Complements, adjuncts and predicator are the three main elements of the clause structure. This paper primarily aims at presenting a general classification of clause structure in Persian. In this context, transitive and intransitive structures in Modern Persian are also analyzed. In this research, five canonical Persian constructions are identified…

English language development or proficiency (ELD/P) standards promise to play an important role in the instruction and assessment of the language development of English language learner (ELL) pre-K-12 students, but to do so effectively they must convey the progression of student language learning in authentic school contexts for authentic academic…

In this study, similarities and differences among generic structures in 80 cover letters written by Taiwanese and Canadian college students were investigated, adopting Upton and Connor's (2001) framework. The results demonstrated that Canadian students tend to write longer letters, use a greater variety of word types and sentence structures, and…

Compared with reading, writing and listening, there has been a paucity of empirical data documenting learners' experiences of speaking English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) in different learning contexts in spite of the fact that developing the ability to speak in a second or foreign language is widely…

This study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Thai language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast. 120 English paragraphs written by 40 second year English major students were analyzed by using Error Analysis (EA).The results revealed…

The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of…

Users of the Probability Approach choose the right one from four basic types of conditional sentences--factual, predictive, hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, by judging how likely (i.e. the probability) the event in the result-clause will take place when the condition in the if-clause is met. Thirty-three students from the experimental…

This article reports a small-scale study that investigated the effect of (1) an instructional method, viz. directing learners' attention to formulaic sequences (FS) in a text, and (2) typographic salience, i.e. bold typeface and underlined, on foreign-language (FL) learners' recall of FS and single words (SW). Twenty-eight FL learners read a…

There is an increasing sensitivity to the challenges posed by the language of examination papers and of instruction in scientific subjects, especially for non-native speakers of English. It has been observed that in addition to technical subject-specific vocabulary, non-technical words such as instructional verbs have been sources of difficulty,…

In this article we present the results of a qualitative research study on the pedagogical factors that influence English teaching in four public schools of Medellín, Colombia. Twelve teachers were interviewed regarding three linguistic principles: communicative competence, native language effect, and interlanguage. The data analysis led to the…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

Studies indicate that cultural properties of texts affect reading at the content and textual levels. However, research has not adequately addressed the effects of the cross-cultural pragmatics of discourse on readers. Therefore, this study explored whether or not cultural factors play a role in reading comprehension by comparing Turkish and…

The aim of the current research is to investigate the effects of textual modification upon the distribution of specific linguistic features of news texts when authors adopt an intuitive approach to simplification. The research focuses on the distribution and use of relative clauses (RCs) across three levels of simplification. The analysis of news…

This study investigates the acquisition of post-verbal (temporal) adverbials and post-verbal negation in L2 Dutch. It is based on previous findings for L2 French that post-verbal negation poses less of a problem for L2 learners than post-verbal adverbial placement (Hawkins, Towell, Bazergui, Second Language Research 9: 189-233, 1993; Herschensohn,…

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., "John filled the bucket") and locatum predicates (e.g., "the water filled the bucket") in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch…