Measurement of Discourse Competence by Cohesivity Judgement Test

IR Web Site

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • 結束性判断テストによるディスコース能力の発達の測定
  • ケッソクセイ ハンダン テスト ニ ヨル ディスコース ノウリョク ノ ハッタツ ノ ソクテイ

Search this article

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to re-examine the results of Shimada (2019), which focused on the transfer effect of noticing activities with a grammatical category on the other categories. The targeted structures dealt with were the three grammatical categories : complex sentence, dative alternation and active and passive voice, all of which can involve some difficulties in choosing a more appropriate form to better fit a particular context. Cohesion refers to the logical relationships in propositional development between different sentences in a text. It is generally stated that in English, propositions are organized in such a way that what is known or old information, comes first in a sentence and what is unknown, or new information in the sentence is placed at the end. This is called the End-focus Principle. A cohesivity judgement test was developed and administered to 144 university students. The test consists of 36 items, each of which was written to measure the students’ ability to understand logical relationships in sentences in a text based on the End-focus Principle. The students were required to read a dialogue between two people and choose the more appropriate utterance to continue the dialogue from two options. The results show, as indicated by students’ means scores with the three grammatical categories, that there were significant gains in ability to select the correct option between the pre-test, the immediate post-test, and the delayed post-test, which suggests that there was not only the treatment effect but also the transfer effect of the activities. The reliability (Cronbach alfa) also improved through the three stages of the tests. The item analysis indicates that the number of the good discriminable items increased towards the delayed post-test. It was also observed that the correlation between the three grammatical categories increased at the final stage, which suggests that, as learning advances, the learners understood that the End-focus Principle can be applied to different grammatical categories.

Journal

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top