Given the raised graduation requirement of the proficiency Enhancement Program (PEP) to attain proficiency levels of "2+," "2+," and "2," the importance of target language use has been highly emphasized across language schools at Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). This article discusses some of the challenges associated…

Purpose: This pilot study examined the extent and nature of associations in the linguistic complexity used by child and clinician within conversational interactions. Method: Correlation analyses focused on semantic and morphosyntactic language sample measures from an experienced speech-language clinician and 29 children with language impairment.…

Composing from sources may no longer be the exclusive domain of reading-to-write activities. The ever-increasing presence of video technology and broadcasting in academic settings could place listening-to-write tasks on a similar footing. This article describes a listening-to-write task, the video-based short comment, which (1) uses video as…

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native…

This paper presents an overview of what has come to be known as the "Interaction Hypothesis," the basic tenet of which is that through input and interaction with interlocutors, language learners have opportunities to notice differences between their own formulations of the target language and the language of their conversational…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and…

This study examined the rate at which English vocabulary was acquired from the 3 input modes of reading, reading-while-listening, and listening to stories. It selected 3 sets of 28 words within 4 frequency bands and administered 2 test types immediately after the reading and listening treatments, 1 week later and 3 months later. The results showed…

This study was intended to compare processing instruction (VanPatten, 1993, 1996, 2000), an input-based focus on form technique, to dictogloss tasks, an output-oriented focus-on-form type of instruction to assess their effects in helping beginning-EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners acquire the simple English passive voice. Two intact…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the use of the student's first language (L1) by a non-native English-speaking EFL teacher affects the students' experiences in learning English compared to those in the classrooms where only English is used as a means of teaching. This study also investigates the role of the teacher in providing…

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation…

This study examines the pragmatic strategies that learners utilize to negotiate a resolution when refusing a native speaker of higher status in three asymmetric situations (+Power, +Distance). Following Pomerantz's (1984) analysis of dispreferred responses, this study focuses on refusals to an invitation, a request, and a suggestion. Refusal…

Research on second language lexical development during reading has found positive effects for word frequency, the provision of glosses, and elaborative word processing. However, findings have been inconclusive regarding the effect of such intervention tasks on long-term retention. Likewise, few studies have looked at the cumulative effect of…

Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10-4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their…

Infant-directed maternal speech is an important component of infants' linguistic input. However, speech from other speakers and speech directed to others constitute a large amount of the linguistic environment. What are the properties of infant-directed speech that differentiate it from other components of infants' speech environment? To what…