Reviews research that has been emerging from the availability of corpora on the grammar of spoken English. Presents arguments for the view that spoken and written language utilize the same basic grammatical repertoire, however different their implementations of it are. (Author/VWL)

This study investigated the relationship of first language (L1) skills in elementary school and second language (L2) learning in high school. Students classified as high-, average-, and low-proficiency L2 learners were compared on L1 achievement measures of reading, spelling, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and listening comprehension…

Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining…

The study sought to examine the effect of lexical aspect and narrative discourse structure on the pattern of acquisition and use of English verbal morphology exhibited by creole-speaking students. Findings indicated that the emergent pattern of morphology in the creole participants' written interlanguage appeared to be influenced not only by…

Focuses on one particular psychological dimension, extraversion-introversion. The relatively small number of linguistic studies in which extraversion is focused on as an independent variable suggests that applied linguists believe it unrelated to speech production or language learning. Argues that this suspicion is based on a misunderstanding…

Investigations of Japanese speakers' interlanguage constructions of English existential sentences with a locative sentential topic found a general shift from topic-comment to subject-predicate structures as proficiency increased. (24 references) (Author/CB)

Analyzes intermediate English-as-a-second-language learners' (N=63) written responses to high and low cognitive level questions. Results indicate that although the degree of linguistic inaccuracy remained stable, the higher order of cognition increased both the amount and the order of syntactic complexity of written English responses. (Author/CB)

Describes an innovative method for teaching reading in French to adult students. The method consists of literal translations in English with the English words, gradually replaced by French. (Author/AM)

Investigation of the use of a multiple-trait scoring procedure to obtain communicative writing profiles of adult nonnative English speakers found that the scoring method was highly reliable in composite assessment, but provided little psychometric support for assessing certain individual writing components. (28 references) (Author/CB)

Investigated how English-as-a-Second-Language (L2) readers used structural properties of a text to "fill in the gaps" in their mental representations and compared these with native English readers' recall protocols. L2 readers' structure-preserving recalls were higher than their meaning-preserving protocols. Results suggest that L2 readers used…

The ultimate goal of reading is to construct text meaning based on visually encoded information. Essentially, it entails converting print into language and then to the message intended by the author. It is hardly accidental, therefore, that, in all languages, reading builds on oral language competence and that learning to read uniformly requires…

A cross-sectional study with Dutch first language learners from Grades 2,4, and 6 was conducted to investigate their ability to derive word meaning from written context. Used a multicomponential measure that involved the percentage of correct attributes, inclusion of false attributes, and contextualization. (Author/VWL)

Examined the role of awareness in relation to R. W. Schmidt's noticing hypothesis in second language acquisition. The study analyzed the think-aloud protocols of adult learners of Spanish as a second language as they were completing a problem-solving task as well as their immediate performances on two post-exposure assessment tasks, a recognition…

Compares the cognitive processing of 12 anglophone French students who wrote an argumentative text in their first language (English) and second language (L2) (French). Results indicate that the writers' strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explains the constraining effects of linguistic processing on…

Two experiments tested whether the orthography of readers' first or second language affected their reading time and comprehension in each. English and Hebrew bilingual graduate students and faculty read texts translated into both Hebrew and English. The English native speakers read the English texts significantly faster than the native Hebrew…