This research project is set in a Pakistani undergraduate translation studies class. Pakistan is an ex-British colony where English is taught in a linguistic neo-imperial context. Teachers often endeavor to lessen the palpable struggle of students by introducing activities that put less emphasis on grammatical correctness and more on fostering…

This study investigates the acquisition and maintenance of periphrastic and se-passives in second language (L2), heritage (HS), and (Spanish-dominant) native Spanish speakers (NS) by addressing: (i) How accessible are Spanish periphrastic passives (which also exist in English) and se-passives (unique to Spanish) for L2ers and HSs in production?…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

This study aims to examine the challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English, and to determine practical procedures to overcome these challenges. The translation challenges in translating Malay cultural terms into English raised due to some factors; sound, lexis, grammar, and style. Both English and Malay originate from different…

Using the Grammatical and Lexical Acceptability Questionnaire (GLAQ), the study aims to contextualize the extent of acceptance of PhE grammatical and lexical items among 400 pre-service basic education teachers in state universities in Luzon and Mindanao. It further determined the difference on the participants' extent of acceptability when…

This paper examines explicitness in English as lingua franca (ELF) spoken interactions. Using a conversation analysis procedure, about 11h of audio-recorded naturally occuring ELF interactions of 79 incoming Erasmus students were analyzed for this purpose. The corpus was compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group…

This paper presents an extension of the Multiple Grammars Theory (Roeper, 1999) to provide a formal mechanism that can serve as a generative-based alternative to current descriptive models of interlanguage. The theory extends historical work by Kroch and Taylor (1997), and has been taken into a computational direction by Yang (2003). The proposal…

For Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese), there has been little research into "distinguishing features" (Fulcher, 1996; Iwashita et al., 2008) used in scoring L2 Chinese speaking performance. The study reported here investigates the relationship between the distinguishing features of L2 Chinese spoken performances and the scores…

This article iterates the results of integrating literacy into SLA (Second Language Acquisition) from a constructivist's perspective in preparing syllabi, pedagogical activities and testing. The observation of Mandarin-learning students' performance and conversations with them suggest that introducing certain vocabulary, expressions and…

This research tries to find answers to the following questions: How much English and how much Spanish is spoken in class? For what functions is each language used? Data were obtained from the tape recording of Spanish conversation classes. Other data sources included non-participant observations and an interview with each of the instructors. The…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main…

Here we report findings from a cross-sectional study of morphosyntactic processing in native German speakers and native English speakers enrolled in college-level German courses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants read sentences that were either well-formed or violated German subject-verb agreement. Results showed that…

Much of second language (L2) class time, particularly in school and university classes, is devoted to the teaching of writing, and written assignments form an important component of assessed work. We assume that learners' L2 writing develops over time, in response to instruction, feedback, and practice. However, to date there has been very little…

This article presents evidence that supports the claim that second language (L2) grammars arise in a domain-specific, informationally encapsulated module with contents provided by Universal Grammar and enriched by native language knowledge, as entertained by Schwartz (1986, 1987, 1999) contra Bley-Vroman (1990). I consider state-of-the-art…