Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting social and communicative skills, including narrative ability, namely the description of real-life or fictive accounts of temporally and causally related events. With this study, we aimed to determine whether a communicative-pragmatic training, i.e., the version for…

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

The current study investigated the possibility that language switches could be relatively automatically triggered by context. "Single-word switches," in which bilinguals switched languages on a single word in midsentence and then immediately switched back, were contrasted with more complete "whole-language switches," in which…

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which teachers can play an effective role to develop students' writing skills through classroom interaction at the Arab Countries Universities. The researcher has adopted the qualitative method as well as the test as a tool for collecting data relevant to the study. It is an attempt to highlight the…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

This paper reports the findings of a study aiming to reveal the recurring patterns of lexical, syntactic and textual errors in student translations of a specialized EU genre from English into Hungarian. By comparing the student translations to the official translation of the text, this article uncovers the most frequent errors that students made…

Speech errors have been used in the construction of production models of the phonological and semantic components of language, and for a model of interactional processes. Errors also provide insight into how speakers plan discourse and syntactic structure,. Different types of discourse exhibit different types of error. The present data are taken…

Discusses the literature on interference as the cause of errors in second language speech. A study is reported which shows that interference by the native language is most often the factor responsible for the largest number of mistakes in grammar and vocabulary. (Author/AMH)

A study investigated patterns in the apparent syntactic errors of native English-speaking, upper-level learners of Arabic as a foreign language. One hundred writing samples, including summaries, criticisms, and free composition, were gathered from a number of university courses. Error types analyzed included articles, subordinate clauses, two-word…

This study explored the dichotomy between global errors, that is, those violating rules of overall sentence structure, and local errors, that is, those violating rules within a particular constituent of a sentence, and the relationship of these to communication breakdown. The focus was tense continuity across clauses (TC) and subject-verb…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the use of connectives by learners of English as a foreign language and their length of study. Eighteen writing samples were collected, six from learners with 2 years of study of English and 12 from learners with 3 years of study. Results found that students' length of study was…

An examination was conducted of the planned and unplanned speech of 24 native speakers of Mandarin and Korean who were serving as teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Each was videotaped on two occasions two weeks apart in a preparation course for international teaching assistants (ITAs), in which instruction in the use of…

The case study examined the development of English writing skills in a native Russian-speaking college student with no previous instruction in English as a Second Language. It drew on writing samples from 2 years of English language instruction. Theories of first and second language acquisition, especially in written expression, are analyzed in…

Discourse analysis has provided a methodology for the study of conversational interactions between language learner and native speaker. This study examines the verbal and nonverbal strategies that native speakers use when communicating with second language learners in natural, non-academic, "survival type" settings. The areas discussed include:…