Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies

“How can teachers help students improve their second language (L2) speaking accuracy?” This is a question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Although L2 writing is a popular topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the consideration that L2 writing has the potential to act as a scaffold for L2 speaking accuracy has often been overlooked. This research attempts to draw SLA researchers' attention to the untapped potential that L2 writing has on improving L2 speaking accuracy. This research provides empirical evidence that L2 writing have a great potential to improve accuracy of L2 oral discourse. Twenty-three Novice, twenty-one Intermediate, and twenty Advanced university students of Russian participated in the study. They completed a text reconstruction task by working with the original text to 'notice the gap' using both written and spoken modes of recall. Both written and spoken forms of recall provided sufficient opportunity for improving semantic accuracy and produced textual complexity, and for acquiring new vocabulary with all three levels of learners. However, only the Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced learners working with the texts in writing showed improvement in their speaking accuracy. These findings can be considered the first step in drawing scholars' attention to the benefits of utilizing L2 writing to improve L2 speaking accuracy that have often been overlooked. This research also bridges the gap in our understanding of written and spoken recall of texts written in L2. The relationship between written and spoken recall has primarily been analyzed with English-speaking monolinguals. It has been reported that written recall provides semantically more accurate responses than spoken recall due to the higher cognitive load and attention required to produce a text. The pilot study described in this dissertation examined the written and spoken text recall relationship in L2 learners of Russian, and analyzed how individual w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ludmila Isurin (Advisor); Mineharu Nakayama (Committee Member); Wynne Wong (Committee Member) Subjects: Foreign Language; Language; Linguistics; Slavic Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This dissertation investigates processing of English and Japanese relative clause (RC) sentences by native speakers and second/foreign language (L2) learners. Particularly, the relationship between the sentence processing and individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity was examined. The main question addressed in this study is whether the performances of L2 learners in processing RCs are similar to those of native speakers depending on one's WM capacity. Two major approaches regarding the processing of RCs have been proposed to account for the differences between the difficulty of the subject-gap and the object-gap sentences: the cost of resources taken up by temporary storage and integration when processing (Dependency Locality Theory; Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the depth of embedding of the extracted element (Structural Distance Hypothesis; O'Grady, 1987; O'Grady, Yamashita, Lee, Choo and Cho, 2000). This study also evaluated these two hypotheses and answers the question: To which hypothesis do the performances of L2 learners best correspond? Fourteen English native speakers who were Japanese language learners and 14 Japanese native speakers who were English language learners participated in the experiment, which consisted of three parts: First language (L1) and L2 reading span tests, L1 and L2 self-paced moving window reading tasks, and a L2 proficiency test. The comprehension accuracy rates of the experimental sentences and individuals' residual reading times in each region of the RC sentence types were used for comparisons. Additionally, the individual participants' sentence reading patterns were examined, so what may have been invisible on the group level analyses were revealed. The results of the experiments showed that (1) English object-gap sentences are more difficult to comprehend than English subject-gap sentences for both L1 native speakers and L2 learners, (2) Japanese subject-gap sentences are more difficult to comprehend than Japanese objec (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mineharu Nakayama (Advisor); Etsuyo Yuasa (Committee Member); Shari Speer (Committee Member) Subjects: Foreign Language; Linguistics