This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

The paper examines how children quote their parents' utterances. In other words, it investigates linguistic recycling as an aspect of language learning and how the child-directed speech (CDS) of adults influences child speech (CS). This topic is examined especially in the light of research made in the crosslinguistic project on pre- and…

This paper explores the applications of pattern grammar and local grammar in English language teaching, focusing specifically on the design of teaching materials. It shows that grammar patterns can be systematically analysed from a local grammar perspective, and further argues that the practice of local grammar analyses helps to raise language…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Muysken argues for four general "strategies" that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use…

The teaching of the Spanish noun gender system to students is based on a set of generalizations that the last phoneme, or sound, of a noun is an excellent predictor of the gender of that noun (Bull 1965). These generalized norms have been refined over the years and can be found in most textbooks. The norms are taught to students who then apply…

Examining grammatically idiosyncratic English expressions often helps reveal not only to ESL (English as a second language) teachers and learners but also to experts on English how intricately language is composed. This paper aims to expound one such idiomatic expression of the "try and V" construction by exploring the phenomenon from diverse…

In Inner Mongolia, those Mongolian students face lots of difficulties in learning English. Especially the English translation ability of Mongolian students is a weak point. It is worth to think a problem that how to let our students use the English freely on a certain foundation. This article investigates the problems of Mongolian English learners…

This article analyses the styles of English produced by an adult migrant who started to speak the language later in life, and it approaches them from the perspective of quantitative style-shifting and discursive stylization. After defining style and the procedures needed to justify the term "L2," the study describes the focal informant's…

Rules, and exceptions to such rules, are ubiquitous in many domains, including language. Here we used simple artificial grammars to investigate the influence of 2 factors on the acquisition of rules and their exceptions, namely type frequency (the relative numbers of different exceptions to different regular items) and token frequency (the number…