Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted The Effects of Textual Enhancement Under Explicit Versus Implicit Conditions on the Acquisition of English Collocations Among Saudi EFL Learners(Univeristy College London, 2024-08) Aljuaid, Waad; Hammer, KateThe current study aims to investigate the impact of textual enhancement in explicit versus implicit conditions on promoting learners’ knowledge of L2 collocations. Specifically, it seeks to examine the effectiveness of textual enhancement under explicit versus implicit conditions on promoting learners’ recognition and recall of L2 collocations. It also aims to identify whether there are differential effects of textual enhancement under the two different conditions (explicit versus implicit). A total of 73 middle-school students were assigned to three groups: a control group (n = 24), an implicit enhanced group (n = 25) and an explicit enhanced group (n = 24). The participants in the implicit enhanced group received textually enhanced input where the target collocations were boldfaced, and the enhanced explicit group received textually enhanced input as well as explicit instructions to pay attention to the enhanced collocations. The control group received unenhanced input. The statistical analysis revealed no significant differences among the three groups in neither the recognition nor the recall tasks. However, there was a significant impact of the treatment on the participants’ recall post-test scores in the control and implicit enhanced groups. The findings suggest that textual enhancement, even when explicit instructions are provided, is not sufficient to promote learners’ collocational knowledge when L2 collocations are not repeatedly encountered in the input. Other factors that could have hindered the effectiveness of textual enhancement, along with some pedagogical implications, are discussed in this dissertation.22 0Item Restricted Using CALL textual enhanced input to develop the real time comprehesion of English generic articles by Arabic L1 speakers(Newcastle University, 2024-01-24) Alshaikh, Asmaa; Lopez, ElaineAcquisition of English articles is notoriously difficult for L2 learners from languages with and without articles (Thyab 2016). Such difficulty motivates researchers to use instruction to ease the comprehension of articles (e.g. Lopez 2015; Sabir 2015; Abumlhah 2016). However, despite the ubiquity of implicit instruction, there is little research on whether it impacts article acquisition, particularly generic articles, as compared to explicit instruction (e.g. Snape, Umeda et al., 2016). Moreover, comprehension is usually measured by standard offline tasks, despite L2 acquisition being a largely unconscious, implicit process (Krashen 1982). I address these issues using an implicit teaching tool called textual enhanced input (TEI) (Smith 1993) and measure its impact on generic article acquisition in two contexts: noun- level generics (NLG) and sentence-level generics (SLG). I include a spontaneous real-time measure of comprehension (self-paced reading; SPR) (Jiang 2013), to fill the noted gap. The study recruited L1 Arabic, L2 English speakers at elementary and intermediate level, divided into two groups: instruction and control. Both groups received six hours of input across four weeks, with TEI applied only to the instruction group. Stories were used as teaching materials. The generic article and following noun were enhanced in the stories (generic article was highlighted, underlined, bolded and in a larger font, while the following noun was bolded following the procedure of Rassaei, 2015). Four tasks were used, two intended to measure implicit knowledge: elicited production with limited time and self-paced reading; and two intended to measure explicit knowledge: grammaticality judgment and forced- choice production. A pre-test and two post-tests were completed by both groups to examine whether TEI influences short- and longer-term acquisition of the generic article. Results suggest that TEI has a positive long-term effect on implicit comprehension, as revealed by the SPR, but not on implicit production nor explicit knowledge. This supports theefficacy of TEI for teaching generic articles. It also highlights the necessity of including a real-time psycholinguistic measure in intervention studies, as it detected results that were not found in the offline standard tasks used in the current study.26 0