Research related to second language acquisition
takes place in several often disparate fields
including linguistics, psychology and education.
While this has had some influence on the nature of
pedagogy and the structure of language textbooks,
there are many areas central to teachers experience
that remain relatively unexplored. One of these
areas is listening comprehension development
resulting from direct interaction with native
speech. This book explores this development by
focusing on the relation of subject and object
relatives to working memory. In a classroom study
of Asian learners of English, reaction time to
longer sentences improved for subject relatives, but
not for object relatives. However, for shorter
sentences, object relatives improved but subject
relatives did not. The results show that
development in the processing of object relatives
and subject relatives differs and is related to
sentence length. Thus, pedagogical approaches which
expand their view of language learning to working
memory and processing efficiency would seem to be
more effective than traditional approaches.
takes place in several often disparate fields
including linguistics, psychology and education.
While this has had some influence on the nature of
pedagogy and the structure of language textbooks,
there are many areas central to teachers experience
that remain relatively unexplored. One of these
areas is listening comprehension development
resulting from direct interaction with native
speech. This book explores this development by
focusing on the relation of subject and object
relatives to working memory. In a classroom study
of Asian learners of English, reaction time to
longer sentences improved for subject relatives, but
not for object relatives. However, for shorter
sentences, object relatives improved but subject
relatives did not. The results show that
development in the processing of object relatives
and subject relatives differs and is related to
sentence length. Thus, pedagogical approaches which
expand their view of language learning to working
memory and processing efficiency would seem to be
more effective than traditional approaches.