Examines whether negotiation addresses the need of second- language (L2) learners to focus attention on L2 form. The study analyzed the utterances of negotiation produced as 20 English native speaker-nonnative speaker (NS-NNS) dyads engaged in communication tasks. Negotiation assisted the NNS needs for data on features that were possible in the…

Biologists at Center for Biological Research found ways to improve their scientific writing without benefit of an English-language program. By tapping Internet biology forums for comprehensible input, and using computer-assisted retention strategy to profit from error correction, writing improved. Scientific dialog on Internet has helped group…

This paper discusses the role of input as one of the universals in second language acquisition theory. Considerations include how language instructors can best organize and present input and when certain kinds of input are more important. A self-administered program evaluation exercise using relevant theoretical and methodological contributions…

Explores whether pragmatic fluency is best acquired by provision of input and opportunity for communicative practice alone, or whether learners profit more with additional explicit instruction in the use of conversational routines. The article hypothesized that such instruction raises learners' awareness of the functions and contextual…

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental-state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief-based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief-based emotion-attribution tasks. A standard task in…

With its focus on simplification universals, developmental orders, teachability, and functional-grammatical bases for acquisition, the well-known research on German (L2) language acquisition has contributed much to SLA research in general. At the same time, sociolinguistic investigations focus squarely on the difficult social conditions that…

This paper reviews studies that have contrasted the effectiveness of structured-input instruction with output-based instruction. It then presents results from a study comparing the relative effects of structured-input and output-based instruction on students' ability to comprehend and produce direct object pronouns in second language French. Three…

This study compared the narratives of three groups of advanced speakers of Spanish with different learning backgrounds. The first group was made up of heritage speakers; the second group was composed of missionaries that had recently returned from a two-year sojourn in a Spanish-speaking country; and the third group comprised students who had…

It is an undeniable fact that storytelling makes a remarkable contribution to the domains of child development at an early age since it is stated that storytelling is the original form of teaching. Firstly, the contributions and effects of storytelling techniques to the cultural, cognitive, linguistic, socio-emotional and psychological domains of…

Examines the emergence of the present perfect in the interlanguage of instructed adult learners of English as a Second Language. Findings indicate that adding a new inflection in the tense/aspect system requires establishing new form-meaning associations as well as revising existing ones. (44 references) (Author/CK)

Maternal infant-directed speech in Mandarin Chinese and Turkish (two mother-child dyads each) was examined to see if cues exist in input that might assist infants' assignments of words to lexical and functional item categories. Results show that sets of distributional, phonological, and acoustic cues distinguishing lexical and functional items are…

Presents a replication of experiments which found that input practice is better than output practice for comprehension skills, and no worse than output practice for production skills in a second language (Spanish). Findings reveal that these patterns are obscured when the testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question…

The past 20 years have seen research on language acquisition in the cognitive sciences grow immensely. The current paper offers a fairly extensive review of this literature, arguing that new cognitive theories and empirical data are perfectly consistent with core predictions a behavior analytic approach makes about language development. The review…

This book provides a summary of past and cutting-edge research on the acquisition of language by young children. It lends support to the behavioralist paradigm of language acquisition, namely, that maternal rewards and corrections should be integrated with perceptual, cognitive, and social learning conceptualizations in a skill-learning approach…

Presents a longitudinal study of teacher talk that examines the use of affective particles in the language of the university-level elementary Japanese as a foreign language classroom. Results reveal that affective particles are used far less frequently in the classroom language analyzed than in ordinary conversation and that significant…