EU-Speak Module 6 Acquisition and Assessment of Morphosyntax

EU-Speak Module 6 Acquisition and Assessment of Morphosyntax

Week 2 Forum 2

The partners have agreed that the virtual conference scheduled for week 6 will be changed to an opportunity for you to share and discuss the data activity tables that will becreated and uploaded by other participants during weeks 2, 3, 4 and 5.

We hope that the opportunity to gather this data will enable you to take the results shared by others and directly apply it to your own practice.In gathering the information from your own learners, sharing it, and looking at other participants learner data, we hope you will be able to find out something more about your own learners in relation to the module content and how that is made relevant for you in your classroom. Don’t forget to make sure that you anonymise your students.

Note from Martha and Rola: Data from learners from different L1s will be most interesting for you.

Gathering your data

Step 1:

Collect some oral data from one or two of your learners. Just make notes while the learner is speaking. You are going to share your ‘data’ with others on the module, so replace their real name now with a pseudonym to comply with ethics to guarantee their anonymity. If you want to find out about research ethics, visit:
Aim to take down between 10 and 15 utterances which are not just single words. You can do this during an oral activity you’ve already prepared. Maybe you could use the technique of asking learners to describe series of pictures you have or show a silent film.

Step 2:

Look at your data and decide what you’d like to focus on. If you’re looking at the acquisition of English, you could focus on one or more of the morphemes in Bailey et al. Regardless of the L2, this could beanything that particularly interests you, and something that you know your learners have problems with.
Step 3:Analyse your data

• Underneath each utterance your learner produces, write what it should be in the language you teach.
• You can then apply the idea of suppliance in obligatory contexts to your data to spot what your learner does not produce.
• Then, like Wagner-Gough did, see if morphemes the learner supplies, where he or she should supply them, are also used in contexts in which they don’t belong. For a recent example of this in L2 English, take a look at the paper by Vainikka et al. (2017) in the Module Resources.
• If you have time, take another look at Bailey et al. or at publications about the acquisition of the L2 you teach to see whether the patterns you have found in your data are similar to the patterns these researchers found.

Work on this as the module progresses. Think about creating one or more simple tables that show patterns you’ve found. Whenever you have something to share about your learners’ morphosyntax, upload it to the ‘Data Collection/Forum/Upload area from week 2.