
Richard Frederick YoungUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison | UW · Department of English
Richard Frederick Young
PhD
About
87
Publications
102,641
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,480
Citations
Introduction
My abiding research passion has been to understand the relationship between the use of language and the social contexts that language reflects and creates. I have always seen that relationship as dynamic and reflexive, and my research has focused on change—how newcomers learn to participate in the practices of a new community. In my recent research I have been using insights from Practice Theory to investigate the dialectic between the local sequential context of classroom conversations and the knapsack of privileges, identities, and personal histories that students and teachers bring to classroom interaction.
Additional affiliations
August 1990 - July 1993
August 1993 - present
Publications
Publications (87)
Within the context of an ongoing reform of the curriculum for English as a foreign language (EFL) in China, we present the implicit association test (IAT) as a new way to measure Chinese EFL teachers’ implicit attitudes to a communicative language teaching (CLT) curriculum and to compare their attitudes to traditional language teaching (TLT) approa...
Since the 1990s, much research in second language learning and testing has focused on the dynamic and dialogic aspects of second language use. Kramsch’s term “interactional competence” has been used by researchers to describe many of those aspects, though there is little agreement among researchers as to which of those dynamic and dialogic aspects...
As the contributions to this Handbook attest, methods of inquiry that applied linguists employ differ greatly. Learning and using language is a vast and immensely complex undertaking and any method of investigating it inevitably involves researchers attending to some aspects while disattending to others. The ways that different researchers attend t...
Identity is a concept that has been defined in many ways and scholars have built theories of identity to explain persons’ and people's sense of the term. In this essay, I compare and contrast theories developed in applied linguistics, social psychology, anthropology and communication sciences and conclude that each is grounded on the particularity...
Institutions are rules: rules that constrain and afford behavior, rules to inspire some beliefs and depress others, rules establishing and maintaining relations of power among persons within and outside an institution. Institutional rules evolve over the history and pre-history of an institution and continue to evolve in moments of interaction amon...
For some, research in learning and teaching of a second language (L2) runs the risk of disintegrating into irreconcilable approaches to L2 learning and use. On the one side, we find researchers investigating linguistic-cognitive issues, often using quantitative research methods including inferential statistics; on the other side, we find researcher...
The word competence was first used in linguistics by Chomsky (1965) to distinguish between knowledge of language in the abstract (competence) and the way in which knowledge is realized in the production and interpretation of actual utterances (performance). Chomsky's idea of competence as knowledge of language apart from its use was criticized by H...
Ortega (2011) has argued that second language acquisition is stronger and better after the social turn. Of the post-cognitive approaches she reviews, several focus on the social context of language learning rather than on language as the central phenomenon. In this article, we present Practice Theory not as yet another approach to language learning...
In this article I present the theory of interactional competence and contrast it with alternative ways of describing a learner's knowledge of language. The focus of interactional competence is the structure of recurring episodes of face-to-face interaction, episodes that are of social and cultural significance to a community of speakers. Such episo...
Ortega (2011) has argued that second language acquisition is stronger and better after the social turn (Block, 2003). Of the post-cognitive approaches she reviews, several focus on the social context of language learning rather than on language as the central phenomenon. In this article, I present Practice Theory not as yet another approach to lang...
Language learning and teaching happens in a social context but, until recently, applied linguists have focused more on the language than on the context. That is not surprising given the rigor, sophistication, and cultural heritage of language studies. But what we know about social context and how language and context mutually and reciprocally const...
In this study we explore a student's affective responses to classroom foreign language learning. In 2 meetings each week throughout an 8-week Portuguese course for beginners, the first author described her language learning experiences to the second author. Sessions were transcribed and then coded and analyzed. A theoretical model grounded in the l...
A common assumption is that one's mother tongue is essentially one's ethnocultural identity. Contact by speakers of local languages with a hegemonic language such as English is therefore seen as endangering not only the local language but also threatening the identity that speakers deem closest to them. I will argue in this paper that identifying l...
The contributors to this book discuss how language is used in educational contexts both in and out of classrooms, and they describe how language learners do social actions, reflect on their own identities and mediate their own learning. In this concluding chapter, I take the opportunity to reflect on the theoretical positions that the other contrib...
This study compares the conversational styles of intermediate and advanced learners of ESL in language proficiency interviews. Eleven intermediate learners and 12 advanced learners participated in a regular administration of the Cambridge First Certificate in English oral interview. I analyzed interview discourse constructed by both interviewer and...
This study investigates the acquisition of an unfamiliar discursive practice by an adult Vietnamese learner of English. The practice is revision talk in weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) writing conferences between the student and his ESL writing instructor. This research adopts the interactional competence framework for understanding the i...
This study investigates the acquisition of an unfamiliar discursive practice by an adult Vietnamese learner of English. The practice is revision talk in weekly English as a Second Language (ESL) writing conferences between the student and his ESL writing instructor. This research adopts the interactional competence framework for understanding the i...
Paul Seedhouse's
The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective is the fourth volume in the Language Learning Monograph Series. The volumes in this series review recent findings and current theoretical positions, present new data and interpretations, and sketch interdisciplinary research programs. Vol...
Reactive tokens are conversational resources by which a listener co-constructs a speaker's turn at talk. The resources that are available include the forms of the reactive tokens themselves, their duration, and their placement by the listener in the current speaker's turn. The present paper is a contrastive study of the use of these resources by Am...
Using the framework of systemic functional grammar, this study compares two modes of presenting the same scientific topic: in a physics textbook and in interactive teacher talk. Three aspects of scientific meaning making are analyzed: representations of physical and mental reality, lexical packaging, and the rhetorical structure of reasoning. Both...
This chapter begins with a careful look at a sample conversation and examines the many layers of interpretation that different academic traditions have constructed in order to interpret it. These layers of interpretation include linguistic forms, nonverbal communication, linguistic context, situational context, and the embodied histories that parti...
The view of speaking that I want to discuss in this paper differs from the views presented by my colleagues. Many scholars, including those who have presented here today, focus their attention on speaking practices in such a way that what speakers say is examined in isolation from the context in which the practices occur. That is to say, many schol...
this paper is how local and how practice-specific must that competence be. By comparing the interactional features of the math office hour with those of the Italian office hour, I wish to investigate the interactional similarities which lead us to identify an office hour as an interactional genre and, at the same time, to highlight those interactio...
We are grateful to Hidetoshi Saito for his careful and reasoned critique of the VARBRUL procedure in his article, “Dependence and Interaction in Frequency Data Analysis in SLA Research” (this issue). Saito reanalyzes Young’s (1988, 1991) study of -s plural variation in the English interlanguage of native speakers of Chinese. He raises two criticism...
this paper come from the project, "The Socialization of Diverse Learners into Subject Matter Discourse," Jane Zuengler and Cecilia Ford, Principal Investigators. The project is part of the Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA), which is supported by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI...
We are grateful to Hidetoshi Saito for his careful and reasoned critique of theVARBRUL procedure in his article, (this issue). Saito reanalyzes Young's (1988, 1991)study of -s plural variation in the English interlanguage of native speakers of Chinese.He raises two criticisms of the statistical analyses in the original work: (a) data from allpartic...
The study of second language acquisition involves understanding what bilinguals know about their second language and how they acquire and use it. Because acquisition and use occur in a social context, it is important for second–language acquisition researchers to understand the ways in which social context and the acquisition and use of a second la...
In this paper we describe the development of a computer-adaptive test of ESL reading comprehension. The computer-adaptive test was based on items from a battery of four conventional fixed-form tests and was constructed using an adaptive test development system for the Macintosh HyperCAT. The application of computer-adaptive testing (CAT) to the ass...
The article presents information on developing a computer-adaptive test of ESL reading comprehension.
This paper critically evaluates the functional hypothesis that interlanguage (IL) is an efficient means of communicating referential
information. The presentation includes: (1) a review of the evidence of previous investigations of the functional hypothesis
in various different forms of language; (2) a description of two studies of the spoken Engli...
In this paper a theoretical model of dyadic native-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) discourse is proposed in which discourse is described in terms of three features: interactional contingency, the goal orientation of participants, and dominance. The model is then used to study the discourse of 30 dyadic oral interviews of the Cambridge First Certificate...
Examines two rating scales for assessment of oral proficiency and judges both as inadequate because they are based on an untenable theory of the development of proficiency in a second language and on mistaken intuitions about oral interaction. The paper concludes with a discussion of an architectural, context-dependent theory of second-language pro...
A discussion of innovation in college and university intensive English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs uses a systems approach to analyze program elements (constituencies, decision-makers, purpose, performance measures, environments, resources, subsystems, and boundaries) and describes new program initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania....
A systems approach is used to show how changes in the design of English training programs for training international teaching assistants (ITA) have affected curriculum design. The approach is described, and three phases of curriculum development are outlined: initial design, ongoing reform, and radical renewal. The history of ITA program design sin...
Much work by second language acquisition researchers has focused on how interlanguage varies across different learners or within the speech of one learner across different tasks. Previous studies of variation in English as a second language, however, have led to conflicting and contradictory claims concerning the causes of variation. The present st...
Previous studies of variation in interlanguage morphology have led to conflicting and contradictory claims concerning the relation between interlanguage forms and the contexts in which they occur. The present study suggests that such contradictions are due to the descriptively inadequate model of variation used in earlier studies. A multivariate mo...
The role that input plays in second language learning and the interactions between learners and other speakers of the language which provide some of that input are two of the most discussed topics in the contemporary field of second language acquisition [SLA]. Several surveys of the considerable body of literature on input and interaction have appe...
This paper proposes a model for CALL software design based on interactionist theories of first and second language acquisition. According to this model CALL software may be classified into two types: those programs which allow the learner to negotiate the outcome of the activity and those in which the outcome is fixed. An experiment was conducted i...
The study reported in this article compared the comprehension of 16 nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English on directions to a task presented by a native speaker (NS) under two input conditions: premodified input, in the form of a NS baseline lecturette modified by decreased complexity and increased quantity and redundancy, and interactionally modifie...
In this essay I will first attempt to sketch the languages used by China’s one billion people in terms of the family tree theories of traditional Chinese philology and dialectology based on the Chinese and Western sources at my disposal. The description of the rich and complex linguistic situation in China, especially in its ethnic minority areas w...
In view of the evidence that comprehensible input is necessary for language acquisition (Krashen 1980, 1982, Long 1981, 1983, 1985), this study compared the listening comprehension of NNSs' of English on directions to an assembly task given by a NS under two input conditions : (1) Syntactically and semantically premodified input without interaction...
This article is a result of work which has been done over a number of years by the British Council in Hong Kong in curriculum development for English as a foreign language in Hong Kong's primary schools. The problem under consideration is how recent theoretical insights into the acquisition of first and second languages by young children can be dra...
What!is!discursive!practice?! ! Originating in anthropology and social theory, Practice is the construction and reflection of social realities through actions which invoke identity, ideology, belief, and power. ! Practice is performance in context. ! Context is the network of physical, spatial, temporal, social, interactional, institutional, politi...