George Yule Quotes

Genie In 1970 a child called Genie was admitted to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She was thirteen years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair in a small closed room. Her father was intolerant of any kind of noise and had beaten the child whenever she made a sound. There had been no radio or television, and Genie’s only other human contact was with her mother who was forbidden to spend more than a few minutes with the child to feed her. Genie had spent her whole life in a state of physical, sensory, social and emotional deprivation. As might be expected, Genie was unable to use language when she was first brought into care. However, within a short period of time, she began to respond to the speech of others, to try to imitate sound and to communicate. Her syntax remained very simple. However, the fact that she went on to develop an ability to speak and understand a fairly large number of English words provides some evidence against the notion that language cannot be acquired at all after the critical period.

That of the British Museum Reading-room,’ explained Jasper; ‘known to some of us as the valley of the shadow of books. People who often work there necessarily get to know each other by sight. In the same way I knew Miss Yule’s father when I happened to pass him in the road yesterday.

Study 22: Learner language and proficiency level George Yule and Doris Macdonald (1990) investigated whether the role that different proficiency-level learners play in a two-way communication task led to differences in their interactive behaviour. They set up a task that required two learners to communicate information about the location of different buildings on a map and the route to get there. One learner, referred to as the ‘sender’, had a map with a delivery route on it, and this speaker’s job was to describe the delivery route to the ‘receiver’ so that he or she could draw the delivery route on a similar map. The task was made more challenging by the fact that there were minor differences between the two maps. To determine whether there would be any difference in the interactions according to the relative proficiency of the 40 adult participants, different types of learners were paired together. One group had high-proficiency learners in the ‘sender’ role and low-proficiency learners in the ‘receiver’ role; the other group had low-proficiency ‘senders’ paired with high-proficiency ‘receivers’. When low-proficiency learners were senders, interactions were considerably longer and more varied than when high-proficiency learners were the senders. The explanation for this was that high-proficiency senders tended to act as if the lower-level receiver had little contribution to make in the completion of the task. As a result, the lower-level receivers were almost forced to play a passive role and said very little. When lower-level learners were the senders however, much more negotiation for meaning and a greater variety of interactions between the two speakers took place. Based on these findings, Yule and Macdonald suggest that teachers should sometimes place more advanced students in less dominant roles in paired activities with lower-level learners.