In this article we report on a study undertaken with ESL children between 7 and 8 years old. They carried out communicative tasks in pairs in second language classrooms. We examined patterns of their task-based conversational interactions while we manipulated their familiarity with the procedure and content of the tasks. We found that learners…

The role of instruction to develop learners' pragmatic competence in both second and foreign language contexts has recently motivated a great deal of research. However, most of this research has adopted an explicit instructional approach with only a few studies attempting to operationalise a more implicit condition for pragmatic learning. In order…

Providing students with lively, authentic comprehensible input is one of the most important tasks of introductory German teachers. Using a Tablet PC can enable teachers to improve the quality of the comprehensible input they provide their students. This article describes how integrating a Tablet PC into daily teaching processes allows classroom…

More than ever before, educational institutions are called upon to prepare young children for the demands of an increasingly globalised world and the challenges of preserving our biosphere upon which all human life depends. In order to provide them with the personal and professional foundations they need to participate in a multilingual and…

Investigates phonological cues available to children and explores the possibility that differential frequency in the linguistic input explains the priority given to masculine forms when children are faced with ambiguous novel terms. A connectionist model of determiner production was incrementally trained on a lexicon of determiner-noun phrases…

Clarifies Grosjean's Language Mode (LM) hypothesis, which develops the notion of language mode or the relative state of activation of a bilinguals two or more languages and language processing systems. Discusses studies that do not support views of the LM hypothesis. Studies of Dutch-English bilingual are presented. (Author/VWL)

An author, David Nunan, responds to a previous article that criticizes his advocacy of task-based syllabuses. Another author, Michael Long, points out inaccuracies in the criticism, and the author of the criticism, Ron Sheen, defends his earlier claim. (45 references) (JL)

A study concerned with factors that may affect three-year olds' acquisition of subordinate categories considered salience of the attribute or attributes that differentiate a subordinate category, presence or absence of linguistic input, and child characteristics. Correlational analyses pointed to a series of relationships between child…

According to prior assumptions that a second language is acquired by being used as a tool for doing things with others, this article analyzes certain mechanisms that teacher and pupils use to build up the meaning of their interaction in the target language. (106 references) (JL)

Reviews research that addresses how grammar can best be taught in terms of four theoretically motivated instructional options: (1) structured input; (2) explicit instruction; (3) production practice; (4) negative feedback. (Author/JL)

Investigates the relationship between a child's degree of bilingualism and features of parental input. Seeks to demonstrate that parental discourse strategies have a direct bearing on the levels of mixing present in a child's utterances in his weaker language (English). (Author/VWL)

Investigates the differential effects of three conditions--nonegotiated, premodified input, negotiation without "pushed output, and negotiation plus pushed output--on second language (L2) learners vocabulary comprehension and acquisition (receptive and productive). Findings of the study provide empirical evidence for the important role of…

Examined how acoustic variation affects second language (L2) lexical acquisition in consideration of four hypotheses: degraded input, elaborate processing, independent modulation, and robust versus strong connectivity. Beginners of L2 Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish words presented in 1 of 3 degrees of acoustic variation. Immediate and…

This study compared the language behaviours of parents of toddlers with language delay (LD) and language of parents of typically developing toddlers (LN). Results indicate that parents of children with a language delay and children with normal language produced comparable amounts of linguistic input, but differed on some qualitative measures.…

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical…