This volume explores the reading development of native speakers of sign language, as well as their early pre-literacy language development. For deafness and sign language scholars, as well as linguists and reading specialists.
Eye Tracking in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism provides foundational knowledge and hands-on advice for designing, conducting, and analysing eye-tracking research in applied linguistics. Godfroid’s research synthesis and methodological guide introduces the reader to fundamental facts about eye movements, eye-tracking paradigms for language scientists, data analysis, and the practicalities of building a lab. This indispensable book will appeal to undergraduate students learning principles of experimental design, graduate students developing their theoretical and statistical repertoires, experienced scholars looking to expand their own research, and eye-tracking professionals.
Eye-tracking is quickly becoming a valuable tool in applied linguistics research as it provides a 'real-time', direct measure of cognitive processing effort. This book provides a straightforward introduction to the technology and how it might be used in language research. With a strong focus on the practicalities of designing eye-tracking studies that achieve the standard of other well-established experimental techniques, it provides valuable information about building and designing studies, touching on common challenges and problems, as well as solutions. Importantly, the book looks at the use of eye-tracking in a wide variety of applied contexts including reading, listening and multi-modal input, writing, testing, corpus linguistics, translation, stylistics, and computer-mediated communication. Each chapter finishes with a simple checklist to help researchers use eye-tracking in a wide variety of language studies. Discussion is grounded in concrete examples, which will allow users coming to the technology for the first time to gain the knowledge and confidence to use it to produce high quality research.
This is the second volume in the series 'Trends in language acquisition research'. The unusual combination in one volume of reports on various different sign languages in acquisition makes this book quite unique.
Second Language Acquisition : introduces the key areas in the field, including: multilingualism, the role of teaching, the mental processing of multiple languages, and patterns of growth and decline explores the key theories and debates and elucidates areas of controversy gathers together influential readings from key names in the discipline, including: Vivian Cook, William E. Dunn and James P. Lantolf, S.P. Corder, and Nina Spada and Patsy Lightbown. Written by experienced teachers and researchers in the field, Second Language Acquisition is an essential resource for students and researchers of applied linguistics.
How children acquire a sign language and the stages of sign language development are extremely important topics in sign linguistics and deaf education, with studies in this field enabling assessment of an individual child’s communicative skills in comparison to others. In order to do research in this area it is important to use the right methodological tools. The contributions to this volume address issues covering the basics of doing sign acquisition research, the use of assessment tools, problems of transcription, analyzing narratives and carrying out interaction studies. It serves as an ideal reference source for any researcher or student of sign languages who is planning to do such work. This volume was originally published as a Special Issue of Sign Language & Linguistics 8:1/2 (2005)
Positive psychology is the scientific study of how human beings prosper and thrive. This is the first book in SLA dedicated to theories in positive psychology and their implications for language teaching, learning and communication. Chapters examine the characteristics of individuals, contexts and relationships that facilitate learning: positive emotional states such as love, enjoyment and flow, and character traits such as empathy, hardiness and perseverance. The contributors present several innovative teaching ideas to bring out these characteristics among learners. The collection thus blends new teaching techniques with cutting-edge theory and empirical research undertaken using qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches. It will be of interest to SLA researchers, graduate students, trainee and experienced teachers who wish to learn more about language learning psychology, individual differences, learner characteristics and new classroom practices.
What does a child’s ability to look where another is looking tell us about his or her early cognitive development? What does this ability—or lack thereof—tell us about a child’s language development, understanding of other’s intentions, and the emergence of autism? This volume assembles several years of research on the processing of gaze information and its relationship to early social-cognitive development in infants spanning many age groups. Gaze-Following examines how humans and non-human primates use another individual’s direction of gaze to learn about the world around them. The chapters throughout this volume address development in areas including joint attention, early non-verbal social interactions, language development, and theory of mind understanding. Offering novel insights regarding the significance of gaze-following, the editors present research from a neurological and a behavioral perspective, and compare children with and without pervasive developmental disorders. Scholars in the areas of cognitive development specifically, and developmental science more broadly, as well as clinical psychologists will be interested in the intriguing research presented in this volume.
This book provides interdisciplinary perspectives on task-based language teaching (TBLT) and task-based language assessment (TBLA) in English as a second language (ESL) context. It discusses theoretical and experimental insights of TBLT and TBLA from cognitive, cognitive linguistic, and psycholinguistic viewpoints. The chapters, written by leading language teaching specialists in the field, introduce the reader to a comprehensive range of issues related to TBLT and TBLA such as curriculum design, materials development, and classroom teaching & testing. With interdisciplinary appeal, the book is a valuable resource for researchers in task-based language teaching and assessment. It is equally useful for teachers to whom it offers practical suggestions for designing tasks for teaching and testing.
This book examines the role of experience-based learning on children’s acquisition of language and concepts. It reviews, compares, and contrasts accounts of how the opportunity to recognize and generalize patterns influences learning. The book offers the first systematic integration of three highly influential research traditions in the domains of language and concept acquisition: Statistical Learning, Structural Alignment, and the Bayesian learning perspective. Chapters examine the parameters that constrain learning, address conditions that optimize learning, and offer explanations for cases in which implicit exemplar-based learning fails to occur. By exploring both the benefits and challenges children face as they learn from multiple examples, the book offers insight on how to better able to understand children’s early unsupervised learning about language and concepts. Topics featured in this book include: Competing models of statistical learning and how learning might be constrained by infants’ developing cognitive abilities. How experience with multiple exemplars helps infants understand space and other relations. The emergence of category-based inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood. How children learn individual verbs and the verb system over time. How statistical learning leads to aggregation and abstraction in word learning. Mechanisms for evaluating others’ reliability as sources of knowledge when learning new words. The Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis and its role in facilitating causal learning. Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy Through Childhood is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians and related professionals, and graduate students in infancy and early child development, applied linguistics, language education, child, school, and developmental psychology and related mental health and education services.