Άρθρα

Zoe Gavriilidou and Alexandros Papanis

Democritus University of Thrace

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of strategy instruction on the use of strategies by Muslim primary school EFL learners, when they engage in reading and listening comprehension as well as vocabulary learning. 122 students attending minority schools in Xanthi and Rodopi, aged from 10 to 12 years old, participated in the study. They were divided into an experimental group who followed a specially designed programme aiming at raising learning strategy use, and a control group who followed only the typical English language programme. Strategy use in both groups was evaluated with a standardized questionnaire based on previous work by Oxford (1990) and O’ Malley and Chamot (1990), distributed before and immediately after the intervention programme. The results showed that the learning of the experimental group, compared to the control group, significantly improved because of an increased use of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies. These findings stress the need for designing special curricula for raising students’ strategic use of language in second or foreign language teaching.

Costas Canakis

University of the Aegean

Stadiou Street bespeaks a story of urban de-gentrification and appropriation by ‘the others’ of Greek society, as suggested by the spray-canned messages on its prized national monuments and up-market shops. The linguistic landscape (LL) has become an arena for the discursive public negotiation of gendered and sexed predicates and meanings, as well as for the discursive production of social categories. It surfaces as a radically globalized ‘canvassing’ arena, which is being transformed through mass media, social media, and contact among local advocacy groups. Therefore, although writing can arguably be considered static, the LL of Stadiou can hardly be conceptualized – let alone studied – as static. To this effect, I approach Stadiou Street ethnographically arguing for the advantages of this approach to the LL as semiotic space.

Ifigeneia Dosi*, Despina Papadopoulou**

Democritus University of Thrace*
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki**

 The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational settingin the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b)the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingualchildren and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect.Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired later than perfectivein previous studies. Moreover, a bilingual educational setting seems toenhance not only cognitive but also linguistic abilities. The participantsof the present study are Greek-German bilingual children, who attend abilingual or a Greek dominant educational setting. They were tested intwo baseline tasks, two linguistic tasks and an executive function,updating, task. Thefindings reveal that bilinguals who attend amonolingual educational setting performed similarly to the monolingualcontrol group on aspect, whereas bilinguals who attend a bilingualeducational setting scored lower than the monolinguals. In the updatingtask, the students of the bilingual educational setting scored higher thanthe other groups. Overall, ourfindings suggest that the bilingualeducational setting seems to boost executive function (updating) skills,while the acquisition of aspect is affected by vocabulary knowledge.

Karen Forbes

University of Cambridge, UK

While the importance of considering the wide variation among language learners has been brought to the forefront in recent years, the impact of such individual differences on the process of second or foreign language writing has been largely neglected. This paper aims to explore the ways in which individual students develop and transfer strategies within and between foreign language (FL) and first language (L1) writing. A two-phase intervention of strategy-based instruction was conducted primarily in the FL German classroom, and later also in the L1 English classroom of a Year 9 (age 13–14) class in a secondary school in England. This paper draws on in-depth qualitative data from writing tasks and stimulated recall interviews. A range of students’ trajectories through the intervention were evaluated and four distinct writer ‘profiles’ were identified: the strategic writer, the
experimenter, the struggling writer and the multilingual writer. Both the development and transfer of strategies for these students were shown to be influenced by a complex and dynamic range of factors such as the learner’s proficiency level, their level of metacognitive engagement with the task, their attitude towards writing and their strategic use of other languages in their repertoire.

Mirosław Pawlak* and Zuzanna Kiermasz**

Adam Mickiewicz University, Kalisz, Poland / State University of Applied Sciences, Konin, Poland*
Łódź University, Poland**

Although multilingualism has become a fact of life in the last few decades, this phenomenon has largely failed to find a reflection in research on language learning strategies. Even when scholars have addressed this issue, it has mostly been done with the purpose of proving the advantage of multilingualism over bilingualism, and scant attention has been given to how the nature, utility or status of a particular additional language can impact the frequency and patterns of strategy use. The present paper seeks to partially fill this gap by investigating the employment of strategies by 107 Polish university students majoring in English and, at the same time, being required to reach a high level of proficiency in another additional language. The data were collected by means of the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford, 1990) and interviews conducted with selected participants. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrated that strategy use in the second language was higher than in the third language, both overall and with respect to specific groups of strategies, mostly traditional and memory strategies were deployed, and the outcomes could be attributed to the proficiency level in both languages and varied motivation to master these languages.