The analysis of A1 level speaking exam in terms of syntax-The effect of general competence on syntax in A1 level speaking
Abstract
This study aims at discovering the relevance of general competence of Turkish and Arab learners who have an A1 level of English proficiency in preparatory school of University of Turkish Aeronautical Association (UTAA) to their speaking skill in terms of syntax by analyzing the recordings of speaking exams in the first semester. Before the analysis, one can ask why learners could ever perform a great syntactic structure variety while the university ensures that all learners get a standardized language education based on the same syllabus and course books to succeed their future academic studies. The answer may seem easy; however, it is difficult to get out thoroughly. Therefore, the paper will try to explain this connection between better performances in terms of syntactic structure in spoken production comparing to Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) A1 level expectations and these learners’ attitudes, motivation, background of education, and world knowledge . During the process, the information falling within the scope of general competence (declarative knowledge and existential competence) is held by one-to-one interviews with 22 randomly chosen learners. The results mainly showed that the learners who invested in developing general competence have their own independent wordrobe and higher syntactic complexity in their speaking whereas the rest and also the majority of the learners who are not as competent regarding declarative knowledge and existential competence (attitude and motivation) show a standard level of syntax (commonly used structures as defined in ALTE) in speaking.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative
Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Branigan, H.P., Pickering, M.J, & McLean, J.F., & Stewart, A. (2006). The role of local and global syntactic structure in language production: Evidence from syntactic priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 974-1010.
Brown, H Douglas. (2001). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (2nd ed.). Pearson Education: 13-17.
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States of America.
Common European Framework of Reference. (2001). Council of Europe. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved on May 20, 2015 from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Cadre1_en.asp
Council of Europe. (2001). Breakthrough Specification (unpublished). Council of Europe. Retrieved on May 20, 2015 from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/DNR_EN.asp
Ellis, R. (2003). The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foster, Pauline, Tonkyn, Alan, & Wigglesworth, Gillian. (2000). Measuring spoken language: A unit for all reasons. Applied Linguistics, 21(3), 354–374.
Freidin, R. (2012). Syntax: Basic Concepts and Applications. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2003). An Introduction to Language (7th ed.). Heinle, United States of America.
Gardner, R. C. (1979). Social psychological aspects of second language acquisition. In Giles, H.& St. Clair, R. (Eds.). Language and social psychology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Gardner, R.C. & Lambert, W.E. (1972). Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Learning. Rowley, MA.: Newbury House.
Hui, H. (2013) On FL Learners' Individual Differences in Grammar Learning and Their Grammatical Competence Training. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Finland, 3(8), 1369–1374.
Iwashita, Noriko. (2010). Features of Oral Proficiency in Task Performance by EFL and JFL Learners. In Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Second Language Research Forum, ed. Matthew T. Prior et al., 32-47. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Jindathai, Supatsorn. (2015). Factors Affecting English Speaking Problems among Engineering Students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology. In Selected Proceedings of the 3rd National Interdiciplinary Academic Conference, Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology, 344-8.
Liu, Y. (2014). Motivation and Attitude: Two Important Non-Intelligence Factors to Arouse Students’ Potentialities in Learning English. Creative Education, 5, 1249-1253.
Schumann, J.H. (1978a). The pidginization process: A model for second language acquisition. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.
Skehan, P. & Foster, P. (1999). The influence of task structure and processing conditions on narrative retellings. Language Learning, 49(1), 93–120.
Radford, A. (1997). Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.
Refbacks
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
ISSN 1305-578X (Online)
Copyright © 2005-2022 by Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies