Educationese, the language often spoken, written and understood only by educators, is in grave danger. Anti-educationese radicals recently proposed national legislation outlawing the passive voice in all education communications, even school district newsletters. These revolutionaries purport that the use of shorter sentences, simple vocabulary…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Re-examines the function of second language acquisition and learning by redefining the terms "acquisition" and "learning" in the context of the classroom. This redefinition, known as the binding/access framework, has several advantages for instruction: it incorporates both lexical and grammatical acquisition, it clarifies the…