Phil Scholfield's Home Page            Last updated Oct11

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scholp@essex.ac.uk,
Department of Language and Linguistics,
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ.

 

Note: much of this site is primarily of local value to University of Essex staff and students

Jump to….

v  Teaching on Essex campus:  My teaching this year and brief outlines of things I often teach but not all this year

v  Distance Essex students: Entrance to the Distance/elearning version of LG575 for those who cannot attend the classes (This is for registered Essex students only: anyone interested should contact me)

v  Research: My own research interests and publications and my PhD Research Group.

v  Here are my viva tips for my students here at Essex. Powerpoints on How to (not) write a lit review and How (not) to write up quantitative results

v  LG595 session on GZLM materials:  GZLM.pptx Distribution shapes in histograms.docx short_long example.sav   issariya.sav  amarin.sav  vineeta.sav 

v  About me: Personal information

v  Support information: about XAIRA, SPSS, statistics etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching             

v  This relates to the session 11-12. Material I have taught but won’t this year is accessible via   outlines of things I often teach but not all this year

Postgrad

1.      LG575-7-AU Non-experimental Quantitative Research Methods for ELT/AL in term 1. A friendly introduction to formulating hypotheses, sampling, measuring, designing studies etc.....and the basics of handing figures and making appropriate graphs with the SPSS program. A must for anyone intending to gather data that will produce numbers.

2.      LG675-7-SP Further Quantitative Research Methods in Language Study in term 2. Follows on the above, covering pretty well all the statistical techniques one might need for language research, including ANOVA, Factor Analysis, Multiple Regression, statistical approaches to reliability and item analysis... all with practical hands-on SPSS tasks. Essential for any PhD with heavy requirement for statistical analysis.

Postgrad and undergrad

3.      LG443-6/7-AU Lexical Change in the History of English in term 1. Why is a sandwich so called? What have dough, fiction and paradise in common historically? Why does book have a regular plural, but not foot? In Middle English it could be spelt fyssche... what word is it today and why did it have so may letters then? What did control apparently mean in 1713 when one could write: The Women never dare Controul or Dispute their Husbands Commands ... and how has the meaning changed since? If you are interested in how and especially why words change in the ways they do, this course is for you.

Undergrad

4.      LG290-5-SP Investigating Language Team Project. !! This new second year module will NOT be on it 2011-12 due to lack of takers…. Maybe in 2011-2?!.  Gather original data to answer an   interesting question in language in a team. Learn data gathering skills. Tick some boxes for developing transferable skills that  you may well not have had a chance to develop/use in any other modules. It is paired with CR700,  a new Careers Development module from the University to be taken in the Autumn term.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some general guidance information

  • Instructions for installing and using XAIRA to access the British National Corpus at Essex
  • How to get hold of the phonetic and Old English fonts to use with Word
  • A guide to entering data into SPSS, and some associated things to get straight in your head before seeking advice from me on analysis of the data. I offer general advice to anyone on quantitative research methods, graphs, statistics, and use of SPSS.... but that is strictly within the Department of Language and Linguistics here at Essex only... and students, please, I don't expect to have to advise on things which you could have attended one of my courses (LG575 above) and learnt how to do.
  • A checklist of headings and points that you might well need to cover in the write-up of a piece of empirical research.
  • How (not to) write a literature review

·         Some stats and SPSS pointers on some specific technical matters I am sometimes asked about but which are not covered in detail in my courses. These may not all mean much unless you have some stats knowledge.

 

 

 

 

My Background

Since 1995, I have been Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistics here at the University of Essex. I have various taught modules described above, and am involved in research with my many PhD students. Currently I am semi-retired, so not taking new PhDs, but seeing out my existing 14 or so ones…

I originally graduated from Clare College, Cambridge with a degree in Classics, followed by training as a teacher of English as a Second/Foreign Language at University of Wales Bangor, in the days of Prof. Frank Palmer (just before he moved to Reading) and Sidney Whitaker. During the course of that, I became interested in what was then (1966) the relatively new and unknown subject of Linguistics, and was taken on as a lecturer in the Dept of Linguistics at Bangor by the late Prof. Sharp. I stayed there all through the period when Andrew Radford was Prof, developing my own knowledge, teaching and research repertoire pretty much with the job: I am particularly indebted to colleagues who in various ways assisted my development - Carl James, Ken Albrow, Pete Garrett, the late Michael Anthony, and others - and to all the many students who provided a sounding-board for ideas. During that period I taught a very wide range of topics in linguistics and applied linguistics, from Stratificational Grammar to Vocabulary Teaching. I contributed regularly to the training of TEFL teachers run by the Education Dept, and for some time ran the MA Applied Linguistics and MA ESL/EFL.

In the early 90s I globetrotted, especially to Poland (TEMPUS project), Greece and the Far East, giving presentations and training sessions mainly in the area of CALL, vocabulary teaching, and learners' dictionaries. I have also spoken at BAAL and AILA, externalled a number of PhDs and MA schemes, and am on the editorial board of the journal Language Awareness.

I had a long association with the ELT Dictionary section of Longman (now part of Pearson Education) as consultant and member of their advisory panel Linglex (chaired by Professor the Lord Quirk). I have especially been associated with work on the successive editions of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and its offspins, and the Longman Language Activator. Over 98-99 I was working on editing a mammoth opus, authored by Doug Biber, Geoff Leech, Stig Johansson and others, the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (420k words). This is the first comprehensive grammar of English with large scale corpus based frequency information incorporated, and describing separately the grammar of four major varieties of English, including genuine conversation. It is rapidly becoming a standard work- it is the classic complement/successor to the Quirk/Leech family of descriptive English grammars.

I have two grown-up daughters, who have had no trouble resisting the temptation to have anything to do with Linguistics or academia. One is a group operational risk manager with Barclays; the other is in marketing research and development. Since my wife died in 2004 I have been rebuilding my life and have a new partner and family, consequent on which I am learning Portuguese (Brazilian).

From Oct 2010 I am semi-retired so not taking any new supervisees. I continue to teach some modules, help my existing supervisees to conclusion, and hopefully will have the time to actually write something again at last….

My Research and Teaching Specialities

  • My main areas of research and teaching interest are these:
    • Vocabulary learning, teaching and use in EFL/ESL
    • Principles of dictionaries for learners of English and their use
    • Strategies research in ESL/EFL - including reading, writing, testing, dictionary use and vocabulary learning strategies
    • Research methods and statistics in language research generally
  • I also have a lesser interest in:
    • Computer assisted language learning, especially use of word processing in ESL/EFL
    • Historical linguistics - especially lexical change in the history of English
    • Writing systems
    • Lexical errors and error correction; feedback
    • Language awareness

 

 

Things I have taught… but probably won’t again

These I have previously taught, and though some of this material is quite old (and unlikely to be updated) I leave it here in case it is of any residual use to anyone!

  • I give brief and in some cases extended information for you to use as you like. But if the module is on this year taught by someone else, obviously you have to follow what they say, not what I may say here!
    • LG478 Computer Assisted Language Learning, which is all about programmes and CDs that can be used in English language teaching, uses of the internet, wordprocessing etc. for language teaching, and how to evaluate them pedagogically, plus electronic corpora of English and what teachers can use them for. Lots of hands-on activity will improve your computer literacy.
    • LG445-6/7-AU Learner Perspectives on Vocabulary, which introduces what I see as the key areas where research is furthering our understanding of learners' lexis. This is my main research area for PhD projects:

§  How they store vocab in the mental lexicon, and what and how much they store

§  How they deal with vocab, and especially the problems arising from lack of knowledge of it, when reading and writing

§  How they learn/acquire vocabulary, both through 'natural absorption' and deliberate memory techniques.

o    LG556 Vocabulary Teaching. We consider in turn the major areas that a teacher of a second/foreign language needs some familiarity with, primarily:

·        What exactly is vocabulary knowledge – the thing we want learners to acquire?

·        How should we, or a coursebook or syllabus writer, select vocabulary for a course?

·        How much vocabulary does a learner need to know? And at what rate should it be introduced?

·        How can the meaning of a new word best be presented to learners? … and the form?

·        What kinds of practice materials, games, tasks etc. are available for vocabulary, and how can we analyse them to see what aspects of vocabulary knowledge or fluency they are really focussed on? Which might most effective in different teaching contexts?

·        How can we best handle vocab in ‘production’ or ‘communicative’ tasks and in the four skills more generally?

·        How can we best test and assess learners’ vocabulary?

·        Should we not also be teaching the learner self-help strategies for learning vocab, and dealing with situations where they lack it? Then what are these strategies and how can we teach them?

·        Should we ban or encourage dictionaries? What dictionaries?

    • LG686 Corpora in ELT. This is all about how corpora – electronic collections of real written and spoken language – can be used in ELT. Both corpora of native speaker language and of learner language (including errors) are available. The ones we look at are accessible free on WWW or campus server, and although you have to use different ‘search engines’ to look for things in them, they are easy to use. Basically you are able to find out about frequencies of things (words or structures) and get ‘concordances’ of real examples of how a word etc. is used. This information may be used in many ways. Many uses are in the ELT ‘backroom’, to guide the creation of better grammars, dictionaries, syllabuses and coursebooks, based on ‘real’ English rather than what experts think English is like. Another major area of use is in ‘language awareness’ tasks in the classroom with learners.
    • My contribution to LG636-7-AU Explicitness in L2 Learning in term 2. I do five sessions of this in the middle.
    • My contribution to LG561 Reading. You can see my powerpoints.
    • My contribution to LG527 Language Teaching, on Vocabulary teaching. You can see my powerpoints.
    • LG442-6/7-AU Language Testing. I contribute a couple of sessions only in term 1.
    • My contributions to LG595 Professional development for PG students

 

 

 

 

My Publications

I seem to have published in some quite obscure places, not to say on some quite obscure topics! If anyone is really dying to read one of my publications and genuinely can't get hold of it, do please email me and I will try to supply a copy.

Book

Feb 1995. Quantifying Language. Clevedon, Avon: Multilingual Matters (pp298). This is all about ways people try to measure linguistic variables in all kinds of areas (applied linguistics, child language, sociolinguistics...) - elicitation, questionnaires, tests.... and how to turn the information into figures appropriately.

Articles, reviews and other oddments in date order

156 biographical entries on linguists and language-related personalities in Everyman's Encyclopaedia 6th ed., Dent (1977)

'On a non-standard dictionary definition schema', Exeter Linguistic Studies 4: 54-62 (1980)

'Explaining meaning by paraphrase: problems and principles', Guidelines for Vocabulary Teaching (Regional English Language Centre Journal Suppl. No.3): 24-37 (1980)

'Evaluating selection policy and grammatical and semantic information in an EST dictionary', Fachsprache 2: 97-109 (1980)

'Vocabulary explanation by paraphrase in context', Studia Anglica Posnaniensia XV: 103-121 (1981)

'Writing, vocabulary errors and the dictionary', Guidelines for Writing Activities (Regional English Language Centre Journal Suppl. No.6): 31-40 (1981)

'The role of bilingual dictionaries in ESL/EFL: a positive view', Guidelines for Study Skills (Regional English Language Centre Journal Suppl. Vol.4 No.1): 84-98 (1982)

'Learning word meaning through explanation within English', Interlanguage Studies Bulletin 6: 34-63 (1982)

'Using the English dictionary for comprehension', TESOL Quarterly 16: 185-194 (1982)

'Communication strategies - the researcher outmanoeuvred?', Applied Linguistics 8: 219-232 (1987)

'Active and passive vocabulary: bilingual dictionaries' and teachers' judgments', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 2: 18-26 (1987)

'Criterion-referenced versus norm-referenced measurement of language', Bangor Teaching Resource Materials in Linguistics 1: 1-19 (1987)

'CALingL - computer assisted linguistics learning', Bangor Teaching Resource Materials in Linguistics 1: 20-33 (1987)

'Lexical errors - a collector's guide', Bangor Teaching Resource Materials in Linguistics 1: 34-55 (1987)

'Vocabulary problems in communication: what determines the learner's choice of strategy?', Bangor Teaching Resource Materials in Linguistics 1: 56-75 (1987)

'Documenting folk etymological change in progress', English Studies 69: 341-347 (1988)

Review of R. Carter, Vocabulary, in Journal of Literary Semantics 18: 79-81 (1989)

'Language awareness and the computer', in ed. C. James and P. Garrett, Language Awareness in the Classroom, Longman, pp227-241 (1991)

Invited review article 'Statistics in linguistics', in ed. B.J.Siegel, Annual Review of Anthropology, 20: 377-393 (1991)

Review of H.Seliger and E.Shohamy, Second Language Research Methods, in British Association for Applied Linguistics Newsletter 39 (1991)

'Vocabulary rate in coursebooks - living with an unstable lexical economy', Proceedings of 5th Symposium on the Description and/or Comparison of English and Greek, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki: 11-32 (1991)

'Trends in Greek-English contrastive analysis: two recent studies', Proceedings of 5th Symposium on the Description and/or Comparison of English and Greek, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki: 279-302 (1991)

'Cluster analysis in the study of language variation - a review and an example', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 3: 55-88 (1991)

'Booms and slumps in the lexical economy of a course: matching supply and demand', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 3: 43-54 (1991)

With P. Garrett, C. James, Y. Griffiths. 'Effects of mother tongue use in the second language classroom on the writing performance and attitudes of bilingual UK schoolchildren: an experimental study', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 3: 1-18 (1991)

With P. Garrett, C. James, Y. Griffiths. 'Scoring for content in transactional writing: from atomisation to audience awareness', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 3: 19-29 (1991)

Review of J.Sinclair, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, in Language Awareness 1: 61-65 (1992)

With P. Garrett, C. James, Y. Griffiths. 'Evolution of a coding scheme for content in transactional writing: from atomisation to audience awareness', Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Applied Linguistics: Evaluation and Assessment, Aristotle University Thessaloniki (GALA Bulletin 6) (1992)

With G. Ipsiladis. 'An evaluation of CALL programs'. Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Applied Linguistics: Evaluation and Assessment, Aristotle University Thessaloniki (GALA Bulletin 6) (1992)

'Folk etymology and the parallelism of lexical processes', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 4 (1992)

With P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths, C.James. 'Differences and similarities between and within bilingual settings: some British data', Language Culture and Curriculum 5: 99-116 (1992)

'The conceptual map of English'. Invited contribution to the frontmatter of The Longman Language Activator, Longman (1993).

Review of P.Arnaud and H.Béjoint, Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics, in Applied Linguistics 14: 313-315 (1993)

With G. Ypsiladis and C.James. 'Communication failures in persuasive writing: towards a typology', Yearbook of English Studies 3: 173-193. Aristotle University School of English, Thessaloniki (1993)

With P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths, C.James. 'Bilingual settings in Wales and in England: an investigation of similarities and differences', Bangor Research Papers in Linguistics 6 (1993)

With C.James, P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths. 'Welsh bilinguals' English spelling: an error analysis', Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 14: 287-306 (1993)

With P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths, C.James. 'Mother tongue in the second language classroom'. In ed. A. Kakouriotis. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on English and Greek, Aristotle University School of English, Thessaloniki: 76-93 (1993)

Invited contribution 'Second language pedagogy - vocabulary', in ed. R. Asher et al., The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press (1994)

With G. Ypsiladis. 'Evaluating computer assisted language learning from the learner's point of view'. In ed. D. Graddol and J. Swann, Evaluating Language, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters (1994) pp62-74.

Invited chapter 'Writing and Spelling - The View from Linguistics', in ed. G. Brown and N. Ellis, Handbook of Spelling: Theory, Process and Intervention, Chichester: John Wiley (1994) pp51-71.

With C. James and G. Ypsiladis. 'Cross-cultural correspondence'. World Englishes 13: 325-340 (1994).

With P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths, C.James. 'Use of the mother-tongue in second language classrooms: an experimental investigation of effects on the attitudes and writing performance of bilingual UK schoolchildren'. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15: 371-383 (1994).

'What's new about word frequency?' Longman Language Review 1: 9-11 (Jan 1995).

'Making the best of the pocket TL>NL dictionary when reading'. In ed. M. Bobran, Zeszyty Naukowe Wyzszej Szkoly Pedagogicznej w Rzeszowie 17, Seria Filologiczna: Jezykoznawstwo 2, Rzeszów: WSP Press (April 1995) pp149-163.

200 language usage notes in ed. D Summers Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (3rd ed) (April 1995).

'Why shouldn't monolingual dictionaries be as easy to use as bilingual ones?' Longman Language Review 2: 6-9 (1995).

'New Light on English Vocabulary from Corpora'. Proceedings of the 1994 ELLAK International Symposium. The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (Feb 1995) pp21-51.

With P.Garrett, Y.Griffiths, C.James. 'The development of a scoring scheme for content in transactional writing'. Language and Education 9: 179-193 (Sept 1995).

Review of P. Procter (ed) Cambridge International Dictionary of English, in Language Awareness 4: 173-176 (1995)

With C. Gitsaki. 'What is the advantage of private instruction? The example of English vocabulary learning in Greece'. System 24(1): 117-127 (June 1996).

'Strategies for pocket bilingual dictionary use when writing: facing up to reality'. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 11: 1-25 (Mar 1996).

'Vocabulary Reference Works in Foreign Language Learning' in ed N. Schmitt and M. McCarthy Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy (pp279-302). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press (1997).

'Dictionary use in reception' International Journal of Lexicography 12:1 (pp13-34) 1999

with S. Al-Hazmi. 'The effect of peer feedback versus self-assessment on the quality and revision of compositions word-processed by Arab ESL learners' (pp24). In ed. Pennington, M., Writing in an Electronic Medium: Research with Language Learners. Houston, Texas: Athelstan 1999.

You will notice that I haven’t published much recently. This is due partly to my bereavement, when I was off for almost a year, but mainly to the pressure of PhD supervision, which leaves no time to work on publications based on the often excellent research which we produce.

 

My Research and PhD Projects

Note I am now semi-retired and not taking new supervisees at Essex.

My PhDs work within the realm of English as a second/foreign language research or applied linguistics. Hopefully sooner or later most of their work will produce publications. I have attached emails and, where possible, websites of the key individuals for anyone interested to follow up in more detail: the account here is only intended to give a rough idea of the area of the work - much of it has much more detail, specific hypotheses and so forth. Many involve a combination of qualitative (esp. 'think aloud') and quantitative methods, related to strategies which students are more or less aware of. The outline below includes both current and past PhD students (the latter marked C for completed).

·         My Core area of interest: vocabulary in EFL

    • Vocabulary learning strategies and factors affecting them. What is the difference between the conscious strategies used by Japanese learners in Japan and those at a Japanese school in the UK, where they are in a TL environment? (Dr Taichi Nakamura C). What differences do we find in the strategies reported by Saudi Arabian learners of different levels in school and university, male and female? Are there distinct types of learner who use different profiles of strategies unrelated to those variables? (Dr Mofareh Al-Qahtani C). It is often tacitly implied that there are certain strategies that are universally 'good', but a neglected angle is the effect of a learner's personality on what strategies they use and feel happy with or are suited to. Dr Alfredo Marin C looked into one such personality variable…. Extraversion.  Salah Alyami has just begun to look at effects of gender and year of study on the vocab learning strategies of Saudi university English majors.
    • One specific strategy, the keyword memory method. Some say this strategy will not work with Chinese learners of English because Chinese and English are so different, but the method relies on spotting similarities between words in the two languages. This is being looked at in depth with Chinese university students by Henry Zhiqing Yang, in relation to variables such as whether the keyword is given or self-generated, whether immediate or delayed retention is tested, etc.
    • Strategies for learning idioms. These involve the successive phases  of: spotting that a sequence of words in a text IS in fact an idiom (identification), figuring out what it means (code-breaking/comprehension/discovery), and remembering it (retention/consolidation): Rosalina Dominguez in Mexico and Eirene Katsarou in Greece
    • Training in vocabulary learning strategies. What strategies do Thai learners of English most need to help retain new vocab (ones which they are not already using) .... and can teaching of those vocab learning strategies be effective? (Dr Issariya Tassana-ngam C).
    • Vocabulary teaching. What aspects of the teaching methods or the materials or the syllabus or indeed the learner contribute most to the lack of success of Saudi schoolchildren in learning a sound basic vocabulary by the end of school? In fact their interest turned out to be high, but there were aspects of their learning strategies and the teaching materials that let them down, and poor backwash from the exams... (Dr Saad Al-Akloby C). Another scenario: what is vocabulary teaching actually like in classes for young learners... in Taiwan? How much does it differ between different ages of students and locations of school (city/country)? And does it have the features that pundits writing about teaching young learners approve of? (Dr Serena Liang C)
    • Vocabulary test-taking strategies. What 'test-taking strategies' do Saudi learners of English use when taking vocabulary tests of the common ‘gap in a sentence with 4 multiple choice options’ type? Do they differ between local teacher made test items and professionally made ones? (Dr Khaled Addamegh; website C). Complementing this, Abdullah AlFraidan is going on to look at the difference between strategies used for two other very common vocab test types in Saudi Arabia, the cloze text with multiple open choice gaps, and the set of sentences, each with a gap, to be filled from one common list of possible fillers.
    • ESP vocabulary and testing and reading. Carlota Alcantar is researching a neglected ESP area, Tourism, making her own corpus of Tourism-related texts and identifying the words and phrases that are distinctively frequent in that corpus compared with general English. From this she is making a test of tourism vocab in order to see if her students in Mexico on a Tourism BA read English better if they know more tourism-related words, or if they just know more high-frequency words of English.

      •
    • Vocabulary storage in the mental lexicon. Grahame Davies is looking at this via the traditional method of word association, targeting emotion and non-emotion words in the minds of native speakers of English and Portuguese learners of English. Are they organised differently by native speakers and learners? Is there any difference between native speakers who only speak English and those who have learnt other languages? And do the non-natives organise the equivalent L1 words differently from the L2 English words?
    • Vocabulary problems in writing and strategies to resolve them. Vocab problems and their handling in general during composition, including by dictionary use. What are the problems that arise with vocab, and the strategies used to handle word problems that we can find learners using when they write? We have a neat classification into problems ... and their solutions... where the writer can (a) think of no word, (b) can think of a word... but it's partly unknown or wrong in some way, or (c) has thought of more than one word and has to choose (Dr Fatemeh Hemmati C). Building on this, Dr Saul Santos C looked more specifically at how learners in Mexico solve vocab problems when writing in L1 and L2… Use of online dictionaries in writing figures in the research of  Dr Vicky Chun C in Korea, looking at the strategies used by writers to handle vocab problems when writing for different audiences and on different topics (also following up on Hemmati). Next to extend this line of research is Amel Meziane, looking at the problems and strategies of Tunisian university students writing in L2 French and L3 English.
    • Dictionary use during writing. What happens when people use a dictionary to deal with vocabulary problems when writing? Does it mean they indulge in less 'avoidance' than if dictionaries were forbidden? (Louise Katamine C).
    • Vocabulary problems in reading and strategies to resolve them. These are often solved with ‘word attack strategies’. Lexical problems are a key stumbling block for the L2 reader. One just never seems to know enough vocab. We are pursuing a range of questions about how learners deal with such problems. How do Greek learners fare guessing words of Greek versus Latin origin, and does the context influence them? Are they overconfident in their guesses when they spot an English word as being Greek? (Dr Penny Vougiouklis C). Why do Greek learners choose to use a dictionary to look up some unknown words and not others? (Joanna Alexandri C). To what extent can more or less complete beginners in Japan identify and decode, on first meeting, English words that exist as cognates in Japanese, due to borrowing? (Dr Emi Uchida C)
    • Word recognition in reading. Reading at the lowest level involves word recognition. How this is effected by a reader depends in part on the writing system that words are written in. It is often held that Chinese characters will be recognised by overall visual shape while English words may be decoded by letter-sound correspondences. However, the part played by sound in recognition of Chinese characters is debated. Dr Gloria Chwo C explored whether there seems to be any difference in this respect among Chinese readers of Chinese in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, due to the fact that the latter are instructed in L1 reading with the aid of a form of phonemic transcription of Chinese, while the former are not. Does this also affect how they recognise English words?
    • Teaching vocabulary strategies for reading (word attack strategies). Dr Mohammed AlSeweed C did a project on this, showing the effects of strategy training on the use of the strategies and reading success.
    • Vocabulary problems in speaking and strategies to resolve them. The ways learners overcome vocab problems when speaking… often called ‘communication strategies’. They have been rather more studied than the equivalent strategies in writing (above).  Sandra Huang is looking at these among university student doing different speaking tasks in Taiwan. Do their problems and strategies differ if talking to a native speaker compared with another Taiwanese student?
    • Dictionary use in general and in reading.  Eid Alhaisoni is doing a thorough survey by questionnaire and think aloud research to see what dictionaries are used, for what, by Saudi learners of English at school and university, and developing a new improved model of the lookup process and its strategies – both good and bad – during reading tasks.  Dictionary use is also a common component in many of the reading and writing and vocab learning studies mentioned above.
  • More broadly some of my students work on strategies that are not specifically vocab-related
    • Learning strategies in general. Faraj Sawani is looking at these in Libya, in respect of how their use relates to student motivation and autonomy.
    • Writing strategies in two languages. Much is written about possible transfer of reading skills between L1 and L2. But what about writing? In this case it is Moroccans writing in Arabic and English. The findings about the possible influences between strategy use in the two languages, by relatively better and less proficient writers, are somewhat unexpected. Could writing strategies be transferred from L3 to L1? (Dr Latifa El-Mortaji C). Similarities, or not, between L1 and L2 recur in the research of Maha Alhaysony, comparing writing strategies in Arabic L1 and English L2 in Saudi Arabian females at university, also in relation to proficiency. 
    • Factors affecting writing strategies and writing proficiency. Muhammed Abdel Latif is looking at the effects of writing apprehension and related constructs as well as proficiency on the writing of Egyptian students.
    • Revision. What difference does it make if Arab students revise their English compositions on their own, or with peer feedback? With a checklist? On word processor? Maybe it depends on their proficiency level... (Dr Sultan Al-Hazmi C)
    • Written errors, feedback and correction. A lot of composition teaching round the world relies heavily on teacher correction of final drafts of essays written by learners. What kinds of correction and other feedback do students like? What do they get in Saudi Arabia? (Dr Ibrahim Asiri C sadly deceased). If Malaysian students have to self-correct errors marked by the teacher in their composition, what strategies do they actually use... and how successful are they at using a dictionary to produce a corrected version? (Dr Fadilah Jasmani C)
    •  Reading strategies and factors affecting them. What difference does it make to the reading strategies Iranian university students use if they are reading different types of text? If they are more or less familiar with the content? If they are reading to summarise or to answer multiple choice questions? And more..... (Dr Hooshang Yazdani C). While previously variables like level of proficiency of the reader were often looked at, now it is realised that purpose of reading may affect the strategies drastically as well. Tarek Al-Khaleefah is comparing what goes on when Saudis read English (a) in classroom conditions, with dictionary, for discussion afterwards and (b) in test conditions with no dictionary and for multiple choice comprehension questions after.
    • Instruction in reading strategies. How are Thais taught reading strategies for English at University, and what strategies do they use? What effect would instruction in reading strategies make have? (Sumitra Pankulbadee

).