Students 11-12 years old were asked to derive the meaning of five unknown words, each embedded in three contexts. Students Proficiency was examined in three activities: decontextualization, cumulative testing, and defining. Eight students of high- and low-verbal ability were compared. Showed that young students are capable of performing meaning…

Responds to Piercy's (2000) perspectives article, "Sexism in the English Language." Suggests that progress has been made in eliminating much sexism in English, and that English is much less sexist than many other languages, precisely because it is less gendered. (Author/VWL)

In response to a review of an article written by the author titled "Sexism in the English Language," the author lays out her agreement and disagreement with the points made in the review. (Author/VWL)

Describes a systematic approach to designing and improving foreign languages courses based on a model of course design. Suggests that the strength of systematically following a model is that the important things are not overlooked. (Author/VWL)

Uses the shock felt by much of the U.S. population at the September 11th terrorist attacks and personal experience learning Italian to assert the importance of studying foreign languages as a way to better understand other cultures. (EV)

Discusses language as skill and the idea that there are common elements between language and general skill acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Investigates whether adult second language learners of English are guided by subconscious innate linguistic knowledge--universal grammar--in the acquisition of a particular linguistic phenomenon, the "wanna" contraction in English. (Author/VWL)

Provides an explanation for the existence of free variation in learner language. Argues that interlanguage is best conceptualized as sets of loose lexical networks that are gradually reorganized into a system or systems. Free variation arises when learners add items to those they have already acquired and before they analyze these items and…

Discusses theoretical and empirical aspects of the neural bases of the mental lexicon and the mental grammar in the first and second language (L1 and L2). Argues that in the first language, the learning, representation, and processing of lexicon and grammar depend on two well-studies brain memory systems. (Author/VWL)

Demonstrates the successful teaching of German literature through distance delivery and suggests that distance delivery does not require revolutionary changes in instructional methods. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the multilingual print environment in Lebanon's streets and shops, which reflects global and local changes in environmental literacy that represent wider notions of literacy from which students may learn. Provides examples of slips and errors between languages to show how environmental literacy can be problematic. Suggests that…

Assesses the contributions made by different approaches to interlanguage pragmatics as a subfield of second language acquisition. Discusses how four particular perspectives on pragmatic development relate to each other. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. Suggests that the varieties grouped under the label Spanish have been immensely enriched over the centuries by contact with other languages. Notes that there is a continuing increase in the presence of Spanish in the United States, and the result is a continued enrichment of the…

We used a collaborative recall task to explore the nature and consequences of children's interaction with another child at the same or different age. Ninety-six children memorised word lists for recall. In a first condition children recalled collaboratively: in a pair with another child. In a second condition children recalled words independently…

In this study we determined whether untrained raters' assessments of fluency in low-proficiency second language speech were related to temporal measures and whether they varied across tasks. We collected speech samples from 20 beginner Mandarin learners of English on picture description, monologue, and dialogue tasks. Temporal measures were made…