The time has come to create a realistic grammar syllabus in the beginning language courses. Yet why do some in the profession insist that all grammar must be taught in the first year of language learning? Abundant data from decades of research on topics such as human memory, chunking, and second language acquisition exist that overwhelmingly…

Singapore English has been, and still is, an enigma for many scholars and researchers. In recent years, much attention has been given to the analysis of its particles. However, rather than focusing on the analysis of one particle or several particles and how they operate at the level of the sentence, this paper looks at a particular phenomenon in…

In second language classrooms, listening is gaining recognition as an active element in the processes of learning and using a second language. Currently, however, much of the teaching of listening prioritises comprehension without sufficient emphasis on the skills and strategies that enhance learners' understanding of spoken language. This paper…

This article proposes a distinction between "fairness" and "justice" in relation to language tests. Basing its discussion on the validity theory of Samuel Messick, it discusses the way in which these terms have been used in the existing literature, and their relationship to the concept of validity. Fairness, broadly speaking,…

In today's increasingly multicultural and multilingual world, having the ability to use a variety of second (L2) or foreign languages is no longer just a luxury but a socioeconomic necessity. This situation has given rise to an urgency to understand more deeply the relationship between L2 learning and use and factors arising from membership in…

Young English-speaking monolingual and bilingual adults were examined for English proficiency, language use history, and performance on a flanker task. The bilinguals, who were about twenty years old, were divided into two groups (early bilinguals and late bilinguals) according to whether they became actively bilingual before or after the age of…

English-Language Learners (ELLs, English-Learners, ELs) are a particularly challenging sector of the student population in United States schools. They constitute an increasingly larger presence in most school districts, growing 51 percent in ten years to 5.1 million in 2006. Despite becoming more common, schools have yet to figure out ways to meet…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

The current English-language research and educational program was driven by an initiative to create a more interactive, theme-based bilingual language education model for preschools in Chengdu, China. During a 2-week teacher education program centered at the Experimental Kindergarten of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Chengdu, China, a team of…

Guided by sociocultural theory and the theory of multiliteracies, learning is perceived as a shifting participation in practices, which is mediated by multiple physical and symbolic tools. Drawing on the situated multiliteracies approach, which integrates these two theories, the purpose of this ethnographic research is to examine the participation…

The theme for this year's annual graduate student conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature (LLL) was "Your Voice, My Voice: Literature, Language, Culture and Society." Translation and interpretation guided the theme for the conference, with Dr. Marvin Puakea Nogelmeier of the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian…

Many people in non-native English speaking countries learn English as a second language at school. Moreover, most countries build it into the curriculum of national education ranging from elementary to university levels of education. As a compulsory subject in many countries, it is necessary that the students learn the language. They must be able…

A total of 104 six-year-old children belonging to 4 groups (English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals) were compared on 3 verbal tasks and 1 nonverbal executive control task to examine the generality of the bilingual effects on development. Bilingual groups differed in degree of…

The "Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century" represent a major effort for setting goals for language instruction across the United States and across instructional levels. They provide descriptions of what "language students should know and be able to do" through 11 content standards in five goal areas, the five…

In order for discourse to be considered idiomatic, it needs to exhibit features like fluency and pragmatically appropriate language use. Advances in corpus linguistics make it possible to examine idiomaticity from the perspective of recurrent word combinations. One approach to capture such word combinations is by the automatic retrieval of lexical…