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Anadolu Üniversitesi Hazırlık Okulu yazılı anlatım değerlendirmesi için kullanılan iki sistemin güvenilirliğinin değerlendirilmesi
Title: Evaluation of The Reliability of Two Grading Systems for Writing Assessment at Anadolu University Preparatory School. Author: Nesrin Oruc Thesis Chairperson: Dr. Patricia N. Sullivan Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program Committee members: David Palfreyman Michele Rajotte Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program Evaluating student writing is always a difficult task for English teachers. Not only it is time consuming to read a seemingly endless stack of compositions, but it is also difficult to write a grade in red ink on the work of a student which represents so much of her/himself, and to put our students into categories such as "A" student, "C" student, or "F" student brings up the issue of the most effective ways of assessing student writing. Assessing students' writing has always been accompanied by arguments between writing instructors at Anadolu University. This is not only because of the long hours spent on grading compositions, but also because of the inconsistencies among the grades and the graders. The main reason for this problem is that at Anadolu University a Standard Grading Format (SGF) has not been used for writing assessment. Instead writing instructors have used their individual grading system to evaluate papers. The main purpose of this research study was to examine writing instructors' individual approaches to assessing writing and then to determine whether the use of a holistic scoring scale would result in an increase in the reliability of the writing assessment at Anadolu University Preparatory School.The participants were six writing instructors from Anadolu University Preparatory School teaching writing to different levels. Half of the instructors were male, half were female. The instructors had between 1 and 10 years experience in language teaching and they were all non-native speakers. The process was begun by giving 15 papers chosen to represent different grade levels from the Anadolu University Preparatory School placement exam to instructors to grade in their accustomed manner. Then, after a training given an SGF using a five band holistic scoring scale which was adapted to Anadolu University Preparatory School, instructors were again given the same 15 papers and were asked to use the new SGF to grade the papers again. Data were analyzed first by a One-way ANOVA in order to find the mean scores of each system. Then the Student T-Test was used to compare the mean scores of the systems. The results of the One-way ANOVA indicate that there is significant relationship between the grades given to the same paper by five different instructors before and after the training which means both of the systems were reliable within themselves. On the other hand, the Student T-Test results indicate that there is a large difference between the scores given to the same papers by the same instructors with two different writing assessment systems. Consequently, no clear judgement can be made as to which system is superior. With regards to the grades given by the instructors for individual papers, the results of qualitative analysis indicate that inconsistencies arise from individual instructors' writing assessment practices and that this may be lessened with holistic scoring.
Türkçede ortaç yapılarına yönelik ekleme tercihlerinin göz izleme tekniğiyle incelenmesi
In this study, the processing of attachment preferences to relative clauses (RC) in Turkish was analyzed through an eye-tracking technique and comprehension questions presented following each experimental sentence. Within this general framework, the possible effects of the RC types (subject - object) on the processing of attachment types (low – high – high with ambiguity) and whether there was any RC asymmetry were examined. The data obtained from a total of sixty participants were analyzed in the study. Forty-two experimental sentences were developed based on two RC types and three attachment types as low, high and high with ambiguity. Therefore, in the study six conditions were tested along with forty-two filler sentences which were employed to distract the participants' attention away from the investigated structures. The Kolmogorow Smirnow test showed that the data exhibited a normal distribution. For two-way comparisons, an independent t-test was used and for three-way comparisons, the ANOVA (Analysis Of Variance) was employed. Certain differences between the two attachment types were observed. General direction of processing seemed to be that the High Attachment configuration caused slightly less cognitive load than the Low Attachment. However, the High Attachment sentences exhibited statistically significant longer reading durations on NP2 (the second noun phrase following the RC area). Therefore, it was assumed that the parser was sensitive to lexical/semantic properties of the incoming words of the given sentences during the initial processing. The processing of the main verb was another point of divergence. Significantly longer fixation durations on main verbs were observed in Low Attachment sentences, which also suggest that they included an implicit ambiguity. It was revealed that the main strategy of the parser to repair an ambiguity in High Attachment sentences was using the argument structure of the main verb. It acted as an error signal prompting the parser to adjust its syntactic preferences. It was found out that for all attachment types, on the RC Area of Interest (AoI) the object RCs are read with longer durations. However, statistically significant differences were not found. Considering the whole sentences, on the other hand, statistically significant results were found where participants spent longer durations for the processing of the object RCs. When analyzed alone, the subject RCs was comparatively easier for the parser to process than the object RCs. This is attributed to longer structural distance between the head noun and the extraction site besides linguistic-specific properties of Turkish in which the ORCs were inflected for person agreement, which caused extra processing load. Regarding the answers to the comprehension questions, the data complements the findings from online processing. The answers to the comprehension questions following High Attachment sentences had statistically the highest accuracy level. On the other hand, the comprehension questions following the High Attachment with Ambiguity sentences had statistically the lowest accuracy rate. Considering the answers to the comprehension questions concerning the subject and object RC sentences, it was observed that the comprehension questions concerning the subject RC sentences were statistically answered more successfully. It is suggested that For Turkish parser, the early processing is dominated by syntactic operations. However, it is overridden by lexical-semantic information of the main verb when it is led into a Garden-path situation. High Attachment sentences take the parser shorter to process compared to the Low Attachment sentences. Therefore, it is suggested that Turkish is a High Attachment language. Considering the reading times, Low Attachment sentences also include a local ambiguity as in High Attachment with Ambiguity. Finally, Cognitive load of ORCs is heavier than SRCs in all attachment types except for RC AoI. ORC asymmetry is also observed across all the experimental items regardless of attachment types, which is predicted by Structural Distance Hypothesis (SDH) (O'Grady, 2003).
İki dillilerin zihin sözlüğünde gerçekleşen birinci ve ikinci dildeki eşdizimli sözcük işlemleme ilişkisinin incelenmesi
Many studies have attempted to investigate how the bilingual mental lexicon is structured and it has been suggested by various researchers that both lexicons or L1 and L2 lexical items in a single mental lexicon seem to interact to a certain extent during language production. However, there are certain disagreements over the interaction between these two mental lexicons or lexical items in a single lexicon during the lexical activation and selection processes. Particularly, some questions like "in which phase of the activation process can we observe an interaction?" and "what are the factors affecting this interaction?" have been raised. Another related topic scrutinized by many theoretical and applied linguists and hotly debated in the literature is whether the activation of lexis is language specific or language non-specific. The current study attempts to assume the process to be language non-specific (e.g. Green, 1986, 1998a, 1998b) and tries to illuminate the cross-linguistic nature of the bilingual mental lexicon with a specific emphasis on collocations, which seems to be an understudied topic. In addition, the research approaches the issue of cross-linguistic lexical priming from a syntagmatic perspective with the help of a typologically different language, Turkish, which previous research appears to lack. To be more precise, extending Hoey's (2005) lexical priming theory which suggests that every word is primed to occur with particular other words it collocates by studying a typologically different language, the study attempts to explore (a) the existence of collocational priming in Turkish in the bilingual mental lexicon, shed light on (b) the cross-linguistic aspect of collocational priming in L1 Turkish and L2 English bilinguals, and (c) illuminate the possible factors affecting (cross-linguistic) collocational priming in the bilingual mental lexicon. To this end, sixty collocational items were extracted from two balanced corpora based on their frequency values, semantic transparency and congruence. Next, three priming experiments were designed and the L1 Turkish-L2 English bilingual participants were asked to respond to a lexical decision task with the help of a software designed for reaction time experiments. The mean reaction times for collocate and noncollocate items were compared to investigate a potential viii priming effect. In addition, the influence of collocational frequency, congruence, typology, presentation direction (L1-L2 or L2-L1), and type of exposure on (cross- linguistic) collocation priming was scrutinized. The findings of the first experiment revealed that collocational priming existed in Turkish in the bilingual mental lexicon and collocational frequency played a significant role in collocational processing. The results of the second experiment indicated that there was cross-linguistic collocational priming for ADJ(ective)+N(oun) word combinations only suggesting a typology effect and that congruence, collocational frequency and presentation direction (L2-L1 or L1-L2) were playing partial roles in the process. Last but not least, the results of the third experiment whose participants had been living in the UK for at least two years showed that the type of exposure to L2 appeared to influence how collocations were processed cross-linguistically. The output from the experiments were discussed in the light of the current bilingual mental lexicon models and second language vocabulary acquisition frameworks; Spreading Activation Model (Collins and Loftus, 1975), Dual Activation of Collocational Connections (Wolter and Gyllstad, 2011), Modified Hierarchical Model (Pavlenko, 2009) and Psycholinguistic Model of Vocabulary Acquisition in L2 (Jiang, 2000).
Toplumsal anlamı dizinleme: Toplumsesbilgisel değişkenler ve Türkçenin dinleyici algısı
The communicative content taking place between speakers and listeners yield variation in which people transmit and interpret the messages. In regard to the variation in pronunciation, the phonemic nature of sounds and their implementations in various segmental environments constitute and transmit the message. When the phonological and phonetic aspects of speech are taken into consideration along with social aspects and social constructions, broader aspects of variation arise. In this sense, the broader aspects of variation exhibit the cumulation of knowledge in the society and they are realized and interpreted by language users as social meanings. In line with this, the current perception study aims to uncover the social meanings associated with the variant pronunciations of alveolar flap /ɾ/ and velar stop /k/ variables in Turkish. In regard to this preliminary aim, the study endeavours to bring an understanding to the social resources employed during the perception and lays out the indexical fields (Eckert, 2008) associated with the /ɾ/ and /k/ variables. In uncovering the socially accumulated knowledge in the perception of listeners, the study employs a tripartite experimental design. In the first phase, variant pronunciations of the sociophonetic variables (i.e., /ɾ/ and /k/) have been obtained through three distinct sociolinguistic data elicitation methods; sociolinguistic interviews, map task and read speech. In the second phase, the environmental aspects (i.e., duration and pitch) of these variables have been equalized and the tokens for the next phase have been determined. In the third phase, which focuses on the perception of these variables, qualitative and quantitative data have been gathered through sociolinguistic group interviews (N=110 in 30 groups) and matched guise survey (N=228) respectively. In the sociolinguistic group interviews, the listeners have been provided with social cues about the speaker as education and socioeconomic level. This interactional qualitative data have been analysed by employing ethnomethodological conversation analysis and further triangulated through a quantitative matched guise survey. The findings show that the /ɾ/ variation is perceived alongside two distinct social personae: tiki and gay men depending on who produces the variable. When produced by a female speaker, listeners have perceived the variable as a salient component of the sociolinguistic style of tiki persona, while they have perceived the same variable along with a gay persona when produced by a male speaker. On the /k/ variable, listeners have yielded an Inner Anatolian persona. In perceiving the speaker, it has been found that listeners exploit the social resources. These social resources, which are social cues and social information, have been employed by the listeners depending on the context of interaction. Thus, it can be argued that the context of interaction, which has been formulated through the social cues, themes and listeners' backgrounds, is a mediator between listeners' perception and the social persona of the speaker. Furthermore, stances adopted by the listeners are also determinant in the perception process and act as a mediator in the social meaning perceiving process. Thus, it can be stated that listeners' stances and their level of stance takings calibrate whether a sociophonetic variable bear indexical or iconic associations. The findings also show that social meaning perceiving is a complex process that draws on the relationship between the sociophonetic variant perceived, the context of interaction and the perceived persona of the speaker.