This study involving 60 Japanese learners of English investigated the effects of various kinds of form-focused instruction on learners' ability to comprehend and produce polite requests in English. Each treatment group received one of the following: (a) deductive instruction; (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks; or (c) inductive…

Although the language teaching profession has long emphasized the use of the target language in the classroom, student teachers face various challenges in their efforts to conduct class in their target language. This case study focused on 10 student teachers with respect to (1) their initial attitudes and beliefs about using the target language,…

There is considerable evidence from psycholinguistics that first language listeners handle function words differently from content words. This makes intuitive sense because content words require the listener to access a lexical meaning representation whereas function words do not. A separate channel of processing for functors would enable them to…

Fourteen collections of children's reading materials were used to investigate the claim that collections of authentic texts with a common theme, or written by one author, afford readers with more repeated exposures to new words than unrelated materials. The collections, distinguished by relative thematic tightness, authorship (1 vs. 4 authors),…

Although it is widely acknowledged that collocations play an important part in second language learning, especially at intermediate-advanced levels, learners' difficulties with collocations have not been investigated in much detail so far. The present study examines ESL learners' use of verb-noun collocations, such as "take notes," "place an…

In this article, the author shares her experience and the lessons learned in teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for a decade. After thousands of lessons, uncountable revisions to those lessons, numerous hours of professional development, access to dozens of talented colleagues, and an abundance of thoughts and insights from…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

Early and intermediate second language (L2) learners often encounter difficulties when engaging in introductory social conversations, typically having had little opportunity to practise such interactions. This article describes a project to design and prototype a computer dialogue system, Let's Chat, which would allow learners to rehearse social…

Good language learner studies show that attending to form is associated with successful learning. This paper reports interviews with three university English majors who had won prizes in nationwide English speaking competitions and debate tournaments in China. The interviewees regarded text memorization and imitation as the most effective methods…

In a series of studies children show increasing mastery of irregular plural forms (such as "mice") simply by producing erroneous over-regularized versions of them (such as "mouses"). We explain this phenomenon in terms of successive approximation in imitation: Children over-regularize early in acquisition because the representations of frequent,…

The correlation between the communicative intent of parents, in terms of their expectation of a response and the response patterns of young children aged 23-25 months during parent-child interactions, was investigated. An Observational Framework was used to code these parameters in interactions between 36 children and their mothers. The children…

The importance of the role of language in teacher education programmes and in children's learning is crucial. This study focuses on the use of English as the language of learning and teaching and its impact on the language development of English second language (ESL) student teachers and ESL learners. Against the background of major theories in…

Generalised access to the Internet and globalisation has led to increased demand for translation services and a resurgence in the use of machine translation (MT) systems. MT post-editing or the correction of MT output to an acceptable standard is known to be one of the ways to face the huge demand on multilingual communication. Given that the use…

The study reported in this article describes second language (L2) vocabulary learning outcomes associated with adult L2 reading comprehension processes, thus connecting L2 learning with the complex cognitive and linguistic processing involved in reading. The study aimed to determine whether background knowledge moderated the relationship between…

This article reports on a study that addresses the following question: why do some children exposed to two languages from early on fail to speak those two languages? Questionnaire data were collected in 1,899 families in which at least one of the parents spoke a language other than the majority language. Each questionnaire asked about the home…