TAKE HOME EXAMDESIGNING EXPERIMENTS FOR SECOND LANGUAGE STUDIES

VARIANTA 1

A. COMPULSORY QUESTION SET 1. What is the difference between experimental research and naturalistic / observational research?

2. Why does (or why doesn't) replicating research make that research more generalizable?

3. Classify the following as nominal, ordinal, or interval data:a. The number of students who got a passing grade in a language proficiency test.Ordinalb. The presence or absence of a verb form in an obligatory context. Nominalc. Ten students ranked from 1 to 10 based on their recall of propositions from a reading passage. Ordinald. The number of final words in 10 sentences that were recalled correctly in a test of working memory.Intervale. The 10 different Lls of a group of 15 ESL children.Nominalf. The number of errors in a single student essay.Ratio

4. Based on your personal experience, what do you think of the Critical Period Hypothesis? Do you know others whose experiences would support or refute it?

5. How can the following research topics be turned into researchable questions?Example:• Gender differences in language classes• Do males perform differently than females on a grammar test following treatment in which negative feedback is given?

a. Motivationb. Task effectivenessc. Novice teacher performanced. Attentionf. Final grades

6. Below are some sentences produced bu a child learner of English as a first language called Nina (taken from a database of the utterances of first language learners known as CHILDES – Mac Whinney and Snow 1985). How might these data indicate that even children’s early syntactic knowledge is not solely determined by the input they hear? (The figures in brackets refer to the age of the child in years and months, e.g. (2,10) = 2 years, 10 months)

my close it (1,11) = I’ll close itI seed you (2,1) = I saw youmy ate outside(2,1) = I ate outside no my play my puppet, play my toys (2,0) = I’m not playing with my puppet, I’m playing

with my toysno Leila have a turn (2,1) = Leila can’t have a turn

does it doesn’t move: (2,10) = Doesn’t it move?is this is a dog? (2,10) = Is this a dog?

B. OPTIONAL QUESTION (FOR OBTAINING THE HIGHEST GRADE: 10): you can choose on your own if you want to answer question 7, 8, 9 or 10.

7. You want to determine the extent to which learners understand aspects of complex syntax, focusing in particular on to what the noun phrases are referring. You have decided to use sentences like the following and have elected to use elicited imitation. What factors do you need to take into account? Come up with six test sentences and describe what you will do. Besides elicited imitation, how could you elicit information regarding the appropriate meaning of the pronoun?a. When he entered the office, the janitor questioned the man.b. As she walked to the blue door, Anne wondered about Joan'sfather.

8. You want to elicit speech samples containing:a. Subjunctive (7 request that everyone be here by 5.).b. Embedded questions (The teacher asked why she was late.).How might you go about doing this?

9. You want to study agreement in English (e.g., subject-verb agreement). How would you go about collecting data?

10. Bennett and Progovac (1998) investigated the interpretation of anaphors in the L2 English of native speakers of Sero-Croatian. In Serbo-Croatian, the anaphor sebi (self) is monomorphemic, which means that it must be bound by a subject. But in addition, tensed Infl in Serbo-Croatian has agreeement features, so sebi can only be bound by subjects up to the point where there is a tensed Infl. For example, in the Serbo-Croatian equivalent of (1), the binding possibilities are as indicated:

1. Maryk knew that [Susanj heard [Anni’s description of selfi/j/*k]]

Bennett and Progovac administered an English multiple-choice comprehension test to two groups of native speakers of Serbo-Croatian – classed as low (n=44) and high (n=29) proficiency L2 speakers of English – and a control group of native speakers of English (n=47). In the task, informants were given sentences like:

2. Bobby likes Peter’s story about himself.

They were asked to choose which of the DPs are possible antecedents for himself: Peter, Bobby, both or none.Informants’s choices (in percentages) on two of the sentence types included in the test are given below (I exclude figures for the choice none, which ws hardly chosen at all):

(i) Choices (in percentages) of antecedents in one-clause sentences:

Bobby2 likes Peter1’s song about himself

Choice Native speaker Low proficiency High proficiency1 91.5% 65,9% 65.5%2 4.3% 21.6% 8.6%1 and 2 4.3% 12.5% 25.9%

(ii) Choices (in percentages) of antecedents in two-clause sentences:

Michael3 says that Peter2 read John1’s letter about himself

Choice Native speaker Low proficiency High proficiency1 81.9% 51.1% 60.3%2 3.2% 20.5% 6.9%3 4.3% 8.0% 1.7%1 and 2 5.3% 11.4% 19.0%1, 2, 3 3.2% 2.3% 5.2%

On the basis of these results, can one say that the L2 speakers have acquired the polymorphemic status of English anaphors like himself?If sentences like the following were included in the test, which choices would you predict these L2 speakers to make: Gemma talked to June about herself.

VARIANTA 2

Babyonyshev, M., Marin, S. (2006) ‘Acquisition of Pronominal Clitics in Romanian’, Catalan Journal of Linguistics 5, 17-44 [SEE ATTACHMENT]

Read the article. Answer the following questions related to the article:

1. How many patterns of clitic acquisition do the authors identify?2. What are the properties of each pattern?3. In which pattern does Romanian fit?4. What explains the cross-linguistic variation between patterns?5. a. What is the design of experiment 1?

b. How many independent variables were manipulated?c. What is the dependent variable?d. What method was used?e. How were the participants grouped?f. What are the predictions of experiment 1?g. What results were obtained?

6. a. Was there anything about experiment 2 that differed from experiment 1?b. What was the elicitation procedure for IO clitics?

7. Are experiments 1 and 2 replicable?8. What are the conclusions of experiment 1 and 2?9. Are the conclusions theory-dependent?

VARIANTA 3Designing your own study

You must keep in mind the following issues:1. What specific predictions are you going to test?2. What groups are you going to test (beginners, intermediate, advanced). How many subjects do

you need in each group?3. What testing method are you going to use?4. How are you going to construct the test items? How many test items will there be?5. Are you going to have a control condition? If so, what kind?6. How are you going to run the experiment (What props will you need? Will there be warm-up

items? What instructions will you give to the subjects? What if the subjects do not respond?7. How will you record the data?8. What coding scheme will you use? (i.e. what counts as a correct / incorrect answer? Will you

analyze errors or just target answers?)9. How will you recruit and motivate your participants?10. How will you know if your predictions have been borne out?

1) Investigate how native speakers of Romanian, which is a [+null subject] language, deals with the acquisition of subjects in English, which is a [-null subject language]. 2) Investigate the acquisition of English yes-no questions by native speakers of Romanian. English has subject-auxiliary inversion in yes-no questions, Romanian does not. Moreover, Romanian also lacks do-support.3) Investigate the acquisition of Romanian direct object clitic pronouns by native speakers of English. Take into consideration (i) the position of the direct object clitic pronouns with respect to the tensed verb, i.e. masculine versus feminine clitics and (ii) the position of clitic pronouns with respect to untensed verbs.4) Investigate the acquisition of (i) English object reflexive anaphors and (ii) English object pronouns by native speakers of Romanian.5) Investigate the acquisition of the English articles the, a, Ø (see Hawkins & García Mayo 2009 in the bibliography)

The subjects of investigation are adult learners of English at different levels of proficiency. Your task is to design a production experiment.SEE ALSO ATTACHMENT MATERIAL RELATED TO THIS TASK

SUBMISSION DEADLINEFEBRUARY 4TH, 2013