Demonstrates the pedagogical implications of a student-conducted ethnographic interview on-site in one of Germany's new Bundeslander. Students who have had more than adequate German language preparation and who have been provided with social/historical and political background information gain lasting insights into Germans' personal perspectives…

Explores the differences in nature and origin between two constructs that are used in the contemporary professional literature to explain the processes and consequences of language learning: i + 1 and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Each construct is situated with respect to its history and to the fundamental assumptions it makes about…

Focuses on a number of episodes in intercultural communication in which there is some degree of mismatch between the intentions and interpretations of the interlocutors. Three concepts are used to illustrate the nature of these mismatches: the concept of common ground, the principle of indexicaity, and the concept of cultural models. (Author/VWL)

Proposes an alternative analysis of Semai expressive reduplication that does not rely on prosodic templates to account for the shape of the reduplicant. The model proposed is called Compression and accounts for the shape of a reduplicant through the application of generalized alignment constraints. (Author/VWL)

Studies the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the referential "renjia" (people-home) in mandarin Chinese, especially the one that allows a specific reference reading. A step-by-step comparison between the usage of the specific referential people-home and that of the Mandarin Chinese bare reflexive "ziji" (self) is provided. Shows why…

Explores some aspects of the relations between literacy education and the processes and history of thinking about public policy making. Discusses two broad abstractions--knowledge and power--that constitute a heuristic of the policy moment. Argues that a critical understanding of policy is required to enable literacy educators and researchers to…

This paper describes past Canadian contributions to the study of CALL and raises questions about the identity of Canadian CALL as distinct within CALL scholarship in North America.

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little…

Through a discussion of research that examines a plethora of variables involved in second language (L2) reading comprehension, the present study attempts to examine and analyze the statistical procedures utilized in studies of this nature. A review of recent research from the past five and a half years from four leading scientific journals of…

This article discusses how Sarah Lamond, a Japanese language teacher in Sydney, Australia has juggled three of her identities: second language (L2) learner, L2 user, and L2 teacher. Data come from four interviews used to create an edited life history. These data are used to draw attention to the relationship between L2 learner and language user.…

Research in cognitive psychology and second language learning has underlined the significance of learners' cognitive processes and individual preferences in language learning. Helping learners to be aware of these processes and preferences has in fact become an important methodological principle of language teaching. Advances in information and…

This article presents the idea that databases are very useful tools for teaching languages over the Internet. Databases in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) are commonly used in three ways: for reference sources such as dictionaries, in the management of large websites, and for data processing such as language tests and learners'…

The need for effective approaches for identifying English language learners with learning disabilities is great and growing. Meeting this need is complicated by recent developments in the field of learning disabilities that are unrelated to the English language learning status, and by limitations in existing knowledge specific to the…

The article by Clahsen and Felser (CF) on grammatical processing in language learning is a timely and much-needed synthesis of research on this topic. It correctly identifies both morphological processing and syntactic processing as key areas that require attention. This commentary raises two issues: the relationship between the grammar and the…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) have written a beautiful and important paper. I applaud their integrative empirical approach, and believe that their theoretical account is largely correct, if not in some of its specific claims, at least in its broader assumptions. CF directly compare their shallow structure hypothesis (SSH) with a model that my colleagues…