little bit goes a long way
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
Description: This research uses Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to explore the effects of heightened awareness of strategy use on learners' strategy use and oral production. It examines two groups of advanced adult ESL learners, with four learners in each group, over 10 weeks. The experimental group members received a strategy use awareness-raising session and engaged in task-specific reflection on their strategy use immediately after their weekly speaking activities. The comparison group members did not receive the strategy use awareness-raising treatment, but engaged in freewheeling reflection immediately after their identical weekly speaking activities.A qualitative analysis of learners' spoken data recorded during their performance of weekly speaking tasks and the data generated from post-speaking reflections showed differences in strategy use and oral production between the experimental and comparison groups. Quantitative data were derived from learners' spoken data, the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Reflective Cards (RC), and Strategy Recall Checklists. For strategy use, the experimental group, relative to the comparison group, made statistically significant gains on Reflective Cards, Metacognitive, Compensation, Cognitive, and Social Strategies, but not on Memory and Affect Strategies, with large effect sizes for all but Social Strategies. For oral production, the two groups differed significantly in their grammatical intricacy scores and lexico-grammatical resources. The correlational analyses showed a strong, positive association between the variables of lexico-grammatical resources in experiential and textual metafunctions and the strategy use variables (RC and posttest SILL). The results from repeated measures over the experimental period indicated a statistically significant variation in mean values between groups over time, and the trend lines analyses determined statistically significant linear trends for oral production. The results from the between-subject tests further supported that the oral production and strategy use variables differed significantly between the two groups.Research findings from both the quantitative and qualitative data shed light on the efficacy of heightening learners' strategy use awareness through in-class awareness-raising sessions and post-speaking activity strategy-specific reflection. Pedagogically, the findings suggest that creating opportunities and mediating tools to foster learners' awareness of speaking strategies contribute substantially to their language-learning endeavours.
Notes: Adviser: Merrill Swain.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1704.