (1) reasons forstudying English, (2) definition ofpronunciation, (3) attitudes to wardserror correction, and (4) satisfactionwith their pronunciation skills. Noanalysis was conducted in the areasthat dealt with instructional timenor with instructional techniques.

RESULTS

Language Learner Background

Reasons for Studying EnglishAbout half of the respondents

(49%) chose "personal growth" and29% indicated "research" as theirmain reason for studying English(Figure 1). Ten (approximately 20%)of the respondents chose "career", as

a reason, and the rest (2%) indicated"other" reasons for learning Englishbut did not stipulate. (See Figure 1).

Male Versus FemaleMore women generally chose

personal growth as their reason forstudying English (F=68%; M=35%)(Figure 2). More men were studyingEnglish for research reasons (F=18%;M=43%). An almost equal numbersof men and women chose "career"(F=23%; M=22%). (See Figure 2).

Indo-European Versus Non-Indo-European Language Speakers

There were few differences inpurpose between the two languagegroups. An equal number of stu-dents chose to study English for per-sonal growth, academic reasons, andcareer purposes.

Humanities Versus Science StudentsThere were few differences be-

tween students in the fields of hu-manities and sciences. More hu-manities students elected "personalgrowth" as a reason for studyingEnglish, but not significantly morethan science students, who leanedslightly more toward "research."

Time Spent Studying EnglishAlthough all 49 students had

studied both in conventional andnonconventional settings, they hadnot studied English for equal periodsof time. For example, 43 (88%) hadstudied English at secondary schools,but only 21 (41%) had between oneto six year of instruction. Thirty-seven respondents had studied

24


., ,,,,I. ,4,5. /5.; 4.2.;.; ,,,,k v, ;,,,,),!;-,-,,;',,-,- ,,,:',,,,, ?' 50

:;-, -,--, ..'ilL,.: ,..er. ...vLIN,.-,, ,,,-,71,,,ist.,,,....',;:;i,'4,..^',,,,

,''',,,,..`;t.,--l: ';(°;.I

1*.**,F7 1 ',11,4'..!'.,'.'l'ta.*'''':.1;...;; :AV °I't: ,., 'a '. " .4 ..',..: "ti:.: k. ' '' 30'AV

1%."::- ''!..01`'`-,:1,'ii-,::.7_1.'"f'`1;';,'Ic.,'". 25A , , ,. toqr ...,,',, aglihr,1S7',4 stt?-7' ,,,,trtt 20,-,r,

,1:6`,.:7: , `;i..', :',,riz:',',:: , , 150

Per. Research Career OtherGrowth

Figure 1. Reasons for Studying English: Total Response

50

40

30

20

";

Per. Cricort h Research Career

Figure 2. Reasons for Studying English: Female vs Male

25


English as undergraduates, but onlynine had studied English in graduateschool. Sixteen (33%) had spentabout two years in some form ofEnglish instruction outside the con-ventional school system. Thus, al-though all the students were study-ing at the intermediate level, thereappeared to be major differences intheir experiences and exposure toEnglish.

Time Spent on Instruction inPronunciation

Responses indicated differencesin time spent on pronunciation ininstruction prior to coming to theuniversity. For example, one studentreported having had 12 hours aweek of pronunciation instruction,and three (6%) had spent no timestudying pronunciation. Fourteen(29%) had received pronunciationpractice one hour a week, eleven(22%) less than one hour a week.Seventeen students (34%) had re-ceived more than an hour but lessthan two hours a week. Three stu-dents indicated that they had two ormore hours a week. In all, justslightly over half the group (57%)had received a minimum of onehour a week or less in pronuncia-tion instruction. (See Figure 3).

Types of Pronunciation InstructionForty-two respondents (86%)

indicated that they had studied seg-mentals before; forty-one (84%) hadstudied stress, and thirty (61%) hadstudied intonation. Twenty-threerespondents (47%) claimed to havestudied all three components;. ,thir-

teen (27%) had studied only segmen-tals and stress, and three respon-dents indicated other combinationsor individual components.

Teaching Techniques forPronunciation

Forty-three respondents (88%)indicated that they had used patterndrills, thirteen (27%) had used lan-guage lab exercise, and nine (18%)listed alternative instruction tech-niques. Eleven (22%) used patterndrills and exercises in the languagelab, and four indicated different in-dividual or combinations of tech-niques. Among these, television andcassette tapes (presumably outsidelanguage lab) were the principal al-ternative techniques listed. Othertechniques listed were "[talking]with friend," "jingle exercise" (nodescription given), and "phoneticchart."

Responses showed that 25 (61%)had used some form of phonetic al-phabet, and all twenty-five found itto be helpful in their study of pro-nunciation.

Defining "Good" PronunciationTwenty (41%) respondents de-

fined good pronunciation as beingable to be understood and twenty-eight (57%) defined it as soundinglike a native speaker (Figure 4). Onestudent circled both definitions.While all students thought thatgood pronunciation was important,76% thought it was very important.The majority of students (71%) werenot satisfied with their current pro-nunciation (Figure 5); 14% answered

26


Hours

Figure 3. Number of Students and Hours of Instruction

"yes," and 6%) answered either "so-so" or "more or less." Four respon-dents (8%) did not answer this ques-tion. In responding to the questionon native speakers' irritation bytheir pronunciation, 3 of the 49 re-spondents said that it never both-ered them. Nine said that it rarelybothered them. Twenty-seven saidthat it bothered them sometimes.Nine said it often bothered themand one did not know.

Male Versus FemaleMale subjects' responses split

evenly between "sounding like a na-tive speaker" and "being easy to un-derstand." Women favored "sound-in like a native speaker" (68% V s32%). Although both men andwomen were generally not satisfiedwith their current pronunciation, alarger number of women (32%) thanmen (9%) answered "yes." Both gen-ders generally felt that native speak-ers were "sometimes" irritated bytheir pronunciation (F=50%;

1

3

O 14O 11

17m3

M=56%), although men were moreinclined to say that native speakerswere "often" irritated (F=9%;M=26%).


While there was only a slightdifference in how IE speakers andnon-IE speakers defined good pro-nunciation (IE =77 %; non- IE =56 %) as"sounding like a native speaker,"there was a startling difference inpersonal satisfaction with pronun-ciation. Not one of the IE speakersexpressed satisfaction with his or hercurrent pronunciation, compared to25% of the non-IE speakers whowere satisfied.

Humanities Versus Science StudentResponses

Sixty-three percent of the humani-ties students defined good pronunciationas "sounding like a native speaker," whilescience students answered this questionalmost 50/50. Thus, there is a slight

27

60

40

20

0


M Understood

N.S.

Figure 4. Respondents' Definitions of Good Pronunciation

Missing

Yes

Figure 5. Respondents' Satisfaction with Pronunciation

suggestion that humanities studentshave more integrative motivationfor learning English, while sciencestudents tend toward a more prag-matic, instrumental motivation.

Error CorrectionForty-six respondents (94%)

wanted their pronunciation cor-rected, one (2%) answered "no"; andtwo (4%) did not answer the ques-tion. The one "no" answer did notoffer a reason for that response.Those who wanted their pronuncia-

tion corrected simply reiterated theirdissatisfaction with their currentpronunciation; for example: "I thinkmy pronunciation is so bad," and, "Ican't pronounce clearly." Six stu-dents noted that with in-class correc-tion they can learn what their errorsare and then work on improvingthem (". . . because the best way tolearn is when you make a mistake,be corrected, and after, work on yourmistake"). Three respondents feltthat it was important to be correctedby native speakers, and several oth-

28


ers wrote that it was a good wayand, in two cases, the only waytoimprove one's pronunciation.

Asked whether they liked tohave their pronunciation correctedoutside of the classroom with expla-nations, 39 respondents (80%) an-swered "yes"; 5 (10%) answered"no"; 3 (6%) answered "sometimes";and 2 (4%) did not answer the ques-tion. Reasons given were a belief inthe value of identifying errors in or-der to correct them, and a generaldesire to improve pronunciation.

Furthermore, three respon-dents liked the idea of their friendshelping to correct their pronuncia-tion errors, and six respondents ex-pressed a belief that any opportunityto correct pronunciation wasworthwhile, whether in the class -.room or not. ("I want to correct mypronunciation at any time"). One,who responded in the negative, gaveas a reason a lack of exposure to na-tive speakers outside the classroom.The other four negative responsesexpressed skepticism about the use-fulness of correction outside theclassroom: one respondent believedthat there was too much exposure tolanguage that was "abnormal andslang;" another was unsure of whosepronunciation to trust ("I don'tknow who can speak proper Eng-lish"); another simply asserted thatthe classroom was "the best place tocorrect pronunciation."

Male /Female DifferencesMen and women both fa-

vored correction and more timespent on pronunciation in class,

with the single difference that menseemed more reluctant to have theirpronunciation corrected out of class(F=5%; M=22%).


The responses were similarbetween the two groups, with oneinteresting small difference in thatall IE speakers (100%) favored correc-tion outside as well as in the class-room, while a small percentage(16%) of non-IE speakers wereagainst correction outside of theclassroom. This discrepancy could bedue to personality or socioculturaldifferences; the difference and thesample size are too small to reach aconclusion.

Additional Learner ObservationsAn open question invited re-

spondents to add any additional ob-servations they wished to shareabout pronunciation. Only seven re-spondents made additional com-ments. Three of these observationshad to do with suprasegmental pro-nunciation; one respondent wrotethat, for Asian students, "intonationis more important than pronuncia-tion," while two others noted thatthey would like to learn "muchmore intonation" and "the pronun-ciation of whole sentences." Two re-spondents requested more time to bespent on pronunciation in class; theremaining two pointed out thatpronunciation was easier to learn asa child or at the very beginning ofinstruction.

29


SUMMARY AND DISCUSSIONIn summary, no statistically

significant differences were foundbetween male and female responseswithin this particular group of lan-guage learners. There seemed to be ageneral tendency, however, thatmen showed a slightly higher levelof anxiety about pronunciation:more of them were unsatisfied withtheir own level of proficiency, morefound that their pronunciation irri-tated native speakers, and morewere disinclined to have their pro-nunciation corrected outside of class.

It was predicted that nativespeakers of non-Indo-European lan-guages (non-IE) would generally re-spond more negatively than speak-ers of Indo-European languages (IE).This was predicted largely becausethe former group is learning a lan-guage from a different language fam-ily. English has much less in com-mon with Japanese or Mandarinthan it does with Spanish or Portu-guese. In fact, the opposite turnedout to be true as a general trend, al-though the differences were not sta-tistically significant.

The majority of IE speakers(IE=77%; non- IE =56 %) defined goodpronunciation as "sounding like anative speaker," while non-IEspeakers' responses were moreevenly split between the two op-tions. It is interesting to note that noIE speakers expressed satisfactionwith their current pronunciation,yet 25% of the non-IE speakers an-swered that they were satisfied. Thismight suggest a different scale ofjudgment being used by the two

groups, where IE speakers givethemselves higher standards becauseeither they can distinguish levels ofpronunciation better, or they feelthey should be able to pronounce alanguage from the same languagefamily.

The rest of the responses wereparallel between the two groups,with one interesting small differencebeing that all IE speakers favoredcorrection outside as well as in theclassroom, but a small percentage(16%) of non-IE speakers wereagainst correction outside of theclassroom. Again, this discrepancycould be due to personality or so-ciocultural differences; the differenceand the sample size are too small toreach a conclusion.

The study found that the mostpopular reason for studying Englishwas "personal growth." "Research"and "career" lagged somewhat be-hind for the group as a whole.Somewhat surprising was the find-ing that there was little difference inthe time spent on pronunciation atboth the early stages of instructionand at later stages, probably indicat-ing lack of knowledge on the in-structor's part or time constraints inteaching.

The majority of respondentslisted one hour or less of pronuncia-tion per week for both levels of in-struction. One hour per week is per-haps acceptable for an intermediateclass, but at the beginning level (ILR1/ACTFL Novice), roughly 27% ofclass time should be devoted to pro-nunciation according to Higgs' Hy-pothesized Relative Contribution

30


Model (Higgs, 1984, p. 6). Pronuncia-tion instruction should peak at thebeginning level, decrease to about8% at ILR 2+ (ACTFL AdvancedPlus), and then rise again to 20% atILR 5.

Respondents reported study-ing stress almost as much as indi-vidual sounds, with slightly lesstime spent on intonation. Almosthalf the respondents studied allthree components. The results sug-gest that the phonemic-based viewof pronunciation instruction did notdominate entirely. Although themajority of the students studied in-tonation and stress, the dominantteaching technique was the patterndrill, to the exclusion of practice oflanguage in context. Students usedthe language labs to a small degree,and few different or innovativemethods were recorded in the "othertechniques" section. Pattern drillsand language labs are both based onrote memorization and contrived,unnatural speech situations that areantithetical to a communicative syl-labus.

The Monitor Model andteaching for communicative compe-tence discourage explicit instructionin grammatical rules. Consequently,both theory and experience wouldpredict that respondents would notnecessarily find the use of a phoneticalphabet as a helpful teaching aid.Thus it was surprising to find thatamong the respondents who hadused a phonetic alphabet, all of themfound it useful to their study of pro-nunciation. Ausubel (in Brown,1993, p. 59) suggested that certain

adults could profit from grammati-cal explanations because of the onsetof formal operations, which makethem more analytic and self-awarethan child learners.

To define good pronunciationas "sounding like a native speaker"suggests an adherence to a more tra-ditional view, which says that learn-ing pronunciation involves themastery of every phonological detailthat characterizes the target lan-guage. Except in the case of children,this goal is extremely difficult toachieve. The definition "being easyto understand" falls in line with thecommunicative or discourse-basedview of language learning, wherecomprehension is more importantthan structural accuracy. It wouldseem likely that the majority oflearners would define good pronun-ciation as "sounding like a nativespeaker." The study found only aslight difference between soundinglike a native speaker" and the alter-native "being easy to understand."

It was clear that respondentsconsidered pronunciation an impor-tant factor in being a proficientspeaker of English. Yet, few respon-dents were satisfied with their cur-rent pronunciation. It would be in-teresting to discover whether re-spondents judged their current pro-ficiency against a native speaker cri-terion or against a profile descriptionin keeping with their instructionlevel. It would also be interesting toknow if instructors make the distinc-tion between these two standardsclear to the students.

31


The popular language learn-ing theory which emphasizes lower-ing the affective filter and whichgenerally favors acquisition overlearning and communicative dis-course over error analysis wouldpredict that students should notwant correction either in or out ofclass. On the one hand, many, if notmost, students come from tradi-tional educational backgroundswhere the authority of teacher maynot be questioned. On the otherhand, the respondents in this studyall seemed highly motivated to learnEnglish to the best of their abilitiesand so might have been willing toaccept any help they could get.

Respondents answered over-whelmingly in the affirmative thatthey wanted corrective feedback i nand out of class. The respondentswho gave negative answers thoughtthat correction outside of the class-room was in some way pedagogicallyunsound. The discrepancy here sug-gests that theorists might want to re-think their ideas about error correc-tion and its application to the class-room. It would be desirable to con-centrate either on "low anxiety" cor-rection and feedback techniques oron educating language learnersabout the limited usefulness of cor-rection suggested by certain theoriesand studies (Omaggio-Hadley, p.83).

RECOMMENDATIONS FORLANGUAGE TEACHING

Research has shown that, aswith other components of language,there is not one most effectivemethod or technique for teaching

pronunciation (Pennington, 1986;

McDonald, 1994). Furthermore, stud-ies on pronunciation suggest thatwhat is most desirable is an ap-proach that combines a communica-tive, discourse-based approach tolanguage instruction, with sensitiveand effective attention to the fullrange of components that make uppronunciation and an understand-ing of the value of pronunciation as"a dynamic component of conversa-tional fluency" (Pennington, 1986 p.

212; Knowles, 1995)Language learners in this

study almost unanimously desiredto spend more time studying pro-nunciation in class. The respondentsexpressed a similarly unanimous ea-gerness to have their pronunciationcorrected in class and, to a lesser ex-tent, out of class. The fact that themajority of respondents had studiedsuprasegmentals as well as the sim-pler phonemic aspects of English didnot mean that they had satisfactoryinstruction or practice in pronuncia-tion. Effective techniques need to bedeveloped to make the instructionof all the components of pronuncia-tion meaningful. An interesting im-plication for instruction is the 61%of respondents who found using aphonetic alphabet as an instructionaid very useful. Teachers mighttherefore want to consider regularlyincluding phonetics exercises in thelessons.

DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURERESEARCH

The present study suggestednumerous directions for further in-

'I 2


quiry. First, a more extensive ad-ministration of a questionnairesimilar to the one in this studymight yield more significant statisti-cal data. It might also be more effec-tive to administer a questionnaire inthe native language of the languagelearners. This would mean eitherfinding a homogeneous group ofnon-English speakers or else design-ing a questionnaire for Englishlearners of foreign languages.

Second, a study could be madecomparing language students' atti-tudes about learning pronunciationwith those of their instructors. In aseries of studies, pronunciation wasone of the most consistent points ofconflict between learners and teach-ers (Kern, 1995 ).

Thirdly, considering the re-spondents' insistence on the impor-tance of correction in this study, itwould be worth further exploringhow this can be done effectively andwith minimum anxiety or stress byexperimental studies designed tochart learners' pronunciation skillsover time.

Finally, Pennington noted thedifferent voice-settings men andwomen use in Japanese and someArabic cultures, and several otherlanguages have phonological vari-ants for men and women (Brown, p.240). The various cross tabulationsalong lines of gender, class, status,language family, and academic fieldsuggest areas for further research.

CONCLUSIONThis study will be most useful

if it is considered as a preliminary

survey which can be used to point tofuture areas of research. This at-tempt to bring language learners'voices into the discourse about lan-guage acquisition has shown thattheir opinions tend to be quite dif-ferent from those of many theoristsand teachers. This finding in itselfsuggests that it would be illuminat-ing to design language learner ques-tionnaires studying other compo-nents of language as well. The re-sults of this questionnaire suggestthat the instruction and learning ofpronunciation may play a muchmore important part in second lan-guage acquisition than is indicatedby either traditional or current theo-ries, and that in order to learn howbest to teach a language, teachers andtheorists would do well to take intoconsideration the opinions of thepeople their theories are designedfor: language learners.

REFERENCESAlbrechtsen, D., Henridsen, B., &

Faerch, C. (1980). NativeSpeaker Reactions to Learn-ers' Spoken Inter- language.Language Learning, 30, 365-396.

Brown, H. (1993). Principles of Lan-guage Learning and Teaching.Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall Regents.

Chalhoub-Deville, M. (1995). A Con-textualized Approach to De-scribing Oral Language Profi-ciency. Language Learning, 45,251-281.

Gilbert, J. (1980). Prosodic Develop-ment: Some Pilot Studies. In

33


R. C. Scarce lla & S. D. Krashen(Eds.),Research in SecondLanguage Acquisition. Roley,MA: Newbury House.

Giles, H., Williams, A. Mackie, D., &Rose lli, F. (1995). Reactions toAnglo- and Hispanic-American-Accented Speakers:Affect, Identity, Persuasion,and the English-Only Contro-versy. Language and Com-munication, 15, 107-120.

Higgs, T. (1984) Language Teachingand the Quest for the HolyGrail (1984). In Theodore V .

Higgs (Ed.), Teaching for Pro-ficiency, the Organizing Prin-ciple. . Lincolnwood, IL: Na-tional Textbook Company, 1-10.

Kern, R. (1995). Students' andTeachers' Beliefs about Lan-guage Learning. Foreign Lan-guage Annals, 28 , 71-90.

Krashen, S. Principles and Practice inSecond Language in SecondLanguage Acquisition. Oxford:Pergamon Press Ltd.

Knowles, G. (1992) Review of AdamBrown (Ed.), Approaches toPronunciation Teaching.London: Macmillan.

Ladefoged, P. (1993). A Course InPhonetics. Fort Worth, TX:Harcourt Brace JovanovichCollege Publishers.

Liskin-Gasparro, J. (1984). The Profi-ciency-Oriented Classroom.In, T. V. Higgs (Ed.)Teachingfor Proficiency, the OrganizingPrinciple. Lincolnwood, IL:National Textbook Company,11-42.

McDonald, D., Yule, G., & Powers,M. (1994). Attempts to Im-prove English L2 Pronuncia-tion: The Variable Effects ofDifferent Types of Instruction.Language Learning, 44 , 75-100.

Munro, M. Sr Dering, T. (1995). For-eign Accent. Comprehensibil-ity, and Intelligibility in theSpeech of Second LanguageLearners. Language Learning ,

45, 73-97.Neufeld, G. & Schneiderman, E.

(1980). Prosodic and Articula-tory Features in Adult Lan-guage Learning. In R. C. Scar-cella & S. D. Krashen(Eds.),Research in SecondLanguage Acquisition. Roley,MA: Newbury House.

Omaggio Hadley, A. (1993). TeachingLanguage in Context, SecondEdition. Boston, MA: Heinle& Heinle Publishers.

Orion, G., (1988). PronouncingAmerican English: Sounds,Stress and Intonation. Boston,MA: Heinle & Heinle Pub-lishers.

Parish, C. (1977). A Practical Philoso-phy of Pronunciation. InTESOL Quarterly, 11, 311-317.

Pennington M. & Richards, J. (1986).Pronunciation Revisited. InTESOL Quarterly, 20, 207-225.

34

APPENDIX

A QUESTIONNAIRETOWARD A CASE STUDY OF LANGUAGE LEARNER ATTITUDES ABOUTPRONUNCIATION

The objective of this study is to learn about language learners' percep-tions of pronunciation in learning a foreign language. Please briefly answerthe following questions.

Age: Gender: Native Language:

Country:

Field of Study:

Student Status (circle one):a. International studentb. Texas residentc. Resident alien

Why are you studying English?a. research (mainly reading & writing)b. career (teaching, etc.)c. personal growthd. other

1. How many years have you studied English at each level of schooling?a. Elementary school (up to grade 6)b. Secondary school (grade 7-12)c. College (undergraduate)d. Graduate schoole. Other:2. About how many hours per week did you spend studying pronunciation

when you were first learning English?3. If you are still studying English, how much class time do you spend study-

ing pronunciation now?4. Which of these aspects of pronunciation have you studied in an English

class? (write a check to mean "yes")a. Individual sounds (vowels, consonants)b. Stress (for emphasis, word differences)c. Intonation (questions, exclamations)5. How were you taught pronunciation? (write a check)a. Pattern drills (teacher models and student repeats)b. Exercises in a language labc. Other techniques (please describe below)

35


6a. Have you used any form of phonetic alphabet when learning about pro-nunciation?

6b. If the answer is yes, did you find it helpful?7. Would you define good pronunciation as (circle one):a. Being easy to understandb. Sounding like a native speaker8. How important do you feel pronunciation is in becoming a good speaker

of English? (circle one)a. Very important c. Not very importantb. Quite important d. Not important at all9. Are you comfortable with your current pronunciation?10. Do you feel that native speakers are irritated by your pronunciation?

(circle one)a. Neverb. Rarelyc. Sometimesd. Oftene. Don't know11. Would you like to spend more time studying pronunciation in your cur-

rent class?12. Do you like to have your pronunciation corrected in class?13. If YES to Q.12, why?14. If NO to Q.12, why?15. Do you like to have your pronunciation corrected out of class?_16. If YES to Q.15, why?17. If NO to Q.15, why?

Please feel free to add any other observations you have about pronuncia-tion. Thanks for your cooperation.

36

Factors of Attrition in Japanese Language Enrollments

YOSHITO SAITO-ABBOTTKEIKO SAMIMY

The status of Japanese as a foreign language in the United States has risen dra-matically in the past ten years, to the extent that Japanese has become the fifthmost commonly taught language in U.S. institutions of higher education. Yet, thestudent attrition rate for Japanese courses has been reported to be as much as80%. The present study investigates factors possibly contributing to attrition inJapanese language classes at the university level. Variables included in this studyare students' affective variables (for example, attitudes, motivation, and classroompersonality), their backgrounds (for example, year in school, major, and length ofstay in Japan), and their final grades. Statistical analyses revealed that learners'final grades and strength of motivation are significant contributors to predictionsof attrition in both beginning and intermediate classes. Several pedagogical impli-cations are discussed in relation to achievement and motivational factors.

INTRODUCTIONAmericans' perceptions of the study of Japanese as a foreign language

have undergone dramatic changes in the past ten years. No longer is Japaneseperceived as an esoteric language. On the contrary, by 1990 it had become "thefifth most commonly taught" (Modern Language Association, 1990) language inU.S. institutions of higher education. Despite this increase in popularity, the at-trition rate for Japanese learners has been reported to be "as much as 80%" (Mills,Samuels, and Sherwood, 1987, p. 19). Among the reasons cited are (1) the inher-ent difficulty of the language, (2) curriculum conflicts, (3) a lack of programsavailable locally for the interested student, and (4) the absence of a future payoffthat acts as an incentive for students to devote the time and effort needed to learnthis language. While these reasons are intuitively appealing, to date little empiri-cal evidence exists to delineate the sources of attrition in Japanese language en-rollments (e.g., Kataoka, 1986; Jorden and Lambert, 1991). Furthermore, researchin second/foreign language education generally focuses on students who arecurrently enrolled in language classes and tends to neglect students who havealready dropped out for one reason or another. With the high attrition rateamong Japanese language students, there is an urgent need to critically examinewhy students discontinue Japanese language studies and how the high attritionrate might be curtailed.

The present study investigates possible contributing factors related to at-trition in Japanese language classes at the university level. Variables included in

37


this study are students' affective vari-ables (e.g., attitudes, motivation, andclass room personality), their back-grounds (e.g., year in school, major,and length of time spent in Japan),and their final grades. The strategicrole of Japan in the world and the im-portance of the USA-Japan relation-ship both demand that we preparemore students who are linguisticallyas well as culturally competent inJapanese. The findings of the presentstudy will contribute not only towarda better understanding of why stu-dents decide not to continue studyingJapanese language but also towardimproving instructional approachesand teacher training.

THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK_

Motivation, Attitudes, and StudentEnrollment Attrition

Research in student enrollmentattrition in second/foreign languageclasses has been scarce. Researchers(e.g., Gardner and Lambert, 1972;Gardner, 1985) have explored possiblerelationships among motivation/atti-tudes, persistence, and second/for-eign language learning and haveidentified characteristics of continuingstudents and discontinuing students.In Canada, for example, Gardner andSmythe (1975) studied ninth-, tenth-,and eleventh-grade students of Frenchin Ontario. The results of their studyindicated that motivational and atti-tudinal differences were more consis-tent predictors for continuing and dis-continuing students than were differ-ences in aptitude. Similarly, Gardner,Smythe, Clement, and Gliksman

3S

(1976) conducted a three-year longi-tudinal study to examine the role ofattitudes and motivation from differ-ent perspectives, such as second lan-guage achievement, language drop-outs, and classroom behavior of stu-dents at five grade levels (5, 7, 9, 10,and 11) learning French as a secondlanguage in seven different geo-graphic regions in Canada. The resultsof the study revealed that clusters ofmotivational factors such as motiva-tional intensity, desire to learn French,and attitudes toward learning Frenchcorrelated the highest with the inten-tion to continue or discontinue Frenchstudy the following year.

In Australia, Baldauf and Law-rence (1990) examined high attritionrates among 459 eighth grade studentsstudying foreign languages (French,Japanese, and Indonesian) in highschools. Two major sources were hy-pothesized as significant contributingfactors for the high attrition rates:variables related to students' so-ciocultural background (such as so-cioeconomic status, gender, andachievement) and those related totheir affective domain (e.g., integra-tive and instrumental motivation, per-sonal attributes, parental influence,and teacher influence). Results of thestudy revealed that, in the affectivedomain, variables such as integrativemotivation, parental influence, in-strumental motivation, teacher influ-ence, and personal attributes, in thatorder, were significant factors, whilein sociocultural background factorssuch as gender (50% of girls continu-ing as compared with 38% of boys),achievement, and language teachers

Attrition in Japanese Language Enrollments 35

were significant variables in studentattrition rates.

In the United States, Bartley(1970), using the Foreign LanguageAttitude Scale, investigated the"importance of the attitude factor inlanguage dropout" (p. 383) amongeighth-grade students enrolled inGerman, French, and Spanish classes.According to Bartley, there was a sig-nificant difference between the"dropout" group and the "continuing"group in their attitudes toward thetarget languages. Furthermore, the at-titude of the dropout group deterio-rated significantly in six months whilethat of the continuing group remainedstable. Similarly, Ramage (1990) in-vestigated 138 high-school studentswho were learning French or Spanish.The study revealed that students aremore likely to continue the study ofFrench or Spanish if they are not tak-ing it as a requirement, if they receivehigh grades in class, if they are inter-ested in cultures, and if they are inter-ested in becoming proficient in thetarget language. One of the most sig-nificant findings, however, is that"continuers attributed low importanceto fulfilling a requirement as a reasonfor taking a foreign language and in-stead indicated other reasons such asan interest in culture and an interestin attaining proficiency in all languageskills" (p. 201). In other words, thecontinuing students are more intrinsi-cally motivated while the discontinu-ing students are extrinsically moti-vated. Furthermore, a noteworthyfinding in this study is that learners'attitudes toward the target languageand the teacher did not account for

their discontinuation, because theyhad "fairly positive attitudes towardthe teacher and course" (p. 211), con-trary to what earlier studies discov-ered (Gardner and Smythe, 1975;Gardner et al., 1976).

Attrition Among Japanese LanguageStudents

As mentioned earlier, to date,there are little existing data on possi-ble causes for attrition among Japa-nese language students at the postsec-ondary level. A study by Kataoka(1986) examined reasons for attritionof Japanese language learners at threedifferent universities. Forty-six per-cent of them gave a heavy course loadand/or conflict as the most likely rea-son, while six percent of the studentsgave poor performance as the mostlikely reason for discontinuing Japa-nese. Twenty-one percent of the stu-dents gave graduation and/or trans-fer as the reason. Kataoka states thatengineering and science students' at-trition rate is high due to the de-manding nature of their major coursework, although they are among thebest students in Japanese classes.

A survey conducted by Jordenand Lambert (1991) also provides in-teresting insights into why postsecon-dary Japanese language studentsmight decide to discontinue fromthree different perspectives (programdirector, teacher, and students). Pro-gram directors and teachers tend toattribute the reasons for attrition tothe general difficulty of the language,the time required for preparation, ageneral lack of time, and the time ittakes to reach useful proficiency. Stu-


dents give reasons such as leavingschool and schedule conflict, not thegeneral difficulty of the language, fordiscontinuing Japanese languagestudy. The authors recommend afurther "in-depth study of high en-rollment attritionits causes and itspossible cures" (p. 182).

Based on the review of the lit-erature, the present study investigatespossible contributing factors for attri-tion in university-level Japanese lan-guage enrollments. In particular, thestudy examines learners' affectivevariables such as attitudes, motiva-tion, and classroom personality, levelof achievement, and student back-grounds as possible sources for thecontinuation or discontinuation ofJapanese language classes.

The following research ques-tions were explored in this study.

1. What student characteristicscontribute to predicting attri-tion in Japanese languageclasses at the university level?Are there different characteris-tics depending on languagelevels (beginning and interme-diate level)?

2. What motivation types con-tribute to predicting attrition inenrollments for beginning andintermediate level universityJapanese students?

METHODOLOGYSubjects

The subjects were 213 studentsenrolled in the fall semester of begin-ning (134) and intermediate (79) levels

40

of Japanese courses at a southwesternuniversity (see Table 1). Among thebeginning-level students, by genderthere were 75 male and 59 female stu-dents; by year in school there were 45freshmen, 33 sophomores, 24 seniors,and 16 graduate students. Of the 79intermediate students, 43 were malesand 36 were females. Four of thisgroup were freshmen, 20 weresophomores, 17 were juniors, 31 wereseniors, and 7 were graduate students.One student of this group was a non-status student.

InstructionBeginning Japanese classes met for sixhours a week, and intermediateclasses met five hours a week for fif-teen weeks during fall and spring se-mesters. Instruction in the beginningand intermediate classes were de-signed to develop the four skills andcultural understanding. In the class-room, more time was allocated forspeaking and listening activities (60%)than reading and writing activities(40%). Classroom instruction for thebeginning level was conducted at arate of five days per one lesson. Thefirst three days were devoted to theintroduction of new vocabulary andgrammar and oral activities; thefourth day focused on reading andwriting activities; and the fifth daywas spent on communicative activitiesbased on daily situations in order toencourage use and retention of thegrammar and vocabulary introducedduring the week. Intermediate classeswere organized similarly to the be-ginning classes; however, becausethere were fewer classroom hours,


Table 1Summary of Student Enrollment of First Semester of

Beginning and Intermediate Classes (N = 213)

Language Level

Beginning (n=134) Intermediate (n=79)

P ( %) P ( %)

Gender:Male 75 56 43 54Female 59 44 36 46

Year in School:Freshman 45 33 4 5

Sophomore 33 25 20 25Junior 24 18 17 22Senior 16 12 31 39Graduate 16 12 7 9

Major:JPN/ANS 7 5 7 9

Liberal Arts 26 20 18 23BUS/ECO 38 28 21 27NS/CS/EN 33 25 17 21

COM/EDU 15 11 10 13Others 15 11 6 7

Notes:1. Data in Table 1 are rounded to the nearest whole number.2. A major uses abbreviation as follows: ANS = Asian Studies, BUS = Business,

COM = Communication, CS = Computer Science, ECO = Economics, EDU =Education, JPN = Japanese, and NS = Natural Science.

41


oral activities were encouraged morein the classroom, while reading andwriting were primarily assigned ashomework.1

The Instruments and ProcedureDuring the fifth week of the fall

semester, a series of questionnaireswas administered in the beginningand intermediate Japanese classes inorder to collect data on five foreignlanguage affective variables (Japan-ese-speaking anxiety, language classrisktaking, language class sociability,strength of motivation, and attitudetoward the Japanese class), types ofmotivations, and students' personalbackgrounds. The questionnaire in-cluded a total of forty-one (41) items(Appendix A). Each item was fol-lowed by a six-point Likert responsescale, with the alternatives labeled:"strongly disagree," "moderately disa-gree," "slightly disagree," "slightlyagree," "moderately agree," and"strongly agree." The instrumentswere adapted from Ely (1984, 1986).The following were the measuring in-struments used in the study:

1. Japanese Speaking Anxiety.(Cronbach alpha = .89) Thisscale is designed to measurethe degree of anxiety, self-consciousness, or embarrass-ment felt when learners speakJapanese in the classroom. Thescale was originally namedLanguage Class Discomfort(Ely) and consists of five items.

42

2. Language Class Risktaking.(Cronbach alpha = .80) Thisscale is designed to measure astudent's tendency to assumerisks by using Japanese in class.The scale consists of six items.

3. Language Class Sociability.(Cronbach alpha = .78) Thisscale is designed to measurethe degree of willingness tointeract with others in theJapanese class by means ofJapanese. The scale consists offive items.

4. Strength of Motivation.(Cronbach alpha = .67) Thisscale is designed to measure astudent's motivational com-mitment to learn Japanese. Thescale consists of seven items.

5. Attitude toward the JapaneseClass.(Cronbach alpha = .86) Thisscale is designed to measure astudent's attitude toward theJapanese class. The scale con-sists of four items.

6. Concern for Grade.There are two items to assess astudent's concern for grades.

7. Motivation Type.There are twelve items tomeasure student's reasons forstudying Japanese. The scaleconsists of three subscales:


Motivation Type A character-izes students' desire for culturalbroadening and belief in theimportance of foreign languagestudy, and there were sevenitems in the scale (Cronbach al-pha = .83). Motivation Type Bcontains three items and char-acterizes expected usefulness inone's career (Cronbach alpha =.70). Finally, Motivation Type Cdepicts students' need to fulfillforeign language requirementsand is measured by two items(Cronbach alpha = .67).

8. Final Grade.2 Final grade(percentage) for both beginningand intermediate students weremeasured by combining theircumulative scores on dailyquizzes, lesson quizzes, oralexams, final exam, and home-work assignments.

Students also filled out a formthat included questions on the stu-dent's gender, year in school, aca-demic major, length of time spent inJapan (living or visiting), and amountof time spent studying Japanese out-side of class (Appendix B). Students'final course grades (percentages) forthe semester were obtained at the endof the semester as a global measure ofperformance (Chastain, 1975; Horwitzet al. 1991; Comeau, 1992; Samimyand Tabuse, 1992; Aida, 1994). TheJapanese language program is coordi-nated in such a way as to provide uni-form instructional guidelines and as-sessment instruments across all levelsof instruction. At the end of the fol-

lowing semester, the students whocontinued or did not continue wereidentified and entered into the dataset for statistical analysis.

Data AnalysisThe collected data were exam-

ined using logistic regression in orderto determine which variables signifi-cantly contributed to the prediction ofprobability for distinguishing con-tinuing students from discontinuingstudents in the first- and second-yearclasses. While a variety of multivariatestatistical techniques may be em-ployed to predict a binary dependentvariable from a set of independentvariables, when the dependent vari-able has only two values, namely,continuing and discontinuing stu-dents, logistic regression seems to bethe most appropriate (Norusis, 1990).Independent variables included in thefirst analysis were five foreign lan-guage affective variables (Japanese-speaking anxiety, language classrisktaking, language class sociability,strength of motivation, and attitudetoward the Japanese class), students'personal backgrounds (gender, year inschool, length of time spent in Japan,and time spent for study), and finalgrades, all of which provided a com-prehensive picture of the student'sperspectives on studying Japanese.

The second analysis was con-ducted using logistic regression todetermine which motivational type isimportant for attrition in the begin-ning and intermediate Japaneseclasses. Three types of motivations,Type A, B, and C, were included inthe analysis.

43


RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONThe results of the analysis as

they pertain to each research questionare as follows.

Research Question 1

What student characteristics con-tribute to predicting attrition in Japaneselanguage classes at the university level?Are there different characteristics de-pending on language levels, that is, be-ginning and intermediate level?

As shown in Table 2, attritionrates were 45% and 32% for beginningand intermediate students, respec-tively. Logistic regression identifiedthe characteristics that distinguishedcontinuing or discontinuing studentsat each level. Significant predictivecharacteristics for the beginning stu-dents based on Wald statistics (seeTable 3) are as follows:

Final Grades (r = -.33, p < .001)Strength of Motivation (r = -.23,

p < .01)Year in school (r = .26, p < .01)Gender (r = -.19, p < .01)Length of Time Spent in Japan

(r = -.17, p < .05)Attitudes toward Language

Class (r = .11, p < .05)

Overall, the prediction successfullyclassified 76.3% of the students whodid not continue.

In other words, among the be-ginning students, those who are likelynot to enroll in the second semester ofbeginning-level Japanese classes werecharacterized as receiving low grades,

having weak motivation, and having anegative attitude toward their Japa-nese class. Furthermore, female stu-dents are more likely not to continuecompared to male students and as thelearner's year in school increases (e.g.,graduate students are less likely tocontinue studying Japanese after thefirst semester). Importantly, studentswho have spent more time in Japan asa visitor or resident are more likely tocontinue to the second semester.

With the intermediate students,logistic regression identified the fol-lowing discriminating variables be-tween continuing and discontinuingstudents (see Table 4):

Final Grades (r = -.30, p < .05)Strength of Motivation (r = -.28, p

< .01)Speaking Anxiety (r = -.20, p <

.05)

In other words, among the interme-diate students, those who are likely todrop out of the Japanese classes werecharacterized as receiving low grades,having weak motivation, and havinghigh speaking anxiety.

The results of the logistic re-gressions reveal some common char-acteristics in terms of predicting vari-ables for attrition. For both beginningand intermediate students, finalgrades and strength of motivation areimportant discriminating variables. Infact, among the variables entered inthe equation, students' final gradeshad the strongest predicting power (p< .001), suggesting that the lower thestudents' grades, the higher the prob-ability there is for them to discontinue

44


Table 2Summary of Attrition of Beginning and Intermediate Japanese Classes:

Year in School and Gender (N = 213).

LanQuaee Level

Beginning n = 134) Intermediate (n = 79)

Cont. Discont. Cont. Discont.

n P(%) n P(%) n P(%) n P(%)

Year in schoolFreshman 27 60 18 40 3 67 1 33Sophomore 21 64 12 36 14 70 6 30Junior 12 50 12 50 13 76 4 24Senior 8 50 8 50 20 65 11 35Graduate 6 37 10 63 4 57 3 43

Total 74 55 60 45 54 68 25 32

GenderMale 45 60 30 40 26 60 17 40Female 29 49 30 51 28 78 8 22

Total 74 55 60 45 54 68 25 32

Note: Data are rounded to the nearest whole number.

45


Table 3Variables in the Equation Summary Table of Beginning Japanese Class

Variables g R Exp(B)

Final Grade***Year in school**2 vs. 1, 3, 4, 53 vs. 1, 2, 4, 5*4 vs. 1, 2, 3, 5**5 vs. 1, 2, 3, 4***

Length in Japan*Gender (1)**Strength of Motivation**Attitudes toward*Language Class

-.1853 -.3300 8308.2151.7087 .0000 2.0314

1.9860 .1525 7.28602.1705 1739 8.76303.6164 .2603 37.2016

-1.7600 -.1665 .1721-.7715 -.1922 .4623

-1.6317 -.2371 .1956.8238 .1068 2.2791

Notes:1. * = p < .05. ** = p < .01. *** = p < .001.2. Year in school is as follows: 1 = Freshmen, 2 = Sophomore, 3 =

Junior, 4 = Senior and 5 = Graduate.

Table 4Variables in the Equation Summary Table of Intermediate

Japanese Class

Variables ig R Exp (B)

Final Grade*** -.1086 -.3008 8971

Speaking Anxiety* .7994 -.2010 .4496

Strength of Motivation** 17.5713 -.2778 .2551

Note: * = p < .05. ** = p <.01. *** = p < .001.

46


their Japanese study. As Burstall(1975) states, "Achievement variableshave a more powerfully determiningeffect on later behavior than attitudi-nal variables" (p. 399); in this case, thedecision to continue or discontinuethe study of Japanese language candepend more on the final grades thestudents receive than the attitudesthey have toward the class.

Grades are very important tostudents since they are popularly usedas an indicator of their academic suc-cess or failure. The results of the lo-gistic regressions suggest that the de-cision to continue or discontinueJapanese is largely dependent uponthe grades the students receive. Inparticular, in the foreign languagelearning setting as opposed to the sec-ond language setting, learners' needfor achievement plays an importantrole in language learning (Dornyei,1994). Those students who receivedlow grades may have decided to dropthe course out of a fear of failure,while the students with good gradesmay have felt encouraged to pursuefurther study in Japanese.

Strength of motivation was an-other salient predictive variable forattrition for both beginning and in-termediate students. In other words,those students who were willing toput time and energy into the study ofJapanese were likely to persist. Thisfinding is consistent with earlierfindings on motivation, languagelearning, and attrition. (e.g., Gardnerand Smythe, 1975, Gardner et al.,1976; Ramage, 1990; Samimy andTabuse, 1992).

In addition, there were othercharacteristics predicting attritionbetween beginning and intermediatestudents. With the beginning stu-dents, four other variables were foundto be important: gender, length of stayin Japan, year in school, and attitudetoward language class. As shown inTable 2, 51 percent of the female stu-dents and 40 percent of the male stu-dents dropped out of their Japaneseclasses. This contradicts one of thefindings presented by Baldauf andLawrence (1990), who found that 50percent of the females continued for-eign language study as comparedwith 38 percent of the males. Furtherstudy is necessary to ascertain the roleof gender in Japanese class attrition.

The fact that the length of timespent in Japan was found to be a sig-nificant variable for predicting attri-tion for the beginning students shouldbe noted. This finding suggests that ifstudents have prior exposure to thelanguage and culture before they takeformal Japanese instruction, they aremore likely to continue to study Japa-nese. It may be that actually experi-encing the language and culture dem-onstrates the functional value of mas-tering Japanese and motivates them topersist.

Year in school was a significantcontributor to predictions of attrition.As students' year in school increases,the attrition rate becomes higher. Asshown in Table 2, ranked by year inschool, graduate students had the.highest attrition rates, 63 percent forbeginning-level and 43 percent forintermediate-level students, respec-

4 7


tively. Some possible reasons are thatlanguage courses are not counted asgraduate credits, that graduate stu-dents who are not Japanese majorsmay drop the language courses whenschedule conflicts occur with theirmajors, and that the students lack thetime for preparation, as Jorden andLambert (1991) discovered in theirsurvey.

Lastly, the evidence that atti-tude toward the language class was asignificant variable for prediction in-dicates that students who cannot en-joy the Japanese class are more likelynot to continue. If students have themotivation to study, types of activitiesand selection of materials in the classmay be important as well as the roleof the instructor in making the learn-ing experience more meaningful andenjoyable.

Speaking anxiety was found tobe an important predictive variablefor attrition among intermediate stu-dents; that is to say, those studentswho felt anxious and awkwardspeaking Japanese tend to discontinuethe study of Japanese. Earlier anxietystudies (e.g., Horwitz and Young,1991; Young, 1992) have pointed outthat a behavioral factor such as cuttingclass may be a manifestation of anxi-ety. It is quite possible, then, thatwhen anxiety becomes debilitating, alearner may decide to drop the studyof Japanese altogether in order toavoid further pain or discomfort. Asthe learners' communicative compe-tence becomes increasingly importantin language classrooms, their anxietyassociated with speaking a target lan-guage needs to be carefully examined,

since among the four language skills ittends to produce the greatest amountof anxiety among language learners(Young, 1992).

Research Question 2

What motivation types contribute to pre-dicting attrition in enrollments for begin-ning and intermediate university levelJapanese students?

In order to examine to whatextent motivation type contributes toattrition in beginning and intermedi-ate Japanese enrollments, logistic re-gression was performed with motiva-tion types A, B, and C. To recapitulate,type A motivation characterizes inte-grative motivation, which indicatesstudents who choose to learn a lan-guage to identify with the target lan-guage group. Type B motivation is in-strumental in nature and indicatesstudents who relate the target lan-guage to career values. Type C moti-vation characterizes students whoneed to satisfy a language require-ment (Ely, 1984).

As shown in Table 5, Type Amotivation was predicted to be animportant variable for beginning stu-dents, while, for intermediate stu-dents, Type B motivation was pre-dicted to be an important variable todistinguish continuing and discon-tinuing students. Specifically, the re-sults of the analysis indicate that forthe beginning students, it was pre-dicted that students with low integra-tive motivation are more likely to dis-continue, while intermediate studentswith low instrumental motivation are

48


Table 5Variables in the Equation Summary Table of Motivation Type

Levels R Exp(B)

BeginningMotivation A* -.7006 -.1228 .4964(Integrative)

IntermediateMotivation B** -.0865 -.2703 .3394(Instrumental)

Note: * = p < . 05. ** = p < .01

more likely to discontinue. In order toascertain why different types of moti-vation affect attrition at two languagelevels, further research is needed. Itshould be noted, however, that unlikein Ramage's study (1990), type C mo-tivation, that is, taking Japanese to ful-fill a language requirement, was not asignificant predictor for attrition.

CONCLUSIONSThe purpose of the present study wasto predict possible contributing fac-tors that distinguish between studentswho continue and those who do notcontinue in beginning- and intermedi-ate-level Japanese courses. The resultsof the study indicate that achievementand motivation are the major dis-criminating factors at both language

levels. This finding is fairly consistentwith earlier studies of attrition in thecommonly taught languages. The mo-tivation type that best predicts con-tinue/discontinue decisions, however,changes from the beginning to the in-termediate level. Beginning studentswith low integrative motivation wereless likely to continue, while interme-diate students with lower levels of in-strumental motivation were less likelyto continue. In addition to grade andmotivation, four other variablesgender, year in school, attitude to-ward Japanese class, and length oftime spent in Japanwere also foundto contribute to predicting attrition atthe beginning level of Japanese. Asstudents advance to the intermediatelevel, however, in addition to the fac-

Q


tors of achievement and motivation,anxiety becomes the only other con-tributing factor to attrition.

IMPLICATIONSWhat implications can be

drawn from this study? With regardto the factor of achievement in attri-tion, it is normal for students not tocontinue when achievement is low atthe end of the semester. What lan-guage teachers can do is to focus onstudents' learning processes duringthe semester. In other words, teachersneed to make sure that students areactually learning what they are sup-posed to learn in the classroom bymeans of various forms of testing andevaluation. As teachers successfullydetect problem areas, they need to ef-fectively utilize that information todirect students attention to workingon their own problem areas in such away that overcoming these difficultiesbecomes a rewarding experience thatreinforces their confidence and desireto succeed in Japanese.

One way of informing studentsof their progress may be to turn theresponsibility over to the studentsthemselves by establishing self-monitoring procedures. Portfolio as-sessment may be helpful for that pur-pose. Failure of learning can originatefrom student' unawareness of theirproblem areas. Becoming aware andresponsible of their own learningprocesses is an important stage intheir learning to become successfullearners.

With regard to strengtheningmotivation, there are some excellent

suggestions by Dornyei (1994). someof which are

1. Let students see the relationshipbetween effort and success sothat they will attribute the out-come to their effort or the lackof effort.

2. Discuss with students the in-strumental value of the targetlanguage.

3. Invite students to help selectteaching materials to increasetheir interest and involvement.

In addition, it is critical to con-duct a needs analysis periodically toensure that the learners' diverse needsare being well met. As indicated inthis study, approximately 30 percentor fewer of all students of Japanesecome from the Liberal Arts Collegeand over 50 percent are coming fromtechnical and business fields; this factneeds to be attended when designingthe program.

At the beginning level, the factthat students having stronger integra-tive motivation are more likely tocontinue suggests that we should at-tempt to foster the sense of genuineinterest in and identification with thetarget culture. Ways to do this mayinclude the effective use of authenticmaterials that tap into students' inter-ests and needs at the early stage ofbeginning-level instruction (Koda,1992; Saito, 1992; 1994). Some Japa-nese language instructors have ex-pressed concern that this may be an

50


ideal but ultimately unrealistic objec-tive because of the complexity of thewriting system (Jorden and Lambert,1991). They suggest that authenticmaterials will intimidate and overloadstudents. As second language re-searchers (Lee, 1987; Allen, Bernhardt,Berry, and Demel, 1988) have demon-strated in their studies, however, lan-guage teachers tend to underestimatelearners' potential for understandingauthentic materials. In fact, studentsare capable of much more if they arepositively challenged by "peda-gogically-appropriate texts" (Swaffar,Arens, and Byrnes, 1991, p. 190).Authentic materials should be usedmuch more in the beginning stage oflearning Japanese, since they help toprovide a reality framework, an everexpanding mental image of the targetcivilization in which to hold the bitsand pieces of information students arerapidly accumulating. In this way, forstudents who have never been to Ja-pan, association through video andrealia can make the country, people,language, and culture a part of ameaningful learning experience.

Another way of motivatingstudents in the university setting is tointegrate the language program withother parts of the university, so thatstudents from diverse areas can takeadvantage of various resources forJapanese language instruction. For ex-ample, opportunities such as seminarsoffered by other colleges or depart-ments that are in some way related toJapan, summer programs in Japan orstudy abroad programs, and profes-sional internships provide studentswith the means to establish their own

goals, and these achievements ener-gize the desire to continue.

With the advance of technol-ogy, various communication networkscan be established through the In-ternet, and this should also become apart of the curriculum. As studentsadvance into the second year, astronger sense of instrumental moti-vation seems to be important for thosewho continue. This renewed motiva-tion indicates the importance of pro-viding students with informationabout how they could use Japanese intheir careers.

The present study primarily fo-cused on learners' affective character-istics and achievement factors as pos-sible contributing factors to attrition.In a future study, factors such aslearners' beliefs about foreign lan-guage learning, perceived difficulty ofa target language, and the role ofteachers should be included. A lon-gitudinal qualitative study could pro-vide different and rich insights intothe sources of attrition in Japaneseclasses.

NOTES:1. Instruction:

Beginning and Intermediate level,instruction:At this level, the majority of theinstructors are native speakers ofJapanese. Only grammatical andcultural explanations are in Eng-lish, all other class activities areconducted in Japanese.

2. Grading: WeightsBeginning and Intermediate levelinstruction:

50%Daily/lesson quizzes

5' l


Oral examsHomeworkFinal exam

20.0%10.0%20.0%

REFERENCESAllen, E., Bernhardt, B., Berry, M., &

Demel, M. (1988). Comprehensionand text genre: An analysis of sec-ondary school foreign languagereaders. Modern Language Journal,72 , 163-187.

Aida, Y. (1994). Examination of Hor-witz and Cope's construct of for-eign language anxiety: The case ofstudents of Japanese. Modern Lan-guage Journal, 78 , 155-167.

Baldauf, R., & Laurence, H. (1990).Student characteristics and affec-tive domain effects on rote reten-tion rates. Language and Education,4, 225-248.

Bartley, D. E. (1970). The importanceof the attitude factor in languagedropouts: A preliminary investi-gation of group and sex differ-ences. Foreign Language Annals, 3,383-393.

Burstall, C. (1975). French in the pri-mary schools: The British experi-ment. Canadian Modern LanguageReview , 31, 388402.

Chastain, K. (1975) Affective and abil-ity factors in second language ac-quisition. Language Learning, 25,153-61.

Comeau, J. (1992). Foreign languageanxiety and teaching methodol-ogy. Master's thesis, University ofTexas at Austin.

Dornyei, Z. (1994). Motivation andmotivating in the foreign languageclassroom. Modern Language Jour-nal, 78, 273-284.

Ely, C. (1984). A causal analysis of theaffective, behavioral and aptitudeantecedents of foreign languageproficiency. Unpublished DoctoralDissertation, Stanford University,Palo Alto, CA.

Ely, C. (1986). An analysis of discom-fort, risktaking, sociability, andmotivation in the L2 classroom.Language Learning 36, 1-25.

Gardner, R. (1985). Social psychologyand L2 learning. London: EdwardArnold.

Gardner, R. & Lambert, W. (1982)_At-titudes and motivation in second lan-guage learning. Rowley, MA: New-bury House.

Gardner, R. & Smythe, P. (1975). Mo-tivation and second language ac-quisition. Canadian Modern Lan-guage Review 31, 218-233.

Gardner, R., Smythe, P., Clement, R.,& Gliksman, L. (1976). Second lan-guage learning: A social psycho-logical perspective. Canadian Mod-ern Language Review 32,198-213.

Horwitz, E. & Young, D. (1991). Lan-guage anxiety. Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice Hall.

Jorden, C. & Lambert, R. (1991). Japa-nese language instruction in theUnited States: Resources, practice,and investment strategy. Washing-ton, DC: The National ForeignLanguage Center.

Kataoka, H. (1986). A pilot study ofJapanese language students atthree state universities in theUnited States: Implications forJapanese language teaching policy.Journal of Association of Teachers ofJapanese 20, 179-208.

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Koda, K. (1992). The effects of lower-level processing skills on FL read-ing performance: Implications forinstruction. Modern Language Jour-nal 76, 502-512.

Lee, J. (1987). Comprehending theSpanish subjunctive: An informa-tion processing perspective. Mod-ern Language Journal 72, 173-187.

Mills, D., Samuels, R., and Sherwood,S. (1987). Technical Japanese for sci-entists and engineers: Curricular op-tions. Washington, DC: NationalScience Foundation.

Modern Language Association. (1990).The Fall 1990 survey of foreign lan-guage registrations in U.S. institu-tions of higher education. New York:Modern Language Association.

Norusis, J. (1990). SPSS advanced statis-tics student guide. Chicago: SPSSInc.

Ramage, K. (1990). Motivational fac-tors and persistence in foreign lan-guage study. Language Learning 40,189-219.

Saito, Y. (1992). Effects of relationaldeletions in Japanese texts. In C.

Kinzer and D. Leu (Eds.), Literacyresearch, theory, and practice: Viewsfrom many perspectives. Forty-firstyear book of the National ReadingConference, pp. 243-251. Chicago:National Reading Conference.

Saito, Y. & Samimy, K. (Forthcoming).Foreign language anxiety and lan-guage performance: A study oflearner anxiety in beginning, in-termediate, and advanced levelcollege students of Japanese.

Samimy, K. & Tabuse, M. (1992). Af-fective variables and a less com-monly taught language: A study inbeginning Japanese classes. Lan-guage Learning 42, 377-398.

Swaffar, J., Arens, K., Byrnes, H.(1994). Reading for meaning: An in-tegrated approach to language learn-ing. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Young, D. (1992) Language anxietyfrom the foreign language special-ist's perspective: Interview withKrashen, Omaggio, Hadley, Ter-rell, and Rardin. Foreign LanguageAnnals 25, 157-172.

53


APPENDIX AAFFECTIVE FACTORSQUESTIONNAIRE

Japanese-Speaking Anxiety

Language Class Sociability

1.

2.1. I don't feel very relaxed when I

speak Japanese in class.2. Based on my class experience so 3.

far, I think that one barrier to myfuture use of Japanese is my dis- 4.comfort when speaking.

3. At times, I feel somewhat embar- 5rassed in class when I'm trying tospeak.

4. I think I'm less self-consciousabout actively participating inJapanese class than most theother students. (-)* 1.

5. I sometimes feel awkwardspeaking Japanese.

I'd like more class activitieswhere the students use Japaneseto get to know each other better.I think learning Japanese ingroup is more fun than learningon my own.I enjoy talking with the teacherand other students in Japanese.I enjoy interacting with the otherstudents in the Japanese class.I think it's important to have astrong group spirit in the lan-guage classroom.

Strength of Motivation

Language Class Risktaking

1. I like to wait until I know exactlyhow to use a Japanese word be-fore using it. (-)

2 I don't like trying out a difficultsentence in class. (-)

3. At this point, I don't like tryingto express complicated ideas inJapanese in class. (-)

4. I prefer to say what I want inJapanese without worryingabout the small details of gram-mar.

5. In class, I prefer to say a sentenceto myself before I speak it. (-)

6. I prefer to follow basic sentencemodels rather than risk missingthe language. (-)

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Outside of class, I almost neverthink about what I'm learning inclass. (-)If possible, I would like to take asecond-year Japanese course.Speaking realistically, I wouldsay that I don't try very hard tolearn Japanese. (-)I want to be able to use Japanesein a wide variety of situations.I don't really have a great desireto learn a lot of Japanese. (-)Learning Japanese well is notreally a high priority for me atthis point. (-)Learning Japanese is valuable tome.

Attitude Toward the Japanese Class

1.

2.

54

I find Japanese class to be veryboring. (-)I would say that I'm usually veryinterested in what we do inJapanese class.


3. I don't really like the Japaneseclass. (-)

4. In general, I enjoy the Japaneseclass.

Concern for Grade

1. It is very important for me to getan A in Japanese this semester.

2. If I get a C in Japanese this se-mester, I will probably drop thecourse.

Motivation Type Cluster A

1. Because I want to learn aboutanother culture to understandthe world better.

2. Because I am interested in Japa-nese culture, history or literature.

3. Because I want to be able tospeak more languages than justEnglish.

4. Because I think foreign languagestudy is part of a well-roundededucation.

5. Because I want to be able to useit with Japanese-speakingfriends.

6. Because I want to use Japanesewhen I travel to Japan.

Motivation Type Cluster B.

1. Because I feel it may be helpfulin my future career.

2. Because it may make me a morequalified job candidate.

3. Because I want to be able to con-verse with Japanese speakers inthe U.S.

Motivation Type Cluster C

1.

2.

Because I need it to fulfill theuniversity foreign language re-quirement.Because I need to study a foreignlanguage as a requirement formy major.

* A minus sign indicates an itemwhich is negative on the scale.

APPENDIX BQUESTIONNAIRE

Note: This questionnaire isstrictly confidential. Thispage will be removed anda number will be assignedto each questionnaire. Theresults will be recorded bynumber, not by name.

1. Name:

2. Sex:MaleFemale

3. Major:

4. Year in College:FreshmanSophomoreJuniorSeniorMasterDoctoral

55


5. Have you ever been to Ja- For what pur-pan? pose?YesNo 6. How many hours do you

spend per day/per week onIf yes, how long (total pe- Japanese?riod of time)? Per day per

week

56

An Analysis of a Common Structure in Korean-EnglishCode-Switching: A Test of the Matrix Language Framework

MI-AE LEE

This paper examines the morphosyntactic mechanism of a commoncode-switching (CS) pattern, the use of an English adjective (contentmorpheme) + Korean -ita (a system morpheme meaning "be") in thespeech of Korean-English bilinguals. The data consist of audiotapedconversations of three participants with their family members or bilin-gual friends and of CS utterances selected by the researcher from dailyconversations. The paper addresses two issues. First, according to thedata, Pop lack's bound morpheme and equivalence constraints do notseem to be universally applicable to explanations of CS phenomena.The present study, in fact, demonstrates that a matrix language framemodel (MLF) is more explanatory than Pop lack's model in terms of Ko-rean and English morphosyntax. Second, the paper suggests two possi-ble explanations for the production of English Adj + -ita. This study as-sumes that English Adj + -ita may result from (1) a tendency towardnominalization in CS or (2) a transfer of English grammar to Korean-based CS.

INTRODUCTIONAlthough code-switching (CS) is commonly observed in bilingual

communities, there seems to be some disagreement in terminology withinthe literature. In general, CS can be defined as the use of two languages in asingle speech situation. My research interest in CS focuses on the ability ofKorean bilingualswho have had no previous systematic learningtogrammatically weave two languages, Korean and English, within their speechcommunities. Such syntactic ability raises two questions: How do people con-trol two conflicting grammars in one sentence? Why do people code switchmore or less in certain situations?

In this study, I will focus on answering "What governs the context i nwhich CS can occur?" To do so, I will review three studies: Poplack (1980);Poplack, Wheeler, and Westwood (1989); and Myers-Scotton and Jake (1995).Furthermore, I will examine how the models proposed in the three studiesexplain the structures of intrasentential CS data, especially with respect to Ko-rean-English CS, and I will investigate how their assumptions were sup-ported in data analysis.

COPY AvaaLE

57


1. OVERVIEW OF THREESTUDIESThree studiesPop lack (1980);

Pop lack, Wheeler, and Westwood(1989); and Myers-Scotton and Jake(1995)discuss intrasentential code-switching and propose differentmorphosyntactic approaches to CSanalysis. Pop lack (1980) analyzes thespeech of twenty Puerto Rican bilin-guals in order to support her hy-pothesis that the equivalence con-straint can be used to rate bilingualability. Pop lack et al. (1989) attemptsto validate the equivalence con-straint on intrasentential code-switching on the basis of naturalspeech data from two typologicallydifferent languages, Finnish andEnglish. Taking a perspective differ-ent from those two, Myers-Scottonand Jake (1995), supporting the ma-trix language frame model with ex-tensive evidence from various lan-guages, discusses implications of CSdata regarding the nature of lan-guage competence and production,particularly in connection with thenature of lexical entries.

1.1 Principles of the Pop lack andthe Myers-Scotton ModelsThe following are summaries

of the Pop lack and the Myers-Scotton models.

1.1.1 Pop lack's Constraint ModelPop lack proposes two syntactic

constraints on code-switching: thebound morpheme constraint andthe equivalence constraint. Thebound morpheme constraint states

that CS cannot occur between a freeand a bound morpheme. InPop lack's terms, "Codes may beswitched after any constituent in dis-course provided that the constituentis not a bound morpheme" (1980, p.585). This means, for example, thatan item such as "*EAT-iendo"meaning 'eating,' which consists of aSpanish bound morpheme '-iendo'affixed to an English stem 'eat,'should not occur in Spanish-Englishcode-switching "unless one of themorphemes has been integratedphonologically into the language ofthe other" (1980, p. 586). Accordingto this constraint, there is no intra-word CS, except for the case of bor-rowing.

On the other hand, theequivalence constraint states that CScan occur where the surface struc-tures of the languages are identical;that is, if a switch occurs at a bound-ary between two constituents thatare ordered differently in the twolanguages, the resulting configura-tion will be ungrammatical by thestandards of at least one of the lan-guages. For example, for Spanish bi-linguals, switching between nounsand adjectives as in "*mi brothergrande" and "*Ini grande brother" isnot expected because the resultwould violate English word order orSpanish word order.

1.1.2 Myers-Scotton's MLF ModelWhile Pop lack proposes the

bound morpheme and equivalenceconstraints to explain code-switch-ing, Myers-Scotton proposes a matrix

58

language frame model (MLF). TheMLF model assumes that the twolanguages do not participate equallyin intrasentential CS; that is, onelanguage is dominant and thus proj-ects the overall frame for intrasen-tential CS. Such a language is calledthe matrix language (ML). The ML,according to Myers-Scotton and Jake,provides more morphemes, espe-cially system morphemes, in CS, andtherefore speakers engaged in CSperceive the ML as the language thatthey are speaking at the time of ac-tual utterance. Unlike the ML, theembedded language (EL), which isthe guest language in CS, usually oc-curs as content morphemes in thegrammatical frame projected by theML.

This distinction between theML and the EL leads to the predic-tion of three kinds of structural con-stituents in intrasentential CS: MLconstituents, EL constituents, andML+EL constituents.

1.2 Data Analysis Within theTwo ModelsThe following describes how

the two models differ in their ap-proaches to data analysis.

1.2.1 Pop lack's Data AnalysisUnderlying Poplack's data

analysis is a hypothesis that the datain the prohibited sites may not rep-resent code-switching. In otherwords, Pop lack claims that thebound morpheme constraint andthe equivalence constraint makepredictions about where CS can andcannot occur. In her 1980 study,

59

Korean-English Code-Switching 55

Pop lack neglects such items like"BLANQUITO (whitey) friends" and"pechos (chests) FLAT" produced byPuerto Rican bilinguals (1980, p. 600).She believes that such outcomes,which do not follow grammaticalrules shared by both Ll and L2, resultfrom poor bilingual competence.

Interestingly, however, Pop-lack and her colleagues in their 1989study of Finnish-English bilingual-ism find a strong tendency (79%) toinflect the English nouns in Finnishdiscourses, as in the example below(1989, p. 400):

ma kerran lahetin sen tuonneI once sent-lp. it-g. there-aldry cleaner iin

I once sent it to the dry cleanersthere.

Pop lack and her colleagues arguethat such cases differ from CS be-cause the morphological and syntac-tic treatment of the items is similarto that of established loan-words.Distinguishing this type of borrow-ing from CS, Pop lack et al. use theterm "nonce borrowing," whichmeans "borrowing made only onceor for a special occasion," and theyfurther support the notion that thebound morpheme constraint andthe equivalence constraint are stillvalid to explain CS.

1.2.2 Myers-Scotton's Data AnalysisMyers-Scotton and Jake intro-

duce two important concepts, lem-mas and congruence, to analyze CSdata within their MLF model. They


define a lemma as "a carrier of lexi-cal-conceptual structure and an asso-ciated predicate-argument structureand concomitant morphological re-alization patterns" (1988). Congru-ence, for Myers-Scotton and her col-league, refers to "a match betweenthe ML and the EL at the lemmalevel with respect to linguisticallyrelevant features" (1985).

According to these research-ers, lemmas link a speaker's concep-tual intentions with the functionalstructure and morphological pat-terns of a specific language. In otherwords, the speaker's communicativeintention activates both lemmas oftwo languages, especially in the casesof intrasentential CS, and selectscongruent EL lexemes in the direc-tion of the ML frame. For instance, ifthe speaker finds "sufficient congru-ence" between the EL lemma andthe ML lemma, then the EL lexemethat this EL lemma supports can ap-pear in a mixed constituent (EL+ML)in this ML frame. The followingSwahili-English CS datum illustratesthis phenomenon (1994).

Leo si-ku-COMEtoday 1S/NEG PAST/NEG-comena 0-BOOK-S z-anguwith CL 10-book-s CL 10-myToday I didn't come with my books.

On the other hand, if thespeaker finds "insufficient congru-ence," the EL morphemes may ap-pear in a bare form, in a do construc-tion, or as an EL island. Myers-Scotton and Jake show the followingexample with Tamil-English CS

(1995) as an illustration of a bareform.

Avan enne CONFUSE paNNiTaanhe me confuse do-PASTHe confused me.

In this way, Myers-Scotton and hercolleague demonstrate how thethree kinds of constituents can bepossible in intrasentential CS.

1.3. Implications of the TwoModelsPop lack (1980) suggests that

the code-switching mode proceedsfrom that area of the bilingual'sgrammar where the surface struc-tures of Ll (the speaker's first lan-guage) and L2 (his/her second lan-guage) overlap. According to Pop lackin the same study, although non-fluent bilinguals are able to code-switch frequently, they tend to main-tain grammaticality in both L1 andL2 by favoring emblematic or tag-switching in which the segmentsmay occur at any point in a sentence(in her terms, such CS is "extra-sentential"). On the other hand,Pop lack finds that those speakerswith the greatest degree of bilingualability favor intrasentential CS,which she hypothesizes to requirethe greater linguistic skill. In light ofthese findings, Pop lack claims thatcode-switching may be a sensitiveindicator of bilingual ability. Toavoid misunderstanding of her con-clusion, it is important to rememberthat Pop lack counts only data thatobeys the bound morpheme con-

CO

straint and the equivalence con-straint.

Pop lack and her colleagues(1989), in keeping with the linguisticconstraints already established byPop lack (1980), provide clear distinc-tions between CS and nonce borrow-ing. According to them, while code-switching is the alternation of twolanguages within a single discourseor constituent, nonce borrowing is alexical form that is phonologicallyand morphologically woven into thebase language and that may not oc-cur again. Figure 1 shows the rela-tionships among the processes (1989,p. 403).


Although Pop lack and hercolleagues try to defend the weak-nesses of their claim by separatingCS from nonce borrowing, they donot seem successful. According tothose authors, nonce borrowings arelexical forms morphologically, syn-tactically, and phonologically inte-grated into L1. However, as is oftenthe case, fluent Korean-English bi-linguals (and perhaps other bilin-guals) use English words or phraseswith the original English pronuncia-tions in their Korean sentences. (Imean by "fluent" here an intuitiveunderstanding of the notion that

"TRUE" INTRASENTENTIALi*Smooth

FUNCTIONALLY MARKED**Flagged

iCODE - SWITCHING

versus (no continuum)i

BORROWING

I

ESTABLISHED BORROWING Continuum NONCE BORROWING

* Smooth: CS at imperceptible switch points** Flagged: CS highlighted by discourse devices such as metalinguistic

commentary, repetition, or translation

Figure 1. Relationships between CS and borrowing.(Adapted from Pop lack et al. (1989, p. 403)

61


members of the speech communityevaluate.) If so, such cases may stillremain different from nonce bor-rowings. Suppose that those casesabove are nonce borrowings. Howcan the speakers embed the bor-rowed words into the base languagewithout any grammatical errors?Would intrasentential CS ever bepossible between languages that aretypologically and morphologicallydifferent?

Contrary to Pop lack's model,which cannot resolve these ques-tions, Myers-Scotton's MLF modelseems to explain better the varioustypes of CS data. Their assumptionthat various types of congruence ex-plain variation in intrasentential CSstructures is fully supported by ex-tensive CS evidence. Consequently,their model appears to be lend itselfto a better understanding of CS struc-tures than do the syntactic con-straints proposed by Pop lack; in fact,Pop lack et al. confess that "It is notour claim that the equivalence con-straint is uniformly pertinent toevery bilingual community, even tothose in which mixing of the twocodes is frequent at the intrasenten-tial level" (1989, p. 390).

Indeed, the MLF model ismuch more powerful than that ofPop lack. It may have the potential toexplain language production far be-yond the nature of CS itself in someuniversal sense. The notion of con-gruence, that is, of how an EL con-tent morpheme is accommodated byan ML frame, has implications aboutwhich features characterizing themorpheme are critical and which are

peripheral at the level of lemmas, asMyers-Scotton and Jake mention(1019). Their hypotheses about lexi-cal entries and congruence involv-ing lexical-conceptual structure,predicate-argument structure, andmorphological realization patternsprovide a persuasive psychological-schema about how the human brainworks in controlling what humansknow and what they want to pres-ent.

2. TYPOLOGICAL FEATURESOF KOREAN RELATED TOCODE-SWITCHINGGiven the two models of CS

phenomena, this paper attempts totest the applicability of the MLFmodel to Korean-English CS data.Since Korean and English are mor-phosyntactically different, it is neces-sary to briefly look at some featuresof Korean germane to the presentstudy.

Korean, as an SOV language,differs from English in various ways.Most of all, to understand the pres-ent study, one must appreciate therich system of particles in Korean.These particles combine primarilywith nouns and verbs. Particles at-tached to nouns signify case rela-tionships and serve functions thatare carried out by prepositions inEnglish, as in the following example:

(1) nay -ka hankwuk -eyseI -NOM Korea -LOCku yak -ul sasstathe medicine -ACC boughtI bought the medicine in Ko-rea.

62

Some particles suffixed tonouns change the nouns into verbpredicates. For instance, a largenumber of verbs are made up ofnoun + -hata. In other words, -hatacombines with nouns and createsnew verbs meaning "to do what thenoun refers to," as shown in (2) and(3).

(2) mal -hataspeech -doto speak

(3) kongpwu -hatastudies -doto study

The verbalizer -hata can also befound in a number of adjectivepredicates in which -hata does notindicate actions at all. Instead, likeadjective predicates in English, Ko-rean adjective predicates with theform of -hata describe the state orproperty of their arguments asshown in (4) and (5).

(4) moca-ka nolusulum -hatahat-NOM yellowish -beThe hat is yellowish

(5) J-ka cengswukJ-NOM feminine modesty-hata-beJ is modest

Another particle, -ita, alsocombines with nouns, but indicatesidentity with its argument, as in "Iam a teacher." The following exam-ple demonstrates the function of -ita.


(6) J -ka haksayng -itaJ-NOM student -beJ is a student

In addition, particles added toverbs are inflected to indicate tense,degree of respect to addressee, condi-tionality, causality, and so on. Thefollowing examples show how parti-cles attach to a verb.

(7) it -ha -si- -ess--work-do (honorific) (past)unikka(bound morpheme 'because')Because . . . worked

(8) haksayng -iyastudent -be (present, inti-mate)be a student

(9) kongpwu -hayssestudies -do (past, intimate)studied

3. RESEARCH QUESTIONThe observations that -hata

creates an adjective predicate and-itaalways combines with an N (or anNP) might lead monolingual Ko-rean speakers to predict the struc-tures English Adj + -hata and Eng-lish N + -ita in order to make aproper predicate in Korean-based CS.However, the behavior of manyspeakers in their natural CS does notbear out this prediction. Table 1

shows contrastive examples of Eng-lish Adj + -hata and English Adj +-ita. For purposes of simplicity, these

63


Table 1. Contrastive Examples of English Adj + -hataand English Adj + -ita

-hata 'do' speakers -ita 'be' speakers gloss

NORMAL -hata

SERIOUS -hata

NICE -hata

NORMAL-ita

SERIOUS-ita

NICE-ita

'be normal'

'be serious'

'be nice'

examples do not include the originalinflections. As will be demonstrated,those who have relatively strongEnglish ability or relatively exten-sive exposure to English tend toproduce English Adj + -ita ratherthan English Adj + -hata. Even moreinterestingly, some -hata speakers(mostly monolinguals) express anobjection to the form English Adj + -ita. They complain that-ita speakersreveal their ungrammaticality andignorance of the Korean language.Nonetheless, -ita speakers commu-nicate with other speakers of Koreanwithout any problem, and further-more, the structure with -ita appearsto be a shared pattern among a groupof bilinguals, according to the data.

Such a phenomenon suggeststhat the underlying mechanism ofthe different linguistic behaviorscould be approached from variousperspectives. This study, however,attempts to look at the morphosyn-tactic properties based on the MLFmodel, rather than to examine psy-cholinguistic or sociolinguistic prop-

erties, and thereby reach a better un-derstanding of how the bilingualsproduce the linguistic pattern that isunexpected by Korean monolingualsand that would not be predicted bymonolingual Korean grammar.

Thus, this study does not in-clude all possible code-switching pat-terns; instead, the study focuses onthe form of English Adj + -ita, whichcontrasts sharply with the formsused by Korean monolinguals.

4. DATAThe data under consideration

in this paper were obtained by audio-taping three Korean-English bilin-guals while they had a natural con-versation with their bilingualfriends or family members. The par-ticipants were DJ, a male college stu-dent (22) who immigrated into theU.S. at the age of 5; SM, a female col-lege student (21) who was American-born and raised by Korean-speakingparents; and RB, a male college stu-dent (25) who came to the U.S. whenhe was 11 years old. These partici-

64

pants can be described as English-dominant bilinguals.

I also selected data on CS pat-terns from observations of dailyconversations, especially fromspeakers who have lived in theStates more than 8 years. Most col-lege students in their early to mid-20s. Those speakers can be character-ized as Korean-dominant bilinguals.

As far as coding is concerned, Ipaid most attention to intrasenten-tial CS within the matrix language(ML) of Korean. Of those produc-tions, I attempted to transcribe onlythe relevant utterances and ignoredsentences that were not clearly audi-ble or had English as the ML. Thetranscription of Korean followed theYale System of Romanization. In theend, a total of 105 relevant utter-ances were extracted from 3 hours oftape recording and additional note-taking. (See Appendix.)

5. DATA ANALYSISThe data argue against the

universality of the syntactic con-straints by Pop lack, which, accordingto her 1980 study, fail to addressvarious problems derived frommorphological disparity (the boundmorpheme constraint) and word or-der differences (the equivalence con-straint) between two languages in asingle sentence. More than 30% ofthe extracted intrasentential CS vio-lates the bound morpheme con-straint, the equivalence constraint,or both. Relevant examples are

(10) COMPETE-ul mothay


compete -ACC can't do(intimate)can't compete with

(11) darundey SPEND TIMEsomething else spend time-ul mani hay-ACC much do (intimate)(I) spend much time on some-thing else

The Korean bound morpheme -u/switches the English content mor-phemes, the V in (10) and the VP i n(11), into nominals within the MLframe. Not only do (10) and (11) vio-late the bound morpheme con-straint, but the sentences do not fol-low the Korean word order; V or VPnormally comes at the end of sen-tence in Korean syntax. In otherwords, the numerous Korean-English CS cases exemplified by (10)and (11) contradict the claim that noswitching may take place betweentwo morphemes that are morpho-logically bound to each other or thatare differently ordered in the twolanguages.

In contrast, the MLF model ofMyers-Scotton seems to present areasonable resolution to the researchquestion. First, the hypothesis con-cerning three possible kinds of con-stituents (the ML constituent, theembedded language (EL) constituent,and the mixed constituent) in theMLF model seems to sufficiently ex-plain the following data:


(12) TRADE CONFLICT-i issea trade conflict -NOM there is- seCONJThere is a trade conflict and so

(13) ONE AND A HALF CLASS-one and a half classes(u1)1 SKIP haysse(-ACC) skip do (intimate,past)(I) skipped one and a halfclasses

Example (12) contains the mixedconstituent (the EL content mor-pheme + the ML system mor-pheme), which implies that thespeaker found sufficient congruencebetween the EL lemma and its MLcounterpart. Example (13), however,shows the presence of the EL con-stituent. In this case, because of"insufficient congruence" at thelevel of lemma, the speaker neededto use a compromise strategy, whichresulted in the EL island + do-verbconstruction. In this regard, the MLFmodel seems to explain the structureof the English content morpheme ofadjective plus the Korean systemmorpheme of -hata.

Yet, there still remains theproblematic form of English Adj +-ita. Looking closely at the CS pat-terns produced by the bilinguals, thisstudy suggests two possible explana-tions for the structure of English Adj+ -ita; namely, the structure maycome from either (1) a tendency to-ward nominalization in CS or (2) atransfer of the EL grammar to CS.

5.1 A Tendency Toward Nomin-lization in CSA strong tendency toward

nominal CS and nominalizationmay lead the speakers to treat Eng-lish adjectives as nouns in the proc-ess of Korean-English CS. The dataindicate that 46% of the intrasenten-tial CS corpus excluding propernouns involves nominals. The mostcommon types of nominal CS areEnglish N(P) + case-marker, as in(14), and English N(P) + time- or lo-cation-marker, as in (15):

(14) A LOT OF PEOPLE -kaa lot of people -NOMmani kakilohaysse?many be going to goAre there a lot of people whowant to go?

(15) SUNDAY MORNING -eySunday morning -TIMEyeki olkeya?here be going to come(Are you) gonna come hereon Sunday morning?

In addition to the rich evi-dence from nominal CS, the datashow that bilinguals tend to nomi-nalize any part of speech from the ELwithin the ML frame. The followingutterances demonstrate how thespeakers interweave the two lan-guages:

(11) darundey SPEND TIMEsomething else spend timeul mani hay-ACC much do (intimate)

66

(I) spend much time on some-thing else

(16) ME TOO -yame too -be (inflected formof -ita; intimate, present)Me, too

(17) PROFESSIONAL' -chelemprofessional-likeip -kodress -CONJ(I) dress like a professionalwoman and

(18) enu INTANGIBLE' -isomething intangible -NOMtowum-ul cwulswuisstahelp -ACC may giveSome intangible thing maygive (me) help.

The speakers nominalized the VP asin (11), the S-bar as in (16), and theAdj as in (17) and (18). The propor-tion of nominalization thusamounts to nearly 10% of the data,without counting English Adj + -ita.It seems that the strong tendencytoward nominal CS may nominalizeany EL constituent as a default undercertain circumstances. Therefore,this study assumes that the strongpropensity for nominalization in CSmay have impact on the structure ofEnglish Adj + -ita.

5.2. A Transfer of English Gram-marFor the second possible ac-

count of the problematic structure ofEnglish Adj + -ita, the current study


suggests that the transfer of Englishgrammar as a cause; that is, whenthe speaker chooses an English ad-jective as the EL at the conceptuallevel, he or she may then require"be" in order to construct a predicatebased on the chosen lexeme. At thesame time, the speaker activates theML morphosyntactic bundle of theML counterpart whose lemma is di-recting the projection of the senten-tial frame. As a result, English be isrealized as the Korean -ita, whichmeans be," for the proper systemmorpheme. Therefore, the bilin-guals naturally produce sentenceslike (19) and (20) below.

(19) kyay-n SERIOUS -yathat person-TOP serious be(-ita: intimate, present)(Linda,) she is serious

(20) CLASS-ka FULL -iyaclass -NOM full be (-ita: in-timate, present)The class is full

One can find extensive evi-dence to support the argument thatEnglish grammar is transferred intoKorean-based CS. The most obviousclue is that the bilinguals frequentlyomit Korean system morphemes,such as case-markers or locativemarkers, which are postpositions, asin the following examples.

(13) ONE AND A HALF CLASSone and a half classes(-ACC) SKIP haysseskip do (intimate,past)

67


(I) skipped one and a halfclasses

(21) STUDY ROOM (LOC)study roomkassessego (intimate, past)(I) went to the study room

(22) HOW MANY PEOPLE (NOM)how many peoplewasse?come (intimate, past, inter-rogative)How many people came?

This pattern seems to appear becauseEnglish does not have a morpho-logical system like that of Korean.

Further evidence can befound in the word order not only inthe CS data but in their "Koreanonly" sentences as well. Examplesare

(23) mot STUDY hayyocannot study do (honorific,present)(Canonically, "STUDY mothayyo")(I) can't study

(24) kongpwuhaysse awn?study (intimate, past) a lot(Canonically, "kongpwu mani,haysse")(Did you) study a lot?

In addition to the variationsin system morphemes and word or-der, participants also sometimesused English intonation, Englishphonology, and English-influenced

Korean lexical choice in Korean-based CS or Korean-only sentences.The following example from MS'sphone conversation with hermother shows how English trans-ferred to her CS:

(25) Mommy, last week (-ey)Mommy last week (-TIME)nay -ka cip -eyI -NOM home -LOConkeya?come' (intimate, present, in-terrogative)Mommy, last week did I comehome (was it last week when Iwas there)?

In such telephone conversations,Korean monolinguals would notuse "come" but "go," whereas Eng-lish speakers choose "come" to takeinto account their listener's location.

6. DISCUSSIONWithin the MLF model, this

study explores the morphosyntacticmechanism of a particular CS struc-ture by Korean-English bilinguals.The analysis supports Myers-Scotton's claim that the congruencehypothesis of the MLF model seemsgenerally applicable to the currentdata.

However, the analysis indi-cates that language production re-garding CS phenomena is in realityfar more complicated than theschema Myers-Scotton and Jake(1995) show. Indeed, it is so compli-cated that the dichotomy betweenthe EL lemma and the ML lemmaappears a bit fuzzy at some level.

68

The ambiguity appears in the Adj +-ita data of this study and in thedouble morphology data concerningplural and infinitival affixes in My-ers-Scotton and Jake. (1995, p. 999).

In the present study, a possiblereason for English Adj + -ita in Ko-rean-English CS is that the CS struc-ture seems to result from the activa-tion of both the EL and the ML at thefunctional level. In other words, it isassumed that after selecting the ELcontent morpheme, the speakerschoose the proper predicate-argument structure in the EL lemmaand the proper morphological reali-zation pattern in the ML lemma.While Myers-Scotton and Jake (1995)assume that the appearance of bothmorphemes may be a "mistiming,"the present study suggests the likeli-hood that these English-dominantbilinguals may have a certain por-tion of mixed lemmas involvingtheir two languages. The intersec-tion of two lemmas may allow bilin-guals to produce their own struc-tures.

The current analysis also findsthat there seems to be a relationshipbetween the use of English Adj + -itaand speakers' linguistic behaviorsderiving from their contact with thetwo languages; that is, the bilingualswho have been exposed to the twolanguages from birth or before theircritical period show a consistency ofusing English Adj + -ita. On theother hand, speakers who have hadcontact with L2 after their critical pe-riod and have had relatively shortexposure to the bilingual contextpreferred English Adj + -hata. In fact,

69


some of those who have recentlycome to the U.S. for their graduatestudies tend to regard English Adj +-ita as the wrong form.

The most interesting speakersare those who immigrated in theirmid-teens and have lived in a two-language setting for a relatively longtime, that is, more than 8 years. Theyuse both structures, although thereason is not clear yet. Again, thisrelationship implies that there maybe mixed lemmas for the two lan-guages, depending on the propertiesof particular cases of bilingualism.However, to make a stronger argu-ment, the current study needs to in-clude a broader range of participantsand data.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I wouldlike to express my sincere gratitudeto the participants in the presentstudy. And I will never know howto thank Dr. Keith Walters for hisdedicated interest throughout thewriting of the paper.

NOTES:1. The entire utterance as it would

be in Korean normally contains-u/ for an accusative marker.

2. Korean monolinguals would ex-pect the following:PROFESSIONAL-hakey ip -koprofessional-adverbial suffixdress -CONJ

3. I understood this utterance as"something which is uncertainyet may give me help." There is apossibility that my interpretationdiffers from the speaker's inten-tion. Therefore, it might have


been helpful to have had a play-back session with the partici-pants.

2&3. Frankly speaking, I struggledwith these utterances while ana-lyzing the data. Although"professional" and "intangible"can be both a noun and an adjec-tive, it seems that Korean mono-linguals tend to treat them onlyas adjectives in their Korean-English sentences. Consequently,Korean monolinguals may pro-duce sentences different fromthose that these bilinguals ut-tered.

4. Although she used the presenttense of come, the speaker obvi-ously meant the past tense. Infact, these bilinguals sometimesshowed Korean grammatical-errors, which seemed to be re-peated, but this paper ignoredsuch grammatical errors, for thisissue was out of scope of the cur-rent study.

REFERENCESMyers-Scotton, C. & Jake, J. L. (1995).

Matching lemmas in a bilin-gual language competenceand production model: Evi-dence from intrasententialcode switching. Linguistics, 33,981-1024.

Pop lack, S. (1980). Sometimes I'llstart a sentence in Spanish ytermino en espaliol: Toward atypology of code-switching.Linguistics , 18, 581-618.

Poplack, S., Wheeler, S. & West-wood, A. (1989). Distinguish-ing language contact phe-nomena: Evidence from Fin-nish-English Bilingualism.World Englishes , 8, 389-406.

70


Appendix

The Yale System of Romanization( ' marks a tense consonant)

Hangul Yale Basic Phonemic Hangul Yale Basic PhonemicRealization Realization

d

n1/11

=E

cc

I>) .

2cc

--1

-1-1

n

o

a 1 /1/ T wu /u/-8- h /h/ -rr yu /yu/

_i_ o /o/

71 -LLyo /yo/

1 uy /wi/

p /p/ 1 i /i/ph /ph/ -ri wi /wi/

PP /P'/ -11 ey /e/t /t/ 11 yey /ye/

th /th/ -r-11 wey /we/tt /t'/ -1-1 oy /ce/

s /s/ H ay /e/, /ee/SS /s'/ 11 yay /ye/, /yae/c /6/ 1-11 way /we/, /wae/

ch /611/ u Au/

cc /6'/ 1 e /a/k /k/ 1 ye /ya/

kh /kh/ -r-I we /wa/kk /1(7 1- a /a/m /rn/ k ya /ya/

ng AV 4 wa /wa/

Research Review

Input Processing and GrammarInstruction in Second LanguageAcquisition. Bill Van Patten. Nor-wood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corpo-ration, 1996. Pp. viii, 177. $42.50,cloth.

Review by KAROL J. HARDIN

Although this book is another at-tempt at providing a better approachthan that of traditional grammar in-struction, it uniquely focuses on in-put and proposes a teaching methodmotivated by both theory and re-search. The core argument is thatinput processing (via processing in-struction, a type of explicit grammarinstruction) shapes the intake datathat a language learner has availablefor accommodation by his/her de-veloping system. Since the intendedaudience for this book consists ofscholars and nonbeginning studentsof second language acquisition andteaching, it addresses the perpetualgap between theory and pedagogy.Working within a cognitive frame-work, this model emphasizes thatlanguage learners must make form-meaning connections. Central tothis process are structured input ac-tivities, which indicate to thelearner what to attend to in the in-put. Rather than attempting tocompete with existing theories suchas that of Universal Grammar and

72

Research Review 69

first language transfer, input proc-essing is presented as complemen-tary to such models.

The book first examines theacknowledged role of input andgrammar by researchers in secondlanguage acquisition. Arguing thatprocessing instruction focuses onform in communicative and input-rich environments, it is presentedas an attractive alternative to tradi-tional output-based grammar in-struction.

Three principles (and corol-laries) are proposed that outlineprocesses that learners use to filterinput data and that help explain thepartial nature of the learner's evolv-ing grammatical system. PrincipleOne states that learners process in-put for meaning before they processit for form. The other two principlesaddress processing of nonmeaning-ful form and assignment of agen-tive role to the first noun (phrase)encountered in a sentence. Guide-lines for structured input activitieswith specific examples from Span-ish college curricula are also deline-ated.

Chapter Four includes fivedetailed studies involving inputprocessing in the acquisition ofSpanish. All of these studies foundinput processing to be more effec-tive than traditional grammar ap-proaches. It is important to note,however, that there were only two


populations for these studies andthat all were in one language. Fur-thermore, the effectiveness of thesestudies was measured by outputeven though the model in questiondoes not include output. The finalchapters examine other potentialcriticisms of the model and remain-ing issues to be addressed.

Despite the abstract nature ofmuch of the book, many helpfulstep-by-step diagrams are included.Since the focus of most of the ex-amples and research is on Spanish,the book may be particularly usefulto college teachers of Spanish. Asthe author readily acknowledges,his theory is not thoroughly articu-lated yet (e.g., acoustic properties arenot included, among other factors)and will undoubtedly undergo revi-sion over time. Nevertheless, hisexclusion of a cultural and contex-

tual component seems particularlyproblematic. How would he inte-grate input processing into a contex-tually based curriculum? Theauthor appears to overlook the in-separableness of language and cul-ture. Further research is necessarybefore the studies cited can be gen-eralized to other populations thanthe two included and before thelong-term effectiveness of process-ing instruction can be demon-strated. Yet the concept of an ap-proach to explicit grammar instruc-tion that is complementary to Uni-versal Grammar, first languagetransfer, and communicative ap-proaches to teaching is appealing.The author provides such a possiblelink; only further research will de-termine the usefulness and validityof the model for second languageacquisition.

73

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