{"id":627,"date":"2017-05-05T08:41:28","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T16:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/?p=627"},"modified":"2017-05-05T08:41:28","modified_gmt":"2017-05-05T16:41:28","slug":"this-week-in-language-education-may-5-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/backseatlinguist.com\/blog\/this-week-in-language-education-may-5-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week In Language Education: May 5, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Winners of the Week: Books and Reading<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

A new Dutch study published in Scientific Studies of\u00a0Reading<\/em> provides more support for the notion that access to books promotes reading, and reading improves comprehension.<\/p>\n

The researchers examined relationship between the home literacy environment,\u00a0a\u00a0child’s print exposure (amount of reading), and reading comprehension.\u00a0“Home literacy environment” was a combined measure consisting\u00a0of the amount of reading the parent did, the number of books the parent owned, and the number of children’s books in the home. Print exposure was also measured for the students, using a “book cover recognition test,” where the students were asked if they had read or recognized the titles of several popular children’s books. Reading comprehension was measured via a standardized measure.<\/p>\n

Consistent with other evidence, the more parental reading and book access in the home, the more the child read, and the more the child read, the higher his reading scores.<\/p>\n

SES was controlled for in the study, although at a school level rather than an individual one. I’m not sure why the researchers chose to do this, since while certainly children in poor neighborhoods typically\u00a0suffer from lack of access to books at school as well as in the home, the authors had gathered data on each parent. A control at both levels would have strengthened their findings.<\/p>\n

Boerma, I. E., Mol, S. E., & Jolles, J. (2017). The Role of Home Literacy Environment, Mentalizing, Expressive Verbal Ability, and Print Exposure in Third and Fourth Graders\u2019 Reading Comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading<\/i>, 21<\/i>(3), 179-193.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Loser of the Week: Error Correction in Writing<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dlaska and Krekeler looked at a group of students preparing to enter a German university (N=225) who were taking a German as a Second Language course. The\u00a0study examined (1)\u00a0whether giving students a grade on a writing assignment would make a difference in the way they responded to “corrective feedback” (CF) (error correction) and (2) whether CF made any difference on the grammatical accuracy of student writing. Not surprisingly<\/a>, the\u00a0answers were “no” and “no.”<\/p>\n

Three groups wrote a series of three in-class essays, one per week. Two of the groups got\u00a0CF\u00a0on certain\u00a0target structures appearing in their first essay; one group did not. In addition, one of the CF groups was also graded on the assignment. The following week, students revised their\u00a0essays. Those who got CF\u00a0did show significant improvements in accuracy, but getting a grade made no difference. Those who did not<\/em> get CF made no gains in accuracy. This is not too surprising, given the CF groups\u00a0were revising essays with the errors already pointed out to them, and the students were\u00a0clearly focused on form.<\/p>\n

The important results came in the third week, when all three groups were asked to write a new essay on a new topic. The researchers found no difference in accuracy among the three groups, regardless of grading or CF. This is consistent with what Truscott<\/a>\u00a0and others have found: written error correction is mostly a waste of time for both teachers and students.<\/p>\n

Dlaska, A., & Krekeler, C. (2017). Does grading undermine feedback? The influence of grades on the effectiveness of corrective feedback on L2 writing. The Language Learning Journal, 45<\/em>(2), 185-201.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Predicting the Native Language of ESL Readers from Eye Movements<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Three\u00a0MIT researchers claimed to have identified differences in the eye movements of ESL readers based on the reader’s\u00a0native language. But rather bizarrely,\u00a0they used the\u00a0listening<\/em> and grammar<\/em> portions of the Michigan English Test, a 50-question, multiple-choice instrument, to find L2 readers\u00a0of equal proficiency. The assumption that L2 acquirers with equivalent formal grammar knowledge and listening abilities have equal reading proficiency is unwarranted.<\/p>\n

The obvious choice here would have been to look at their subjects’\u00a0reading comprehension scores, vocabulary levels, and\/or amount of print exposure to make sure they were comparing readers<\/em> of equal proficiency in English.<\/p>\n

Like most eye movement studies, the experimental conditions were odd and unnatural: subjects read unconnected sentences on a computer screen, were asked comprehension questions after\u00a0each sentence, and “the sentences and the questions were triggered by a 300ms gaze on a fixation target (fixation circle for sentences and the letter \u201cQ\u201d for questions) which appeared on a blank screen and was co-located with the beginning of the text in the following screen” (p. 3). You know, just like you do all your reading.<\/p>\n

\n

Berzak, Y., Nakamura, C., Flynn, S., Katz, B. (2017).\u00a0Predicting native language from gaze.\u00a0eprint arXiv:1704.07398<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An “A” for Effort May Mean an “F” on the Reading Test<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers studied reading attributions of success among African American and Latino readers in English, ages 8 to 15. Good readers\u00a0tend to attribute their success to ability rather than effort, say the authors. But the effects were very\u00a0small, with correlations under .2 for most everything (statistically significant only due to a rather large sample size of 1,000+).<\/p>\n

The study used a relatively new\u00a0(at least to me) type of analysis called “quantile regression<\/strong><\/a>,” in which results are compared within a group by percentile.\u00a0I just saw another study with a similar approach for a separate topic, so I guess it’s now a thing.<\/p>\n

Frijters, J. C., Tsujimoto, K. C., Boada, R., Gottwald, S., Hill, D., Jacobson, L. A., Lovett, M., Mahone, E.M., Willcutt, E., Wolf, M., Bosson-Heenan, J., & Gruen, J. (2017). Reading-Related Causal Attributions for Success and Failure: Dynamic Links With Reading Skill. Reading Research Quarterly<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does Reading Mark You Smart, or Do Smart People Read Well?<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A meta-analysis of studies on “executive function” and reading comprehension found that there was a “moderate” association between the two. But as is typical with these kinds of research reviews, the studies are all correlational and thus cannot tell us if one thing causes the other.<\/p>\n

The author does note that the few experimental studies on the question found that “[a]lthough several . . .\u00a0demonstrated gains in executive functions, as measured by improvements on executive function tasks, there was limited overall support for the notion that improvements in executive functions caused gains in achievement or academic skills.” Perhaps they just need to turn the\u00a0vagus nerve stimulation<\/a> dial up to 11?<\/p>\n

An\u00a0alternative hypothesis is that reading makes you smarter\u00a0(see Mol & Bus, 2011<\/a>\u00a0and Stanovich & Cunningham, 1991<\/a>, but also Payne et al. 2012<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Follmer, D. J. (2017). Executive Function and Reading Comprehension: A Meta-Analytic Review. Educational Psychologist<\/i>, 1-19.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bible Translators and Language Preservation<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s a short article\u00a0on a woman who helped translate the\u00a0Bible into a dialect of Mixtec, an\u00a0indigenous language of southern Mexico. Missionaries are not infrequently the first linguists<\/a>\u00a0who tackle the issue of creating or standardizing a written form of a language (a popular form of written Hmong<\/a> is an example), although some scholars are not amused<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Quick Takes:<\/strong><\/p>\n