Background

Griffith University is set across five campuses in south-east Queensland, Australia, and has a student population of 43,000. The School of Languages and Linguistics (LAL) offers programs in linguistics, international English, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English language enhancement courses. Research strands reflect the staff's varied scholarly interests, which include academic language and learning, sociolinguistics, second language learning/acquisition and teaching, computer assisted language learning (CALL) and language corpora. This report offers a summary of research recently published or currently underway within LAL.

Academic language and learning

Academic language and learning has a high profile in Australian universities due to increasing numbers of international students: 23% of Griffith's students come from other countries, mostly from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB). As a result, there is increasing pressure from regulatory authorities for English language support for NESB students. Part of the university's response was the establishment in 2010 of a suite of discipline-specific English language enhancement courses (ELECs), offered by LAL in collaboration with the Griffith English Language Institute. In a first for Australian higher education, the ELECs are embedded as mandatory core subjects for NESB students in the first year of their degree, across all disciplines. The ELEC program, and academic language and learning more generally, have become central features of LAL's teaching and research.

Several papers have been published or are forthcoming on this work. One such study (Humphreys et al. Reference Humphreys, Haugh, Fenton-Smith, Lobo, Michael and Walkinshaw2012) tracked shifts in the English proficiency of 51 international students as a result of their taking ELECs, using IELTS Academic test scores at pre- and post-intervention stages. The main statistically significant improvement was in speaking, while there was a lesser shift in writing and only marginal shifts in listening and reading. A novel feature of the ELEC program is that students have to seek out and attend one language-enhancing activity or service on campus and submit a reflective essay on the experience. In a paper published in the journal Teaching in Higher Education (Reference Lobo and Gurney2013), Ben Fenton-Smith and Rowan Michael report on which activities students attend, and present a qualitative analysis of a corpus of written reflections. Two other papers (Lobo Reference Lobo2012; Lobo & Gurney Reference Lobo and Gurney2013) focus on retention. The latter reports on international undergraduates’ expectations of the ELECs and their potential impact on attendance and de-enrolment. The researchers found that discipline-specificity was a key factor, since this distinguished the ELECs from generic EAP courses which most students had already experienced. The theoretical basis for materials development in the ELEC program has been explored in two papers by Fenton-Smith (Reference Fenton-Smith2012, Reference Fenton-Smith and Tomlinson2013). The first shows how a theme can be exploited from both EAP and content-based perspectives, focussing on applications of ‘self-efficacy’ in education and health sciences. The second provides an update on applications of discourse analysis in language learning materials.

Several other projects are in progress. Pamela Humphreys’ doctoral thesis investigates the construct of English language proficiency within the Australian higher education context from the perspective of different stakeholders, including students, discipline academics and policy-makers. She recently co-authored a discussion paper for a 2013 national symposium, ‘Five years on: English language competence of international students’, which reported on policy and practice related to the language proficiency of international students in Australian universities at three key stages in the student lifecycle: entry, during degree study and on graduation (Humphreys & Gribble Reference Lobo and Gurney2013). Ian Walkinshaw is investigating the effectiveness of individual consultations for developing NESB students’ academic writing skills and lexico-grammatical competence. Rowan Michael is exploring the interface of language and technology, in particular how emerging technologies inform social interaction, communication and language use.

Work is also being conducted on academic language and learning in non-English speaking media. Hugo Hortiguera and Adriana Díaz are comparing assessment practices in elementary and intermediate level Spanish language programs at Griffith and the University of Queensland. This project aims to develop collaborative quality assurance enhancement strategies by establishing comparable student performance indicators and providing tools and resources for internal and external consensus moderation, particularly in the assessment of oral tasks.

Sociolinguistics

Three research projects explore this area. Research into the perception by Japanese native speakers of foreign-accented Japanese speech was completed by Chiharu Tsurutani (Reference Tsurutani2012; Tsurutani & Selvanathan Reference Tsurutani and Selvanathan2013). They found that despite respect for western culture in Japanese society, foreign-accented Japanese speech was evaluated less positively than native Japanese speech, although prior contact with non-native Japanese speakers influenced some aspects of native listeners’ judgments. Tsurutani is also investigating the relative importance of timing and pitch in L2 Mandarin and comparing the significance of timing across different languages. Exploring sociolinguistic aspects of language teaching, Ian Walkinshaw (with Duong thi Hoang Oanh of Vietnam National University) investigated language learners’ perceptions of native and non-native speaker EFL teachers. The first study (Walkinshaw & Duong Reference Walkinshaw and Duong2012) evaluated the importance to Vietnamese learners of English of native-speakerness compared with qualities typically prized in a language teacher, such as teaching experience, enthusiasm and qualifications. Despite the popular belief that learners prefer native-speaker teachers, native-speakerness was low-rated. The second study (forthcoming) solicited Vietnamese and Japanese university students’ opinions of the advantages and disadvantages of learning English from native and non-native English-speaking teachers. Instead of regarding native-speaker teachers as the ideal, the sample identified pedagogical, linguistic and cultural advantages/disadvantages in each type of teacher. Finally, Claire Kennedy is working with Griffith University sociologist Ian Woodward on the role of language learning in developing cosmopolitanism among young Australians.

Language learning, teaching and culture

Several research projects focus on the interface between language learning, teaching and culture. A book by Adriana Díaz addresses the theory/practice gap in language and culture pedagogy by providing conceptual discussions of emerging issues as well as empirical accounts and case studies. A study by Ben Fenton-Smith (with Michael Torpey Reference Fenton-Smith and Tomlinson2013) redresses the lack of research into the process of orienting EFL instructors to new workplaces and unfamiliar cultural surroundings with a project evaluating a two-week induction for 22 EFL teachers at a Japanese foreign languages university. Kumiko Katayama's doctoral study investigates the use of English among Australian learners of Japanese during collaborative activities in Japanese language classrooms.

Communicative competence

Michael Haugh is developing an evaluative model of communicative competence as situated competence-in-performance (Haugh forthcoming). He argues that evaluations of communicative competence should be analysed and theorised as distinct from situated instances of competence-in-performance of users. This reconceptualisation raises several important empirical questions, including: who is doing the evaluating, what are the grounds for these evaluations, how are they situated vis-à-vis specific contexts, and to what degree do they co-vary systematically with situated instantiations of competence-in-performance across contexts? In a related line of research with Wei-Lin Melody Chang (Haugh & Chang Reference Haugh, Chang, Kite and Tatsuki2013), he is focusing on how interactional analyses can be combined with data from corpora in the teaching of pragmatic phenomena.

Second language acquisition

Susana Eisenchlas (with Elisabeth Mayer and Carolina Holtheuer Beausire) is investigating whether explicit instruction on the formal properties of copula verbs promotes early mastery of the system in adult learners of L2 Spanish. This question is approached experimentally with two groups of beginner students, both learning via the Natural Approach but with the treatment group receiving additional grammar activities aimed at increasing grammar awareness. Three experiments are involved: a truth-value judgment task, a colour elicitation task and a question elicitation task. The findings have implications for second language acquisition theory, language teaching and general linguistic theory.

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)

Two projects are underway on CALL-related aspects of language learning/teaching. The first centres on designing and evaluating interactive online learning modules focused on second language reading, writing and grammar development using Blackboard 9 and PowerPoint. The project members (Claire Kennedy, Adriana Díaz, Hugo Hortiguera, Tiziana Miceli and Sara Visocnik Murray) are also developing and evaluating approaches to using blogs, wikis and language corpora, tailored to various stages of language learning. The second project, driven by Susana Eisenchlas and Andrea Schalley, with Gordon Moyes from Griffith Film School, investigates the extent to which primary school-aged German–English bilingual children can self-direct their literacy acquisition in the minority language through playing online educational games at home and with little adult input.

Language corpora

Finally, two significant corpus projects are underway at LAL. The first is the Australian National Corpus, a joint project between Griffith and Macquarie University, envisaged as an online database of spoken and written language in Australia. LAL's input includes work by Andrea Schalley and Michael Haugh developing an interlingua ontology to enable pragmatic analyses across spoken data collections, and work by Cliff Goddard, Michael Haugh and Andrea Schalley on the refinement of search and queries. A second corpus, The Asian Corpus of English (ACE), directed by Andy Kirkpatrick, comprises English used as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. Project teams in Australia, Brunei, China (including Hong Kong), Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam have now collected one million words of naturally occurring spoken interactive data. Findings illuminate how English is used between multilinguals in Asia and highlight implications for English language learning and teaching and for intercultural communication in Asia (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2012a, Reference Kirkpatrick2012b; Kirkpatrick, Patkin & Wu Reference Kirkpatrick, Patkin, Wu, Sharifian and Jamarani2012).