mass nounn
see countable noun
mastery learningn
an individualized and diagnostic approach to teaching in which students
proceed with studying and testing at their own rate in order to achieve a
prescribed level of success. Mastery learning is based on the idea that all
students can master a subject given sufficient time. For example in an ESL
reading programme, students might be assigned graded reading passages to
read in their own time. Test questions after each passage allow the learner
to discover what level of comprehension they reached, and re-read the
passage if necessary. They must reach a specific comprehension level before
they move on to the next passage.
matched guise techniquen
(in studies of language attitudes) the use of recorded voices of people
speaking first in one dialect or language and then in another; that is, in two
“guises”. For example, bilingual French Canadians may first speak in
French and then in English. The recordings are played to listeners who do
not know that the two samples of speech are from the same person and who
judge the two guises of the same speaker as though they were judging two
separate speakers each belonging to a different ethnic or national group.
The reactions of the listeners to the speakers in one guise are compared to
reactions to the other guise to reveal attitudes towards different language or
dialect groups, whose members may be considered more or less intelligent,
friendly, co-operative, reliable, etc.
matched-subjects designn
an experimental design where participants with similar characteristics
are first matched into blocks and then participants within each block are
randomly assigned to the experimental conditions. For example, when
comparing two methods of teaching L2 vocabulary, a researcher wants to
make sure that the participants in the study are homogeneous, so that any
difference in a vocabulary test between the groups taught with different
methods can be attributed to the difference in teaching methods. If one
group happened to consist predominantly of L2 learners whose L1 shares
many cognates with their L2, it would not be clear whether the difference in
the test is due to the treatment (i.e. use of different teaching methods) or
not. This problem could have been avoided by first matching participants
by their L1 background and then randomly assigning participants within
each L1 background block into the two classes using different teaching
methods.
matched-subjects design