Personalisation is an emerging "movement" within education. Its roots reside in marketing theory, not in educational theory. As a concept it admits a good deal of confusion. It can refer either to a new mode of governance for the public services, or it qualifies the noun "learning", as in "personalised learning". The…

The purpose of the present study is to investigate pragmatic transfer in refusals by native speakers of Mandarin speaking English, and to what extent transfer is influenced by the learners' level of L2 proficiency. The elicitation instrument used for data collection was the discourse completion questionnaire developed by Beebe et al. [Beebe, L.,…

Combining principles of peace education and political discourse analysis, this study dwells on one powerful metaphorical mechanism engaged in by Israeli political leaders: war-normalizing metaphors, a mechanism for framing war as part of human nature and normal life. Six core semantic fields were identified as particularly useful "raw…

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with mothers in the US about feeding their young children, this article examines how consumer culture--broadly construed--constitutes part of the indispensable context of mothering practices. The argument put forward is that mothers not only provide food and sustenance for their children, but necessarily encounter,…

Studies on bilingualism from a neurocognitive perspective have begun to attract considerable interest recently. Contextual variables--such as age of acquisition, level of proficiency and frequency of use--have been identified as significantly impacting on the convergence or divergence of representations in first language (L1) and second (L2)…

Maximizing the interaction between pupils with and without special needs is generally considered an important aspect of inclusion. However, it is frequently questioned whether pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in regular classrooms have interactions and friendships with their peers. In order to be able to evaluate these relationships, it…

Research supports the need for active vocabulary learning across grade levels and subject areas to help increase readers' comprehension of diverse texts that they encounter. Given the increasing emphasis on decoding and reading comprehension, the relative importance of vocabulary instruction has been diminished in recent years. The authors argue…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

This paper wants to examine the present communicative situation in our global world, and consequently the position occupied by the English language as the main means of interaction. I do not intend to make any realistic prediction, but my purpose is only to evaluate the spread of this language and the emergence of other languages according to both…

Scholarly activities are a collection of academic related activities such as research, teaching and consultation work which result in research outputs such as journals, theses and articles in proceedings. The output will then be disseminated to researchers all over the world by means of the WWW. The four pillars of this scholarship i.e. discovery,…

Matching-to-sample and sequence training procedures were used to develop responding to stimulus classes that were considered analogous to 3 aspects of verbal behavior: identifying synonyms and parts of speech,and using syntax. Matching-to-sample procedures were used to train 12 paired associates from among 24 stimuli. These pairs were analogous to…

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

This study analyses a case of parallel grammaticalization in five genetically related languages, with a lexical source meaning "person" developing to a grammatical function of reflexive marking. Although not typologically unusual, this case is special because, in spite of the overall parallelism, the resulting reflexive markers are located in…

Phonological and semantic principles which underlie the derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives in English are examined. There is intricate phonological conditioning for suffix "-ize" and for suffix "-(i)fy"; a third major process is zero derivation. These derivational processes cover more than a score of semantic relations (some with…