12-year-olds' written production in english across five countries in the Baltic Region -: does L1 matter?
2018 (engelsk)Konferansepaper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Fagfellevurdert)
Abstract [en]
English is currently taught at primary levels at schools in more and more countries in the world and the interest has increased on improving the teaching of English to young learners and thereby facilitate their learning and future communication in international contexts. It is therefore relevant to investigate the production in English by young learners from different geographical, cultural and language backgrounds since their L1can play an important role in their use of vocabulary (Schmitt 2010). Vocabulary acquisition is also claimed to be central in language learning (Saville Troike 2012).
In three studies, which are based on the data collected in the project Baltic Young Learners’ of English Corpus (BYLEC), the purpose was to investigate 12-year-olds’ use of vocabulary in EFL and in written production. The texts were analysed with three approaches. Firstly, the learners’ use of English was investigated in the context of discussing sustainable development. Secondly, the learner’s uses of a number of adjectives were analysed in the context when they described their best friend. Thirdly, quantitative analyses were carried out on the number of English words in the texts, the proportions of high-frequency vocabulary and the type-token-ratios.
The results indicate that the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian and Swedish learners adhere to slightly similar patterns of vocabulary when they use the English language in writing. The numbers of words in the texts vary significantly however and there are great individual differences within the country categories. In one of the six tasks of BYLEC when the 12-year-olds wrote about their future, great differences could be identified in the themes described and in their views on their future. The analyses of the proportions of high-frequency vocabulary and the degrees of lexical variation across the five country categories show that the young learners in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Sweden to a great extent used similar patterns of vocabulary in English in their written production although some minor differences could be identified.
sted, utgiver, år, opplag, sider
2018.
Emneord [en]
young learners, English as aforeign language, written production, Baltic region
HSV kategori
Forskningsprogram
Didaktik
Identifikatorer
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-357155OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-357155DiVA, id: diva2:1238313
Konferanse
Early Language Learning Conference 2018 June 13-15, 2018, Reykjavik, Iceland
2018-08-132018-08-132019-01-02bibliografisk kontrollert