Page 11 - ELG1806 June Issue 458

Teacher’s pet
Norwegian gamers master English

better than mother tongue If at first you don’t succeed…
Foteini Kourakou is a qualified
By Federica Tedeschi Greek nurse but, since moving to
Northern Ireland to be with her fiancé, has
Teenage gamers perform markedly better
in tests of L2 English reading compared had to scratch a living as a care assistant.
to reading tests in their mother tongue, a She sat the Ielts test a mind-boggling
Norwegian study suggests. eight times, but could not reach the
A total of 463 16-year-olds from Oslo standard required of EU nurses in the UK.
public schools scored in or above the 60th The essay section, she said, flummoxed
percentile in their L2 English reading tests, her every time, despite excelling in the
but were only in the 20th percentile on their other skills. In all, she spent £2,000 in
L1 reading exam.
Other students typically scored in the same show good academic skills and is more likely exam fees and tutoring.
quintile for L1 and L2, or higher in L1. to drop out. Girls in vocational programmes But now, she has become the first
These ‘outliers’ were identified among a were the only section of the outliers’ group person in Northern Ireland to sit the
national sample of 10,331 students taking whose reading scores improved when they Occupational English Test and register as
national tests. On average, they exceeded used fewer reading strategies such as scanning a nurse since the Nursing and Midwifery
average results in L2 by 5 percentage points. and re-reading. Council relaxed the rules on which tests it
Many of the student outliers who were Asked about their interest in and accepted.
amongst the top L2 performers acknowledged motivation for reading English, 85 per cent
playing online games more than three hours a of the student outliers answered positively: She had to travel to the Irish Republic
day, the research says. English was their preferred language out of to sit the test as it is not yet available
Boys made up 66 per cent of the outliers. school, used in a variety of activities. in the north. Ms Kourakou, who hopes
Over 90 per cent of them were Norwegian These findings challenge the common to return to intensive
mother-tongue speakers. notion that poor L1 readers also care nursing, told The
When it came to making inferences from underperform when reading in L2, and Irish News: ‘I became
texts, seen as the most difficult aspect of underline the importance of reader interest totally demoralised and
reading, the gamers outperformed the overall for L2 comprehension, the researchers said.
sample by 17 per cent. so nervous about each
This surprised the researchers, not least n Outliers: Upper secondary school students who exam.’
because the majority were boys in vocational read better in L2 than in L1, Lisbeth M. Brevik,
programmes – a group which doesn’t generally Glenn Ole Hellekjær https://tinyurl.com/y89dc2j4
Naughty corner
Weird word order bends Basque

brains native Basque-speakers experienced some A Twitter storm erupted recently
difficulty in semantic processing - as shown by after the Northern Ireland MP
By Federica Tedeschi activation of the N400 brain activity signals. Emma Little-Pengelly, condemned
They also showed P600 activity, which
Spanish L1 speakers who are bilingual in occurs in the brain when the person perceives users of the term ‘gammon’ to describe
Basque process atypical word order sentences syntactic anomalies. Conversely, Spanish L1 angry, red-faced, middle-aged man with
better in Basque (Euskera) than natives do, a speakers did not generate any brain signals bigoted, racist ideas. Naming such people
study suggests. The researchers conclude that to indicate semantic processing difficulties after a certain rather fat, pink cut of pork
the Spanish-speakers were able to rely on the when reading those same Basque sentences, was ‘stereotyping’ based on ‘colour and
syntactic features on their mother tongue to whether they had an SVO order, typical in age’ and was ‘just wrong’, said Ms Little-
help them. Spanish, or an OVS one – which is not.
The most common word order in Spanish However, researchers point out that the Pengelly. Fair enough, part of it is based on
is subject verb object (SVO). Basque typically verb is always positioned between object and skin colour. But as many other Twitter users
uses SOV. The sample was made up of thirty- subject in Spanish, while Basque normally pointed out, people have a choice not to be
five Spanish-speakers, all of whom started places the verb at the end. angry and bigoted, so they were fair game
learning Basque before the age of five, and 35 The study concluded that bilinguals for such insults. And besides, there is a long
Basque mother-tongue speakers. process atypical word orders in L2 based on history of food-based epithets/insults – some
The participants, all in their early twenties, the grammatical restrictions of their L1. affectionate and some less so.
were asked to read 144 Basque sentences
which used the SVO word order, the typical n Negative Transfer Effects on L2 Word The French happily call the British ‘les
Spanish structure, and 144 sentences using Order Processing Kepa Erdocia* and Itziar rosbifs’ on account of their love of beef but
OVS, which is uncommon in both Spanish Laka. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ also their habit of turning red in the sun. In
and Basque. While reading OVS sentences, articles/PMC5861198/ turn, the British call the French ‘the frogs’,
based on their love of the delicious limbs
of the amphibious delicacy (among other
etymological theories).
Food-based insults are the stuff of legend.
How would we be able
to say sentences such
as: ‘The pie-eyed tart
was talking baloney?’
editorial@elgazette.com 11

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