Browsing by Author "Elgort, Irina"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Restricted
Is Wiki an Effective Platform for Group Course Work?
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2008) Elgort, Irina; Toland, Janet; Smith, Alastair G.
This study reports on students' and lecturers' perceptions of using wikis as a platform for conducting assessed group projects in two postgraduate Master's level university courses. The results highlight the fact that student attitudes to group work, in general, are mixed, and that the use of wikis per se is not enough to improve these attitudes. On the positive side, students found wikis useful for arranging information and sharing knowledge, while instructors thought wikis made managing and marking group work easier and more effective. Other issues related to using wikis as a collaborative learning tool in higher education are also considered.
Restricted
Point of view and the teaching of reading: a pragmatic model for developing instructional approaches
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 1997) Elgort, Irina
This study investigates the construction of point of view in written texts in the light of recent theory and models of analysis, and attempts to construct an accessible framework for developing critical reading skills for L1 and L2 students of an intermediate to advanced level of language proficiency. New requirements of the New Zealand Curriculum create a need for teaching methodologies and guidelines to help instructors introduce critical reading practices into classrooms and encourage students' personal response to texts. Point of view, which is an essential aspect of critical reading, presents considerable difficulty to students both in terms of identification and interpretation. The term "point of view" appears in narratology, stylistics, critical linguistics and discourse analysis. Depending on the area of study, it can signify a structural or rhetoric device of narrative composition, a component in the thematic structure of a text, or a way of representing attitudes and beliefs of the author. This thesis studies a range of approaches to point of view for the purpose of identifying its most important compositional, attitudinal and thematic functions in the construction of written discourses; and the most powerful linguistic tools used for their realization. The result of this study is a pragmatic linguistic framework for describing point of view, which can be used as a basis for pedagogical approaches to critical reading of literary and non-literary texts. The framework, informed by the findings of current theory and research into reading and reader response, aims to activate students' knowledge-driven and text-driven processing of texts, and thereby encourage a critical reading stance which might deepen and enrich the aesthetic reading of literary texts. The scope of the framework is first demonstrated by analysing point of view in a short story and a magazine article. Then, a teaching adaptation of the developed approach is provided to exemplify how the framework can be used for developing learners' critical reading skills in a classroom situation. The suggested approach to teaching critical reading through point of view aims to empower learner-readers, by developing their ability to critically evaluate written discourses, i.e. to identify authorial stance and implied sets of values and beliefs texts represent. In regard to literary texts, the framework equips students with new techniques for achieving higher levels of sophistication in their aesthetic transaction with the text. It is also hoped that the approach will contribute to students' reader autonomy.
Restricted
The Role of Intentional Decontextualised Learning in Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: Evidence From Primed Lexical Decision Tasks With Advanced Bilinguals
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2007) Elgort, Irina
This study investigates effects of intentional decontextualised learning (IDL) on vocabulary acquisition in a second language. Three experiments were designed to measure acquisition of a set of studied pseudowords across the representational and processing knowledge domains, using the lexical decision task with visually presented stimuli and three priming procedures. In each of the three experiments, the findings were examined to test whether the expected perceptual effects had occurred, and whether the patterns of results observed with the newly-learned vocabulary items aligned with low-frequency English words or with nonwords, in the same experiments. In Experiment 1, a clear prime lexicality effect (Forster & Veres, 1998) was revealed for the seven- and eight-letter stimuli (but not for the nine-letter stimuli) using an unmasked form-priming procedure. In Experiment 2, a robust masked repetition (identity) priming effect was recorded for the newly-learned pseudowords, irrespective of their length in letters. Taken together the results of these experiments suggest that formal-lexical representations of the pseudowords had been established. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that the participants were able to fluently access representations of the newly-learned vocabulary items under automatic task conditions. In Experiment 3, a reliable semantic priming effect provided evidence that lexical-semantic representations of the pseudowords had been established and that the process of their integration into the participants’ system of lexical-semantic representations had begun. Priming generated by the pseudowords was, however, weaker and less reliable compared to that resulting from real English word primes, suggesting that the acquisition of lexical-semantic representations was in its early stages. Overall, the findings that both formal-lexical and lexical-semantic representations of the newly-learned vocabulary items had been established and integrated into the mental lexicon of the bilingual participants clearly demonstrate that IDL triggered acquisition of representational knowledge of these vocabulary items. Furthermore, using coefficient of variation (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993) calculated for the participants’ response latencies in Experiments 2 and 3, it was shown that high automaticity had been achieved by the participants in processing the newly-learned vocabulary items, indicating that IDL can also facilitate acquisition of the procedural aspects of the L2 vocabulary knowledge. Implications of the findings for the learning-acquisition debate are discussed. Evidence gathered in this study is also used to consider the organisational structure of the L2 mental lexicon of advanced bilinguals and the mechanisms underlying word processing in the second language. Finally, some suggestions for high-stakes vocabulary learning in the second language are offered.