Background: It is widely acknowledged that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) predominantly have difficulties in the areas of grammar and vocabulary, with preserved pragmatic skills. Consequently, few studies focus on the pragmatic skills of children with DLD, and there is a distinct lack of studies examining the effectiveness of…

The purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (L2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. Several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of L2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that…

This article presents a review of research that has investigated ways of measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language (L2), focusing on grammar. It begins by defining implicit and explicit knowledge in terms of a distinguishing set of criteria. Two ways of investigating implicit knowledge are discussed -- through experimental…

Syntactic complexity has been extensively approached in the fields of corpus linguistics and academic discourse studies. However, works focusing on disciplinary variation in terms of linguistic complexity and comparison of professional and novice academic writing are scarce. Addressing these issues is likely to have important implications for…

Because phonological, semantic, and morphosyntactic characteristics of grammatical features can have a significant impact on form-focused instruction, utilization of different grammatical features to test new language teaching techniques may conflate determinations of efficacy or inefficacy. The purpose of this study was to holistically examine…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

Purpose: This study examined the extent to which children born preterm (< 37 weeks) and/or who have low birth weight (< 2,500 g) catch up with their full term peers in terms of their language abilities at early school age (= 5 to < 9 years). Method: A systematic literature search identified empirical studies that fit the inclusion…

Factors, such as treatment complexity and duration, language proficiency, and educational context (EFL vs. ESL), can significantly influence language performance in experimental studies. The purpose of the present meta-analysis is to investigate the degree to which these causal factors influence linguistic improvement in studies of the English…

The purpose of this study is to explore any possible difference among the verb types chosen in articles written in English by the non-natives and natives. In so doing, Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (1994) was employed. 80 published articles from the medical sciences field of study were chosen from among which 40 were written by native…

This article summarizes the evidence as regards the effectiveness of therapy for grammar for school-aged children with language impairments. I first review studies focusing on specific areas of grammar (both expressive and receptive targets) and then studies aiming to improve language more generally, several of which focus more on the…

This article reports a meta-analysis of studies that investigated the relative effectiveness of comprehension-based instruction (CBI) and production-based instruction (PBI). The meta-analysis only included studies that featured a direct comparison of CBI and PBI in order to ensure methodological and statistical robustness. A total of 35 research…

In this literature review I have first provided an introduction in which I've clarified the meaning of focus on form issue and some debates about its advantages and disadvantages and the needed degree of focus on form in teaching structures in classroom. Then I have stated some features of focus on form and the ways that focus on form can…

Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives have highlighted how the public rhetoric of the Bush administration has shaped the representation of the conflict which has followed 9/11. However, the literature in this area raises but does not itself address the question of how the administration's use of "terror", "terrorism" and "terrorist(s)"…

Focuses on the revised system of grammar coding for verbs in the fourth edition of the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English" (OALD4), comparing it with two other similar dictionaries. It is shown that the OALD4 is found to be more favorable on many criteria than the other comparable dictionaries. (16 references) (VWL)

Argues that the Guided Induction presentation is superior to a deductive one for the teaching of certain grammatical structures to beginning foreign language students. A study is presented that compared both approaches when applied to the learning of French grammatical structures by beginning level U.S. college students. (25 references) (GLR)