Papers by Eleni Agathopoulou
Twelve Turkish-Greek bilingual learners of English were orally administered a translated version ... more Twelve Turkish-Greek bilingual learners of English were orally administered a translated version of the SILL questionnaire (Oxford 1990) and had to specify frequency of language learning strategy (LLS) use as well as confidence in the effectiveness of each strategy on a [01] bar instead of the usual Likert scales. Deviations between frequency and confidence in the results indicate that learners either appreciate the effectiveness of a strategy but they do not know how to use it or that they use a strategy without firmly believing in its usefulness, which suggests the need for pedagogical interventions to raise the learners " awareness of language learning strategies and how to use them. More proficient learners exhibit higher frequency and confidence in reported LLS use than their less proficient peers, while the age of the learners does not seem to affect LLS use.
The current study investigated the effects of age, gender and L1 strategies on strategy use in En... more The current study investigated the effects of age, gender and L1 strategies on strategy use in English as a Foreign Language learned by primary school learners in Greece. Data were obtained (a) through the administration of Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning to 103 participants of fourth, fifth and sixth grades and (b) through the examination of Greek coursebooks. Results showed a strong effect of age on strategic use but no strong effect of gender or L1 strategies. Overall, the reported medium use of strategies and the low use of specific strategies calls for pedagogic intervention in the form of strategic instruction.
The present article investigates Pinker's (1991) Dual Mechanism model in non-native (and nati... more The present article investigates Pinker's (1991) Dual Mechanism model in non-native (and native) morphology. Adult Greek learners and English natives produced the past tense of English pseudo-verbs varying in their similarity to existing verbs. Results seem problematic for Dual Mechanism and indicate no qualitative difference between L1 and L2 regarding the representation of regular/irregular morphology.
Tsimpli, I. M., Andreou, Μ., Agathopoulou, E. & Masoura, E. (2014). Narrative production, bilingualism and working memory capacity: a study of Greek-German bilingual children. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, 1730-1742
We investigate narrative production of 8-10 year old typically developing bilingual children. One... more We investigate narrative production of 8-10 year old typically developing bilingual children. One group of these children grow up in Germany and attend German schools with exposure to Greek in afternoon classes only, while the other group attends the German School of Thessaloniki. Biographical data were gathered through a detailed questionnaire, allowed us to determine age of onset and input measures. A vocabulary production task was used as an independent measure of language proficiency. The results reveal correlations between working memory function and type of bilingualism. Vocabulary measures seem to correlate with narrative production both in qualitative and quantitative terms.
The current study investigated the effects of age, gender and L1 strategies on strategy use in En... more The current study investigated the effects of age, gender and L1 strategies on strategy use in English as a Foreign Language learned by primary school learners in Greece. Data were obtained (a) through the administration of Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning to 103 participants of fourth, fifth and sixth grades and (b) through the examination of Greek coursebooks. Results showed a strong effect of age on strategic use but no strong effect of gender or L1 strategies. Overall, the reported medium use of strategies and the low use of specific strategies calls for pedagogic intervention in the form of strategic instruction.
We investigated the non-native acquisition of adjective-noun agreement in Greek and whether this ... more We investigated the non-native acquisition of adjective-noun agreement in Greek and whether this interlanguage structure was affected by input-based, meaning-oriented instruction. The participants were adults from an array of mother tongues and with low intermediate proficiency in Greek. The findings from three production tasks showed that the main errors consisted in phonological matching between the adjectival and the nominal inflectional morphemes, as well as in inflecting the adjective with a suffix -o, underspecified for agreement features. There were no important differences with respect to errors in gender, number or case features. A group of the learners received Processing Instruction and another group received Focus on Form instruction. Results showed significant learner improvement for both types of instruction but more for the Focus on Form one. Also, instruction type affected learner errors differentially. These findings have specific implications for second language pedagogy. concepts of the two input-based instructional approaches examined here, namely Processing Instruction and Focus on Form. Methodological details and the results obtained in this study are described in section 4. In the final section we discuss the implications of our findings for L2 learning and teaching.
Corpus-based research can offer valuable insights to teachers of English for Academic Purposes (E... more Corpus-based research can offer valuable insights to teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Such research may demonstrate typical and less typical patterns of language use and highlight important phenomena commonly not included in conventional EAP syllabuses. Moreover, studies exploring non-native English corpora inform us on learner problems in academic English. To make prominent the pedagogical implications of corpus research for EAP, in the current paper I focus on corpus findings in three areas, namely, compound words, discourse-organising nouns and titles of scientific articles and offer suggestions for the pedagogical exploitation of these findings.
The present study regards beliefs about language learning held by Greek university students who w... more The present study regards beliefs about language learning held by Greek university students who were also prospective teachers of English. Answers to a questionnaire administered in the beginning and at the end of a course about how languages are learned indicate that students changed views in the desired direction. Yet this change was not dramatic and did not concern all of the 'erroneous' beliefs.
The current study offers a novel set of data on phenomena regarding SV/VS in L2 English. We explo...
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Papers by Eleni Agathopoulou