Gary Cziko

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This is a study of four groups of elementary school students and their attitudes toward 10 socially relevant concepts, e.g., “self”, “monolingual French Canadians”, “bilingual English Canadians”, etc. Two of the groups comprised grade five and six English-speaking Canadian students who had participated in either an “early” or a “late” French immers...

The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability, validity, and scalability of a new technique for constructing, administering, and scoring dictation tests to measure second language proficiency. The “graduated” dictation test used in this study involved the auditory presentation of progressively longer text segments to be written down by t...

The French oral reading errors of two groups of seventh-grade English-speaking students with intermediate and advanced competence in French as a second language were analyzed and compared to the errors of native French-speaking students. It was found that the intermediate students made a significantly lower proportion of deletion and insertion erro...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of second language proficiency with respect to its divisibility and components. Specifically, the correlated-traits and the second-order hypotheses were evaluated using 334 university students learning Englishasa second language, a wide range of language proficiency measures, and confirmatory...

Tandem language learning occurs when two learners of different native languag-es work together to help each other learn the other language. First used in face-to-face contexts, Tandem is now increasingly being used by language-learning partners located in different countries who are linked via various forms of elec-tronic communication, a context t...

A vast and largely untapped resource for second language learners has recently become available: native speakers of languages being learned who have access to the Internet. To explore the potential of this new resource for second language learning, we reviewed six free programs for Windows and Macintosh computers that permit synchronous audio (and...

Hull et al. see responses and properties of responses as units of selection in behavioral change. However, this perspective cannot account for goal-directed behavior in which organisms employ variable means to reliably attain intended consequences. An alternative perspective is offered in which the intended consequences (goals) of behavior serve as...

There is an ironic and costly contradiction in the attempt to integrate technology into education. While evidence of the educational benefits of technology abounds and investment in hardware and software has dramatically increased, rela-tively few teachers use technology regularly in their teaching and the impact of computers on existing curricula...

Both Perkins and Sternberg recognize Campbell's selectionist theory of knowledge generation as accounting for certain types of learning and human creativity. However, they argue that his theory cannot account for the full spectrum of human creativity, with Sternberg having more serious reservations than Perkins. I argue in this commentary that whil...

"The fish's streamlined shape reveals functional knowledge of the physical properties of water.... The deadly effectiveness of the cobra's venom shows useful knowledge of the physiology of its prey.... Indeed, knowledge itself may be broadly conceived as the fit of some aspect of an organism to some aspect of its environment, whether it be the fit...

Part 1 The need for selection: puzzles of fit. Part 2 The achievements of selection: the fit of biological structures the emergence of instinct the immune system - selection by the enemy brain evolution and development - the selection of neurons and synapses. Part 3 The promise of selection: the origin and growth of human knowledge the adaptive mod...

This book, even in 2019, still advances research and theory concerning both cloze procedure and discourse coherence. It gives a comprehensive theoretical basis for all existing experimental research on discourse comprehension and on literacy and language acquisition. It also chronicles experimental advances from Wilson Taylor's invention of the ter...

This article continues the discussion begun in my 1989 Educational Researcher essay on the problems posed by the unpredictability and indeterminism of human behavior for educational research and responds to criticisms of these arguments offered by Lehrer, Serlin, and Amundson (1990). In the course of this discussion, a theory of purposeful behavior...

The author discusses topics related to the evaluation of bilingual education programs. He surveys the results of seven major bilingual education evaluations and presents their diverse findings. He argues that such research cannot answer the question of whether bilingual education necessarily or even probably works. To demonstrate the potentials and...

This essay presents arguments for the view that complex human behavior of the type that interests educational researchers is by its nature unpredictable if not indeterminate, a view that raises serious questions about the validity of a quantitative, experimental, positivist approach to educational research. The arguments are based on (a) individual...

A secondary analysis of empirical studies of children's acquisition of verbs was undertaken to examine evidence for the state-process and punctual-nonpunctual distinctions in children's early use and under standing of verbs as postulated by Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis. Approximately 60 empirical studies were initially reviewed with 1...

This study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition....

One component of D. Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis is here empirically tested by reviewing studies of children's comprehension and production of articles. Seven studies reporting relevant data in English and French were reviewed. Two of them provide clear empirical support for the hypothesis that children are universally sensitive to th...

The study reported in this article used classical psychometric, latent trait, and nonparametric approaches to analyze 13- and 14-item scales of English language proficiency. Tests of English listening comprehension (dictation) and reading (“copytest”) were constructed by modifying the standard dictation testing procedure to create items of text seg...

This article mentions some of the problems associated with the criteria of reproducibility and scalability as they are commonly used in Guttman scalogram analysis to evaluate cumulative, non-parametric scales of dichotomous items. It then describes the advantages of criteria developed by Loevinger (1948) and Mokken (1971) to evaluate such scales. A...

This is a book of controversies and, hopefully, of a newly emerging consensus. It concerns methods of language testing research and the conclusions to which that research legitimately leads. Contributors discuss technical as well as practical aspects. Unavoidably, the advances and refinements discussed here depend heavily on theoretical reasoning,...

The present research was conducted to determine whether modifications of existing integrative testing procedures could be made to improve the psychometric, criterion-referenced, and practical qualities of those tests which involve text presentation and reconstruction. For this purpose, a dictation test constructed of 14 segments varying from 2 to 2...

The development of an empirically based model of communicative competence is discussed in terms of conceptual, statistical, and methodological considerations. A distinction is made between descriptive and working models of communicative competence. Working models attempt to show how components of communicative competence are interrelated psychologi...

This paper presents the results of the first impact evaluation of the Local Languages Literacy Project in the Southern Sudan conducted in late 1980. Background, process, and outcome data were collected focusing on two Primary 2 project classes using the new project materials and two comparison classes not using these materials. The background data...

Attitudes of four groups of elementary school students toward 10 socially relevant concepts, e.g., "self,""monolingual French Canadians,""bilingual English Canadians," and other areas are studied. Two of the groups were grade five and six English-speaking Canadian Students who had participated in either an "early" or a "late" French immersion progr...

An account of a research project based on the psycholinguistic theory of reading. Its purpose was to isolate, analyze and directly compare the use of syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints by readers of French either as a first or as a second language. (AMH)

This report discusses the views of students now in the eleventh grade who participated in the original pilot class of the St. Lambert early immersion program in Montreal. They were asked to look back on their schooling and to appraise its effects on their lives. Their parents were asked to do the same. Questionnaires designed to elicit information...

During the past decade, it has become fashionable to include an evaluation component with each new bilingual education program. The proliferation of empirical evaluation studies seems, however, not yet to have shed much light on very basic issues, such as the relationship between language of instruction and cognitive growth, academic achievement or...

This report describes an evaluation of the effects of the early and grade 7 immersion programs on the English and French language skills of students at the end of grade 7 in Montreal. Tests of English language skills were administered to early immersion, grade 7 immersion, and English control students. Tests of French language skills were administe...

A study is reported evaluating the effects on the development of bilingual reading skills of a second language--native language sequence of reading instruction as opposed to a native language--second language sequence in elementary grade French immersion programs. (RM)

This article reports on a pilot study undertaken to determine the effect that a new student exchange program would have on student attitudes and student motivation in second language learning. (CLK)

Faux-titre : French immersion, SES and pupils' performance. Comprend des résumés en anglais et en français. Feuillets 14a, 38a, 54a-b omis. Thèse (M.A.) - McGill University, 1975. Bibliogr. : f. 76-80. Microfiche du manuscrit.

Half-title: French immersion, SES and pupils' performance. Includes abstracts in English and French. Leaves 14a, 38a, 54a-b inserted. Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University, 1975. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-80). Microfiche of typescript.

Half-title: First- and second-language reading. Includes abstracts in English and French. Thesis (Ph. D.)--McGill University, 1978. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-87). Microfiche of typescript.