Uses results of case study of children using collaborative talk in text-based task to argue there is no clear distinction between what is "off" or "on" task talk. Based on Vygotsky's theory of social basis of thought, (it develops from internalism of speech and functions within various relationships), evidence shows children…

Examines a wide range of writing tasks of 11- and 15-year-old students from four regions of England to establish the relative importance of nonstandard dialect as a factor in deviation from standard English norms in writing. (Author/JL)

Reports the preliminary results of an ongoing study of the benefits of building repetition into a communicative task in an English for Specific Purposes course. Compares the performances of two learners at markedly different levels of English proficiency and finds that both benefited from the opportunity to recycle communicative content as they…

Presents an overview of time study research in school library media centers that attempts to categorize the tasks performed by school library media specialists and the time devoted to them. Suggests implications for preservice and continuing education, salaries, and the need for future time studies. (Author/LRW)

This study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. Kindergarten and second-grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. Results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to…

Identifies key variables within and outside the learning context that could affect motivation to learn during training. Bases the theoretical framework on sociotechnical systems, total quality management, and training transfer theories that could influence employee and organizational performance. Considers task autonomy, organization's orientation…

Explores the developmental patterns observed when Japanese adult learners acquire the locality condition on English reflexives. Experimental tasks were designed specifically to deal with the methodological problems of earlier research and then administered to Japanese learners of English at five proficiency levels as well as English and Japanese…

Examines different sources of planning (teacher-led, solitary, group-based) as well as different foci for planning (towards language or towards content). Results are discussed in relation to how teachers may more effectively make pedagogic decisions on task implementation conditions linked to selective pedagogic goals. (Author/VWL)

Examined why adults learning second languages make frequent errors in lexical form. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. Less fluent participants experienced more interference for…

This article proposes and tests a formal cognitive model for the go/no-go discrimination task. In this task, the performer chooses whether to respond to stimuli and receives rewards for responding to certain stimuli and punishments for responding to others. Three cognitive models were evaluated on the basis of data from a longitudinal study…

The current work examined age differences in the classification of novel object images that vary in continuous dimensions of structural shape. The structural dimensions employed are two that share a privileged status in the visual analysis and representation of objects: the shape of discrete prominent parts and the attachment positions of those…

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether playing a specific ball sport, such as tennis, could maintain the coincidence-timing (CT) performance of older adults at a similar level to that of younger ones. To address this question, tennis players and nonplayers of three different age ranges (ages 20-30, 60-70, and 70-80 years)…

This study compares 27 sixth grade students who have been learning Spanish since kindergarten with 5 who have had Spanish for only 1 year using a battery of Spanish oral and written tests. The students who started early out performed the new students in listening, speaking, and writing Spanish. Those who started early also displayed a positive…

The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing…

Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good…