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Teaching English Through English: Giving Instructions at A1-A2 level students
Mertová, Sára ; Uličná, Klára (advisor) ; Žďárek, Karel (referee)
This diploma thesis aims at presenting principles and techniques of giving instructions during English lessons and their practical use. It stresses the awareness of the importance of delivering clear and understandable instructions and of their influence on students' comprehension. Theoretical part of this thesis describes general rules of giving instructions and focuses on instruction techniques suitable for students' learning styles. It also deals with the language of instruction appropriate for A1 - A2 level students. Practical part consists of applying the theoretical principals in practice through an action research. The aim of the practical part is the improvement of the author's instructions. The findings have shown that modifying the language of instruction as well as using various verbal and non- verbal instruction techniques promotes the students' comprehension of instructions. Key words: Language acquisition, comprehensible input, language of instruction, students' comprehension, learning styles, gestures, action research, instructions
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Communication in Kindergarten: Selected Communicative Situations
Josífková, Lenka ; Saicová Římalová, Lucie (advisor) ; Šormová, Kateřina (referee)
This diploma thesis deals with communication in kindergarten in selected communicative situations. The first part defines basic theoretical terms and, based on previous research, summarizes findings about pre-school education and mental and language development in pre- school children. The thesis also explains factors that influence language acquisition, child directed speech and pedagogical communication. The second part's main focus lies in describing communicative situations and in qualitative analysis of the acquired data - video recordings of selected communicative situation. The pocess of recording took place after previous agreement with two kindergartens. The recordings were transcribed according to the modified manual for the DIALOG database. The analysis is focused on the nature of the pedagogical communication in kindergarten. Our findings were compared to previous research results. Keywords communication, pedagogical communication, language acquisition, child directed speech, kindergarten
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Comprehension of Polysemous Expressions in a Pre-School Child
Bendíková, Barbora ; Saicová Římalová, Lucie (advisor) ; Šormová, Kateřina (referee)
The bachelor's paper focuses on the comprehension of polysemous expressions and ambiguous syntactic constructions in pre-school children. The goal of the paper is to find out, whether and how children understand polysemy, focusing closer on chosen metaphorical and metonymical transfers, and ambiguity in selected constructions. An original battery of questions has been created for this purpose, the data were being collected by a series of recorded semi-structured interviews with three children. Afterwards, the interviews were transcribed using a combination of the transcription systems GAT 2 and CHAT and analyzed. The collected data also contained interviews with every child's parent to provide closer information about the child and its linguistic, mental and social development. The results of the paper have shown that children understand many of the metaphorical (e. g. personification) and metonymical (e. g. synecdoche) transfers. It seems however, that they perceive them mostly unconsciously (as something given). On the other hand, the collected data have suggested a certain ability of the children to produce the transfers freely, depending on the given context.
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Introduction to the Theory of Language Correctness
Beneš, Martin ; Adam, Robert (advisor) ; Bermel, Neil Halford Andrew (referee) ; Dolník, Juraj (referee)
Introduction to the Theory of Language Correctness. The theme of this Thesis is the novel conceptualization of the subject field, which is, in the Czech context, traditionally dealt with within the theory of language cultivation, from the perspective of the so-called ontological "socialism" (esp. Itkonen, 1978; 2003). The first two chapters explain why the subject field of the (theory of) language cultivation is to be newly approached from this very perspective. The conceptual discussion in the first chapter identifies three underresearched factors (reaction of the Protectorate elites to the Nazi occupation policy; variety-based approach to the "language" and physicalism) that had negative effect to the debate on these questions and therefore they should not be taken into consideration; the terminological discussion in the second chapter supports the claim that it is not suitable to associate the traditional term (theory of) language cultivation with this novel conceptualization. The third chapter introduces in detail the so-called ontological "socialism" according to which there are not only spatiotemporal entities, i.e. language means, but also non-spatiotemporal entities, i.e. language rules qua actually existing social facts, in the subject field of linguistics. The fourth chapter provides a...
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The management of language maintenance and shift in the Czech language community in Chicago
Štěpánová, Marie ; Sherman, Tamah (advisor) ; Dittmann, Robert (referee)
The Master's thesis The management of language maintenance and shift in the Czech language community in Chicago examines (based on the analysis of the transcript of more than twenty hours of recordings of testimonies of thirteen speakers from Czech-speaking areas of western peripheries of American Chicago who have been living outside the Czech countries for more than forty years) the issues of language maintenance, transmission to future generations, and language shift in the expatriate community. The work analyses the environment and diverse situations of possible contact with the Czech language, reflected by the speakers, as well as the importance of national institutions (such as expatriate associations, minority schools, Czech parishes, etc.) for language maintenance of individuals. Respondents reflect also the conditions under which they were able to pass the Czech language to succeeding generations." It analyses testimonies of Czech Americans on what reactions they have received on language features showing their origin (such as foreign accent and name) and what assimilation strategies they used to moderate such stigma. The project examines, from the perspective of simple language management, how bilingual skills and the identity of respondents interact in a research interview.
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: The acquisition of the article by Czech learners of Dutch as a foreign language
Ungermannová, Eva ; Pekelder, Jan (advisor) ; Rezková, Iva (referee)
This Master's thesis deals with the phenomenon of learning Dutch as a foreign language. The paper draws upon the fundamental theories and methods associated with applied linguistics on second language acquisition, in particular on the interlanguage hypothesis. The theoretical basis to this study comes from psycholinguistic processes that accompany the second language acquisition, such as language transfer, fossilization, overgeneralization and variability. This section is followed by a brief summary of the theory of the Dutch article, in contrast with an outline on how definiteness and indefiniteness are expressed in Czech. The paper also mentions some recent findings on article acquisition by second language learners. The practical part describes and analyses a small corpus of written utterances by Czech students who followed courses of Dutch language and literature at three Czech universities. The corpus consists of utterances made by speakers at two levels of language proficiency. The thesis seeks to observe the differences between lower intermediate and upper intermediate students. The research focuses mainly on general tendencies in article use. Various factors that influence the use of this grammatical category are discussed. Based on the collected data, a number of hypotheses are formulated,...
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Poor readers
Rusnáková, Kristýna ; Presslerová, Pavla (advisor) ; Kucharská, Anna (referee)
The bachelor thesis deals with the topic of poor readers in the context of reading comprehension. Poor readers are diverse group of readers, who are inferior to normal-reading peers in various aspects of reading. Reading comprehension is crucial skill in the process of acquiring, learning and using informations from every area of human activity. The aim of this thesis is to generally map the concept of poor readers and to identify specific problems shown by poor readers in reading comprehension tests. The theoretical part presents the concepts of mapping the issue, such as literacy, educational methods, reading comprehension. The main part focuses on the characteristics and specifics of poor readers in the context of the simple view of reading. Apart from this, other types of readers such as dyslectisc and poor comprehenders are described and compared to poor readers. The practical section is based on GAČR project - Reading comprehension - typical development and its risks, carried out by PedF UK, in which I took part. The objective is to analyze decoding and reading comprehension test results of fourth graders. This study attempts to identify a group of children with both decoding and reading comprehension difficulties (usually referred to garden variety poor readers). Moreover, the decision will...
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