In successful communication, it is critical to have the ability to identify what a speaker is referring to from previously mentioned information. This ability requires the identification of the topic initially introduced by lexical forms and its continuity in discourse expressed by anaphora such as null and pronominal forms in the subsequent…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

Recent research that explored how input exposure and learner characteristics influence novel L2 morphosyntactic pattern learning has exposed participants to either text or static images rather than dynamic visual events. Furthermore, it is not known whether incorporating eye gaze cues into dynamic visual events enhances dual pattern learning.…

This article reports the findings of a study in which we investigated the possible effects of word order on the acquisition of case marking. In linguistic typology (e.g. Greenberg, 1963) a very strong correlation has been shown between dominant SOV (subject object verb) word order and case marking. No such correlation exists for SVO (subject verb…

This study is aimed at examining how students of selected Teacher Training Colleges handle one important aspect of sentence structure, i.e. "subordination". Data were collected from written scripts, and tests responded to by 150 participants from three selected colleges. These were analyzed by identifying both correct and incorrect uses…

This paper reports a post-hoc analysis of the influence of lexical difficulty of cue sentences on performance in an elicited imitation (EI) task to assess oral production skills for 645 child L2 English learners in instructional settings. This formed part of a large-scale investigation into effectiveness of foreign language teaching in Polish…

Given the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) in post-secondary environments (Roessingh & Douglas, 2012), educational practices such as availability of language support for mathematics should be assessed to ensure that all students' needs are met. To explore the effects of language on mathematics in ELLs, mathematical test…

Background: Sentence construction and syntactic organization are known to be poor in children with specific language impairments (SLI), but little is known about the way in which children with SLI approach language tasks, and static standardized tests contribute little to the differentiation of skills within the population of children with…

Explains that a good essay question should be as specific in what it asks for as the students are expected to be in their answers. (HOD)

The ability to monitor learning and memory of sentences was investigated in a group of 72 undergraduate students. Some sentences included within-sentence elaborations clarifying subject-verb-object relations and some did not. Results provide insights into subjects' recall and ability to monitor item difficulty and into effects of testing. (TJH)

The effect of five types of topical structure (including initial sentence element, mood subject, and surface subject) on the item difficulty of reading comprehension questions was investigated. Results indicated differences in the item difficulty of questions according to the type of topical structure on which the questions were based. (21…

Three rating scales--with all positive or all negative wording, or a mixture of both--were administered to 522 children in grades four through six. The results indicated that it was difficult for students to indicate agreement by disagreeing with a negative statement. This affected test validity. Author/GDC)

To estimate reading difficulty of items on a sentence repetition task, a study had 50 adult English as a second language (ESL) students repeat each of 26 sentences immediately after two presentations. High-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than low-difficulty items, and the most difficult items involved the processing of…

The multifaceted structure of sentence-completion test items was analyzed to explain verbal comprehension. The three stimulus constituents were technical, logical-semantic, and associative-contextual. Guttman's facet and order theories and smallest space analysis were used. Results confirmed the multiple skills involved in solving these tasks.…