The present study was focused on acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by second language (L2) learners and whether this acquisition was influenced by RC linguistic features, learners' Chinese proficiency levels, and their first language (L1). Data were gathered via a Chinese reading comprehension test, a grammaticality judgment task, a…

Aside from learning the basic and common grammatical structures, English as foreign language learners ("hereafter EFL") have to be familiar with a wide range of lexical chunks called collocations. Being sensitive to collocations is the key of attaining a native-like fluency in English. The aim of this study is twofold: to explore the…

The following work tries to analyze the possible fossilization errors of the students when acquiring a second foreign language. For this purpose, two languages have been chosen: maternal (Spanish) and foreign (English). In the present work we have examined the effects of the Spanish language and the English language when learning another language…

This study focuses on a native speaker of Chinese, in her 40's, who began to learn English in her late 20's when she emigrated to the United States. It was discovered that the subject was able to self-correct nearly every error she made in casual speech when the errors were pointed out to her after their commission. Furthermore, in nearly every…

Reviews three linguistic studies from 1970s in light of approaches used in 1980s: (1) pretest-posttest analysis of spoken Spanish and English of Mexican American bilingual children; (2) assessment of Spanish grammar among Culver City Spanish Immersion pupils, and (3) effect of summer vacation on Spanish language retention among English speakers…

This paper reviews the history of contrastive analysis (CA) against the background of its objectives and its present problems and presents an outline of procedures which seem to be necessary to make the methods meet the objectives of applied CA. CA in the United States was closely connected with structuralism, which was an obvious cause for later…

A young Spanish woman was given 82 hours of individual instruction in English. Her exposure to and use of English were confined to these lessons. The subject acquired adjective-noun ordering and regular plural relatively quickly; possessor-possessed ordering and genitive relatively slowly; the definite article all at once after a period of…

This book is a comprehensive treatment of the literature on second language acquisition in childhood, viewed in terms of contemporary process models. After a general introduction on bilingualism in society, six major topics are considered: first-language acquistion, language acquisition and learning in childhood and adulthood, simultaneous…