Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Moderating Effects of Difficulty on Individual Differences' Prediction of Intensive Second Language Proficiency Attainment(2024) Pulupa, Catherine Maria; Hui, Bronson; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States government is perennially in need of employees with proficiency in critical foreign languages to communicate with foreign counterparts and maintain relationships worldwide. In order to fulfill this need, the government devotes significant resources training federal employees to advanced levels of language proficiency through intensive courses aimed at developing communicative language skills that reflect the work that employees will perform in their work advancing the interests of the United States abroad. Notable proportions of employees fail to meet proficiency goals at the end of training, and little is known about what learner individual differences drive whether or not employees will meet their proficiency goals in order to perform their work on behalf of the United States. To this aim, the current investigation utilizes multiple analyses to explore and explain the interrelationships between learner individual differences, language difficulty, and proficiency attainment throughout training. The investigation constitutes two related analyses. First, a path-analytic approach examines associations between a cognitive (aptitude) measure and non-cognitive (motivation, familiarity with curricula, previous advanced second language learning) measures with student proficiency achievement throughout training. A second analysis builds on the first: the path-analytic model incorporates a measure of difficulty of the language studied by the students to determine how difficulty influences language learning and ultimate attainment within the context of individual differences in L2 speaking and reading. Results demonstrated consistent influence of language aptitude on proficiency attainment, and notable influences of previous L2 acquisition and the alignment of training to individuals’ language use goals. L2 difficulty moderated the relationships between individual differences and proficiency assessment scores during several points in training. The findings support an understanding of adult L2 acquisition that more fully considers learners’ goals and previous L2 experiences and consideration of the impact that difficulty can have on individual learners’ abilities to achieve target proficiency goals.Item An Examination of the Influence of Age on L2 Acquisition of English Sound-Symbolic Patterns(2017) Mueller, Jeansue; Jiang, Nan; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of researchers (DeKeyser, 2012; J. S. Johnson & Newport, 1989; Long, 1990) have argued that age is a critical factor in second language acquisition. This conclusion is based on extensive research over the last two decades that has demonstrated age-related effects in learners’ nonnativelike acquisition of phonology, morphosyntax, pragmatics, and discourse-level features of language. In the wake of such findings, there has recently been an increased interest in determining the precise linguistic areas that are difficult for adult learners and the cognitive mechanisms implicated in age-related effects. Because implicit learning plays a key role in first-language (L1) acquisition, particularly in the acquisition of statistical patterns in language, it has been proposed that age effects may be the result of attenuated implicit learning capabilities in late-teen and adult learners (DeKeyser, 2000; Janacsek, Fiser, & Nemeth, 2012). If this is true, age-related effects should be significant in linguistic areas that are not readily amenable to conscious learning processes and explicit instruction. To determine whether this is in fact the case, this study examined the linguistic knowledge of native speakers (NSs), early L2 learners, and learners who acquired English as adults. In particular, it examined these groups’ knowledge related to an area of English that is hypothesized to be difficult to learn explicitly, namely, English sound-symbolic (SS) patterns. Participants were composed of English NSs (n = 20) and three NNS groups with L1 Korean and L2 of English. The NNS groups were divided into three groups based on age of onset (AO) , with an AO range from 3 to 9 years of age (n = 20), 10 to 16 (n = 20), and > 17 (n = 20). Three experiments were performed that tested the participants’ English magnitude SS sensitivities when forming assumptions about nonce words (Experiment 1 and 2) and their ability to utilize English SS patterns to bootstrap their learning of new vocabulary (Experiment 3). The two late L2 learner groups (AO 10-16; 17+) were found to have significantly reduced levels of SS knowledge compared to the early L2 learners (AO 3-9) and NSs in all experiments. Only in Experiment 1 and 2, the early L2 learners had diminished magnitude SS sensitivities compared to NSs, but not for Experiment 3. Explicit and implicit aptitudes as measured by LLAMA (Meara, 2005) were also tested for potential relationships with test scores. Explicit aptitudes (LLAMA B, E, and F) did not have a significant effect on the performance of all AO groups, whereas implicit aptitude (LLAMA D) did have a moderate to strong correlation for test scores in only the two late learner groups. The early learner group was not affected by language aptitude levels during the experiments. In sum, the study has found that there is evidence for SPE in the areas of magnitude and English phonesthemic SS patterns. Implicit language-learning aptitudes appeared to have a facilitative effect on the acquisition of these SS sensitivities for the two late L2 learner groups, but not for the early L2 learners.