The effect of multilingual glossaries of meta-cognitive verbs on improving assessment performance: a case study at a South African university of technology

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study was conducted to determine whether first-year students at a university of technology would benefit from the use of multilingual glossaries of metacognitive verbs, and specifically whether such glossaries will improve the students' understanding of the instructional verbs used in their test and examination papers and other assessments. First-year students at the university of technology often present with low English proficiency due to factors such as an inadequate school system and language-in-education policies which require them to study through means of a language other than their mother tongue. Such students typically find it difficult to cope with English as the sole language of teaching and learning unless they receive additional assistance as regards their English language proficiency. As this university of technology no longer has an English support programme, alternative methods of support are needed. Multilingual glossaries of subject-specific concepts have been developed and are in use in some South African universities, but there is a marked lack of information on multilingual glossaries containing metacognitive verbs.For the purposes of this study, multilingual glossaries were developed using the seven languages most widely spoken on campus and seven of the most commonly misunderstood metacognitive verbs (the latter as identified by lecturers at the university at which the study was conducted). English was used as the control and the words were translated into the other six languages – viz. Afrikaans, French, isiZulu, Sesotho, Sepedi and Tshivenda – giving the metacognitive verb, the meaning of the verb and an application using that verb, in each language. In order to make them easily accessible, the multilingual glossaries were made available on the online learning platform of the university, to which all the university's students have free access, and as a low data-consuming cellphone application.The study to determine whether first-year students would benefit from the use of these multilingual glossaries was conducted by means of a baseline test to determine prior knowledge of the metacognitive verbs, a series of tutorials to explain the verbs, and activities in which students used the multilingual glossaries and were encouraged to translanguage during their discussions, in order to encourage deeper understanding of the metacognitive verbs. This was followed by a post-test.The results of the baseline test and the post-test were compared and the latter showed a clear improvement. The participants of the study were asked to fill in a questionnaire indicating (a) whether or not they found the multilingual glossaries helpful and (b) what their impressions were of this means of language support. Most of the responses were positive. It was concluded that the multilingual glossaries of metacognitive verbs could successfully be implemented to scaffold student learning, especially as the glossaries could be made easily accessible to students.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University