Grup de Recerca per a l'Estudi del Repertori Lingüístic (GRERLI)
Grup consolidat reconegut i finançat per la Generalitat de Catalunya (2005-2008)
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Grup de Recerca per a l'Estudi del Repertori Lingüístic (GRERLI) |
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Financial support: Spencer Foundation (USA)
IP: Ruth Berman. Spanish Coordinator: Liliana Tolchinsky.
Summary This study examines the proposal that the use of de-verbal and de-adjectival nominals which express predicative content is indicative of linguistic and cognitive development and reflects the ability to take a more distanced, objective, and generic stance when recounting events in which the narrator was personally involved. To this end, we analyze the quantitative distribution of various types of verb and verb-related predicating constructions in Hebrew personal-experience narratives as a function of age (grade-schoolers, adolescents, and adults) and modality (spoken versus oral texts), and proceed to a semantic analysis of types of predicating expressions in relation to thematic content and the lexical and syntactic constructions in which such expressions are embedded. With age and schooling, expression of predicative content relies decreasingly on verbs, which prototypically express narrative content, and involves additional, more marked devices, especially in the form of derived nominals. This applies particularly to written narratives, which overall contain more predicative type content than their spoken counterparts, although are generally shorter in length. This shift in the form and content of predicating expressions in mature narratives results in a less concrete, subjective, and involved stance even in talking and writing about highly personal events.
Financial Support: Division of Education Sciences (UB)
Reference number/Code: 1997RE-5002-2A
IP: Joan Perera
Summary Project objectives: (1) Discover the types and quantity of linguistic interferences (Spanish-Catalan) which appear in oral and written texts of different typologies (narrative and expository) produced by Catalan speakers of various ages and linguistic training (4th course of elementary school, middle and high school, university students and language teachers). (2) Determine the influence of variables such as age and level of linguistic training, modality (oral and written) and genre (narrative and expository) in the quantity and types of interferences. (3) Determine the correlation between the quantity and types of interference and the level of output of the learned practice questionnaires.
Financial Support: Division of Education Sciences (UB)
Reference number/code: 1999RED-5020-2A
IP: Joan Perera
Summary Project objectives: (1) Characterize the discursive organization of expository texts, understanding the different parts of a text and the relationships between them. (2) Determine the relationship between discourse structure and variables, both individual (age, sociocultural characteristics and subject languages) and textual (modality –oral/written– and order of text production). (3) Describe processing signals in the text (pauses and rewording in oral texts, and corrections in written texts) and analyze their characteristics and functions. (4) Determine the relationship between the processing signals and individual and textual variables. (5) Determine the relationship between discourse structure and processing signals.
Financial Support : MCTE – Ministry of Science and Technology.
Reference number/code : BSO2000-0676
IP : Joan Perera
Summary The project centers on the semantic-pragmatic domains which are key to message modelization. It studies the morphosyntactic, lexical, and rhetorical devices which speakers use to convert definite, specific, or explicit agents into indefinite, generic, or implicit ones. The research proposes to: (1) Describe the range of depersonalization devices in expository texts and to confirm the variation in various languages (Catalan, Spanish, and French), linguistic environments (monolingual and bilingual), modalities (oral and written) and age groups, (4th course of elementary school, middle and high school and university students). (2) Evaluate the variety and complexity of these devices and the level of thematic production. (3) Confirm the degree of accessibility of these devices on the part of speakers outside the production context.
Financial Support : MCTE - Ministry of Science and Technology.
Reference number/code : BSO2003-06020
IP : Joan Perera
Summary The project centers on the relationship between morphological knowledge, orthographic representation, and reading. The study examines this relationship from an developmental and crosslinguistic perspective -in different age groups- comparing native speakers of romance languages and speakers of Arabic and Chinese. The results of the study contribute to the understanding of the spelling and reading learning processes and provides crucial information for teaching spelling and reading to children with different L1s.
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code: ARIE2004-00011
IP: Joan Perera
Summary This project offers tools to assist in discovering recently arrived foreign students' knowledge about written materials used for social purposes and about the function of writing during their initial schooling in Catalonia. The group of tools (situational-interviews) is tested with native Chinese, Arabic, and non-peninsular Spanish (Latin American) -speaking children ages 5-8 , with different prior experiences with literacy. Although the study focuses on these three groups of children, it proposes criteria for measuring/generalizing for other languages and ages. It also establishes the utility of information obtained using these tools for teaching reading and writing.
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code: 2006ARIE-10058
IP: Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary Finding the optimal combination of student usage and knowledge and what they must learn is a key factor in the learning process. In language teaching, adequate teaching of linguistic usage notably influences learning success. This project's end is to provide a fundamental tool for knowing student linguistic usage to the education community: a reference corpus of written scholastic Catalan in Catalonia with the derivative data obtained from the process. The education community and the editorial and research world now have access to relevant information on key aspects of the linguistic usages of students in Catalonia throughout compulsory education. We have collected and processed a corpus of texts produced by children from the last course in early education (P5) to the last course of compulsory education (4th of ESO) of schools and high schools in different Catalan regions. This corpus provides organized and accessible information on frequency of word usage and word categories; lexical density; varieties of lexical forms; idiomatic expressions; semantic relationships between words; phrasal structure; syntactic constructions; complexity of nominal synonyms; the relationships of coordination and subordination between orations and grammatical and orthographic errors. These aspects of knowledge are important for their role in language acquisition and processing, as well as writing comprehension. The corpus as much as the derivative data can be used to measure and plan educational performance to improve the linguistic competencies of students from different educational levels.
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code: 2005ARIE-10029
IP: Joan Perera
Summary The growing linguistic diversity in our country's classrooms generates new contexts for the acquisition of basic competencies. Children learn to read and write in multililngual contexts. Using this diversity to induce more effective learning of Catalan and other school languages is an important educational challenge. This project proposes offering the education community specific tools to acheive this objective. In particular, we have produced a group of classroom activities for learning reading and writing, designed based on the knowledge of previous students (detected by means of the situations-interview produced in the project 2004ARIE-00011), tested in class, approved by teachers and adhering to the curricular objectives of the last course of early education and the initial cycle of elementary education. The project considers the development of different types of activities (collective, group, pair and individual), which we have observed and documented. Based on the observations and based on teacher collaboration, we have proposed the readjustments necessary to obtain a test set of classroom situations with different types of participation, suggestions for intervention and application alternatives.
Financial Support: The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
IPs: Catherine McBride-Chang and Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary In this study, we examine maternal mediation of writing in kindergartners as a function of orthography in Spanish and Chinese using a two-culture comparison. As orthographies make use of phonological and morphological information, this study examines the extent to which mothers utilize both types of information in shared writing with their children. We are also interested in looking at the dialogue between mother and child during shared writing and how it relates to children's vocabulary knowledge. We asked children to write several words that their mothers give them (all words were standardized in each location). The words are designed to facilitate metalinguistic cues from mothers. We videotaped all dyads during the writing session (including about 10 words in all). We also measured children's cognitive skills as well as their print knowledge. The study looks at both the relative focuses of mothers across cultures as they help their children to write new words and also the link between the focus of mothers' writing help and children's cognitive and literacy skills. We assessed children on a number of tasks, measuring children's phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, letter-naming, word reading and visual processing. Overall, this study will focus on differences across cultures in how mothers approach the writing task in their very young children and on how these approaches, to be coded depending upon findings from our pilot testing, are associated with actual reading and writing proficiency in each language.
Financial Support: ICE of the UB: REDICE
IP: Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary : This project fulfills two necessities, the first regarding the organization and internal dynamics of the subject of “Linguistics” and the second in adapting the subject to the European norm. This involves student participation, promoting specialized class-linked reading materials, increasing tutorial and promoting continual evaluation. At the same time this requires adapting to the European norm which emphasizes these same aspects.
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code : 2006ARIE-10059
IP : Joan Perera
Summary The growing linguistic and cultural classroom diversity of our country creates new contexts for learning basic competencies. Especially for recently arrived foreign children, school has become the most important and practically their only space for learning Catalan. In this context, teaching language through other areas of the curriculum makes sense as the only strategy for new foreign students to fully acquire L2 communicative competencies. This project provides the educational communicative tools specific to integrating linguistic learning with other areas of the curriculum. In particular, we have produced a group of language learning activities, whose contents will be integrated with other areas of the curriculum (special, physical, and art education). The activities respond to the curricular objectives of the intermediary cycle of elementary school. They have also been approved by educators in the implicated schools and tested in classrooms having a significant presence of new foreign students. The project considers, observes and document the development of different types of activities (collective, group, pair and individual). On the basis of these observations and with the collaboration of teachers, this project will propose the readjustments necessary to obtain a group of activities which makes use of classroom situations with different types of participation, suggestions for intervention, and alternative applications.
Financial Support: MEDU – Ministry of Education and Science
Reference number/code: SEJ2006-11083
IP: Joan Perera
Summary In this project, we propose studying the Spanish and Catalan linguistic production of non-native speakers (speakers of Arabic, Chinese and Korean) of various ages and levels of linguistic scholastic training with the aim of characterizing the development of their linguistic repertoire and comparing it with that of native speakers. These three languages were selected for their distinct typological characteristics compared with Spanish and Catalan and because, in at least the first two cases, they represent some of the largest immigrant populations. We understand linguistic repertoire as being The group of grammatical and rhetorical devices which a speaker uses to adjust his/her discourse to attain different communicative objectives. To characterize the linguistic repertoire of non-native speakers we will use the same methodology applied in prior work on the production of native speakers: based on a series of categories considered as diagnostic indicators in differentiating genre (narrative/expository) and modality (oral/written), we will analyze distribution based on educational level (9, 12, and 16 year-olds and university students) and on languages. The categories of analysis of linguistic and textual level are the following: (a) information production (study of textual discourse organization); (b) processing signals (study of oral and written processing signals and their relationship with discourse organization); (c) precision (study of the structure or nominal syntagms); (d) diversification of rhetorical devices (study of deagentivization resources, especially passives and constructions with - se ); and (e) development of connectivity (study of linguistic devices used to connect information in discourse). These five aspects have been selected because, in accordance with the results of prior research, they serve as an adequate diagnosis of genre and modality (for example, expository texts are distinguished from narratives as they present a greater complexity of nominal syntagms and a greater proportion of deagentivization signals); In addition, they all present developmental differences in frequency of use and types of devices.
Financial Support: MEDU – Ministry of Education and Science
Reference number/code: SEJ2006-05292
IP: Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary The aim of this project is to identify which are the best conditions for a successful initial learning of literacy skills, while determining the relative influence of current teaching pract ice s and of children's previous knowledge on the learning process. We propose two main general objectives: (1) to provide systematic information about the diversity of teaching pract ice s in different geographical areas (Almería, Asturias, Cantabria, Catalonia, Madrid, Valencia, Granada, Leon, The Basque Country, and Valladolid); and (2) to determine the nature of the relationship between these teaching pract ice s, children's previously-held knowledge, and a successful learning of reading and writing. In order to fulfil such objectives we will conduct a two-phase study. Phase 1 will focus on defining the variable teaching pract ice s , while phase 2 will deal with the description of the processes and achievements in learning to read and write . The study will take students at preschool (age 5) and first-graders, as these are regarded as key moments in the teaching of literacy skills within the school system. A comparative analysis of the results from both phases will allow the identification of the most suitable teaching pract ice s. The design of the project combines massive data-collection techniques – which provide quantitative information—with other methods that allow for a qualitative approach. The project is of a multidisciplinary nature, unifying the efforts of different universities in Spain, in order to contribute to an improvement in the area of teaching and learning literacy skills. It will provide reliable information about the factors affecting learning, and will therefore lead to an optimization of students' teaching-learning conditions. We predict an impact on initial and on permanent teacher training, as well as on curriculum design. The data that will be provided about the relative importance of school, socio-cultural, and individual factors on learning literacy skills is relevant for these three aspects
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code: 2007ARIE-00005
IP: Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary The aim of this project is to complete the analysis and processing of a reference corpus on written scholastic Catalan in Catalonia, compiled thanks to the financial support of the project ARIE06. This corpus will be a fundamental tool for the educational community as it will facilitate knowledge of student linguistic usages at the lexical level as well as syntactic constructions and discursive organization throughout compulsory education. It consists of a picture of the state of written language in Catalonia from a synchronic and developmental perspective, which could lead to diachronic studies. During the first phase of the project (ARIE06) we collected 4,000 texts from 30 centers -public and semi-public- and from 16 geographic areas in Catalonia. This corpus includes productions from the last course of early education (P5) through the last course of compulsory education in the 1st and 2nd of BUP. When the first phase is finished, we will provide organized and easily accessible information on vocabulary from 5 lexical fields (clothing, food, personality traits, leisure activities and natural phenomena) and a collection of texts of different genres: definitions, explanatory texts, narratives and arguments. With respect to vocabulary, information will be obtained based on variations of lemma (standard form), frequency, richness of vocabulary for each thematic area, etc. The search systems will be defined, e.g. for age, sex, maternal language, etc. The requested help will allow textual data processing: the relationships of coordination and subordination between orations; the identification of different types of syntactic constructions; the analysis of complexity of nominal syntagms; analysis of the discourse organization in each genre; and orthographic and grammatical errors. These are key aspects of linguistic knowledge and form the basis of the acquisition and processing of language, as well as reader comprehension.
Financial Support: The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code: 2008MQD-00096
IP: Joan Perera
Summary The goal of this project is to improve processes of evaluating research competencies acquired by students in the Master of Research in Didactics of Language and Literature, while establishing the coordination mechanisms between professors and in order to guarantee quality. This goal is approached through: (a) evaluation coordinated with the subjects from the first two modules of the Master's and (b) the orientation process and evaluation of the final research project for the Master's. The current project requires that the subjects share a general objective and is centered on student acquisition of research strategies and resources in the field of Didactics of Language and Literature. The project plans to establish mechanisms which, linked with temporal or mechanical coordination, advance new methods of group evaluation. The research Master's normally includes a final research project, completed in the second semester of the course. That work is understood as a general mechanism for evaluating acquisition in the Master's group, the reason being that it is essential to establish criteria which permit evaluation from this perspective.
Financial Support: University of Barcelona. Notification/request of help for research iniciatives in the humanities and social sciences.
IP: Maria Antonia Martí.
Summary The project will supply researchers and teachers with two corpora with distinct characteristics (Spencer and CesCa) which open a window of research in areas such as psycholinguistics, language learning, language didactics, clinical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, language processing, philology, etc. These corpora are possible thanks to prior projects and the objective of the DigitalCor-UB project is to standardize and anotate morphostyntax to facilitate the above-mentioned research. The project also seeks to institutionalize a webpage within the UB, to reunite the developing corpora with research teams and offer researchers the tools of free distribution that we currently provide as well as those that can be incorporated in the future. In fact, with the project we have already initiated this integrated line of research by incorporating, in addition to the mentioned corpora, an important corpus of autobiographic texts (which pertain to the U.S. research group Biographics) and another of Greek literature from the Roman-Imperial era (the research group Graecia Capta). For this project, interdisciplinary research teams will collaborate on work in language acquistion, reading and writing acquisition, computational linguistics, language teaching, analysis and interpretation of texts (both ancient and modern), and the study of auto/biographical writing, as an emerging field as well as a complex area of cultural and literary history. The project subsidy will contract a linguist with a strong technological background, for the purpose of standardizing and processing the corpus. The research groups who are applying count on a support technician with a computer science engineering degree to program and install the web page.
Financial Support : The Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR). Generalitat of Catalonia.
Reference number/code : 2008ARIE00053
IP : Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary Orthographic quality of written production has a great impact on people's academic and social development. Despite this importance, we do not have mass information on the developmental profile of Catalan orthography. This project aims to obtain an exhaustive developmental characterization of Catalan-speakers' written language throughout compulsory education, to determine the influence of linguistic background (home language and the time they have been speaking Catalan) on this development. The study will also explore the relationship between the development of subjects' orthographic knowledge, syntactic complexity and discourse organization. Based on a corpus of 229,917 words (Corpus CESCA -2006ARIE 00011) produced by children since the last course of early education (P5) through the last course of compulsory education (4th of ESO), we will establish a typology of orthographic errors through the analysis of orthographic variants which appear in the corpus, in isolated written words and in texts. Prior to this, we will establish the relationship between types and frequencies of orthographic errors, phrasal syntactic complexity and textual quality. The project will permit the development of automatic recognition rules in orthographic errors, to understand at which point orthographic knowledge implicates other linguistic levels and to interpret specific difficulties of Catalan students.
Financial Support: MEDU – Ministry of Education and Science
Reference number/code: EDU2009-10321
IP: Liliana Tolchinsky
Summary The project conflates the efforts of different Spanish universities to obtain a better understanding and contribute to an improvement of reading comprehension. It is based on a previous study that focused on the initial learning of written language in order to establish the relative influence of teachers' practices and children's prior knowledge on initial literacy learning ( APILE - SEJ12006-05292 ) . This proposal centres on reading comprehension, the ultimate goal of reading instruction and a very hard-to-master competence (a competence which is hard/difficult to master. It aims at detecting which children's abilities/knowledge and teachers' practices contribute better (more?) to explain children's progress in reading comprehension.
To address this aim we will carry out two studies of similar design but with differentiated goals. In both, we take a longitudinal approach and combine the use of instruments providing data amenable to both qualitative and quantitative analysis with observational instruments providing qualitative information. Study 1 approaches one of the central questions in the domain of written language: which of the abilities involved in initial word reading learning better predict the development of text comprehension? Study 2 addresses another set of crucial issues: How does comprehension evolve from second to third grade of Elementary School ? How do literacy learning conditions influence the development of text comprehension? Approximately 850 second graders from several regions of Spain attending classes with different profiles of teaching practices will participate in a number of tasks evaluating word-reading and comprehension of different types of written and spoken texts, in particular narrative and expository texts. A sample subgroup of these second graders was previously assessed at the end of preschool and first grade in word-reading and basic abilities related to reading (e.g phonological awareness, knowledge of vocabulary) in the previous APILE study. The profiles of teaching practices were also defined in the same study. In Study 1, we compare the performance of the sample subgroup in word-reading and text comprehension with the results they obtained at the end of preschool and first grade on word-reading, phonological awareness and knowledge of vocabulary, among others. The goal here is to detect which of these abilities better predict text comprehension in second grade. In Study 2, we examine the development of text comprehension in the whole sample from second to third grade. The goal here is to determine the relationship between word-reading and reading and listening comprehension of different types of texts. This design will enable us to establish the influence of text type (narrative vs. expository) and modality of production (written vs. spoken) on the development of text comprehension. The diversity of profiles of practice together with the diversity and geographic dispersion of the classes in the sample will enable us to test the influence of initial literacy learning conditions and children's linguistic situation (bilingualism, coincidence or divergence between languages at school and languages at home) on text comprehension. Finally, we will gather detailed information about teacher's practices for enhancing reading comprehension in second and third grade of ES by means of observing classes and interviewing teachers. This information will be helpful for interpreting children's performance and for building future instruments for more systematic assessment of practices
We shall gain a deeper understanding of the factors influencing the development of text comprehension which, in turn, will optimize children learning conditions. Findings concerning cognitive, socio-cultural and pedagogical factors involved in written language learning are highly relevant for initial and continuous teachers' training and for curriculum development. We therefore envision a strong impact of this project on these three settings.
Financial Support: MEDU – Ministry of Education and Science
Reference number/code: EDU2009-08862
IP: Joan Perera
Summary The goals of the proposed study are threefold. Firstly, we aim at consolidating and bringing within the reach of the research community a wide corpus of Spanish and Catalan oral and written texts produced by native and non-native informants (L1s= Arabic, Chinese and Korean). The texts are suitable to be studied from linguistic, psycholinguistic and educational perspectives. Secondly, we aim at deepening in the analysis of a set of selected morphosyntactic, lexical and textual features that characterize later language development of competent L1 speakers and proved to be adequate for a comparison with those used by L2 learners/speakers. Finally, we intend to develop the educational implications arising from the exploitation of our corpus, as a result of the analysis performed on these specific linguistic features.
The corpus was obtained by the research team in a number of previous studies and it has been transcribed and codified using the CHAT format of the CHILDES project. To attain the first goal, the corpus will be standardized and disambiguated, so that subsequent analysis –both automatic (morphological and preliminary syntactic analysis) and manual (complete syntactic analysis)- using different programs can be carried out. As for the second goal, we intend to complete and broaden the study of a set of grammatical and discursive features that, according to the results of previous studies,(1) are indicators of genre and modality appropriateness, (2) show significant developmental differences in terms of frequency of use and type of device, and (3) are useful for illustrating the process of linguistic development in L1 and L2. Such features are: a) elaboration and distribution of the information (study of the discourse organization of texts); b) narrative structure; c) lexical precision (study of Noun Phrase complexity; lexical density and diversity); d) diversification of the rhetorical devices (study of deagentivization, specially in passives and constructions with clitic se; e) development of connectivity (study of the linguistic resources used for connecting information in discourse); f)propositional attitudes (discourse stance and distancing devices); and g)anaphoric expressions and antecedents.
Concerning the last goal, we plan to offer innovative proposals for the educational exploitation of the corpus that result from collaborative work and discussions with teachers. We also plan to develop specific teaching proposals based on the above mentioned analys i s. Such proposals include, for instance, the development of classroom activities to work on the relationship between spoken and written language or on contrastive rhetoric, and the development of methodological proposals, materials and resources for teaching oral and written L1s and L2s. As the preceding projects did, the results of this one will contribute to improve L1 and L2 ways of teaching, in particular those affecting new immigrants.