This text critically examines traditional methodologies for teaching grammar in the context of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL). It proposes an alternative, eclectic approach, which can be used in any foreign language. Drawing on evidence from research and pedagogical practices, it highlights areas for improvement in current approaches, such…

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…

The generality of the orthographic consistency effect in speech recognition tasks previously reported for Portuguese beginning readers was assessed in French-speaking children, as the French orthographic code presents a higher degree of inconsistency than the Portuguese one. Although the findings obtained with the French second graders replicated…

The present study looks at the levels of activation of different languages a trilingual language user operates in at the moment of text construction in one of these languages. Forty-eight Portuguese advanced users of English (L2) and intermediate in German (L3) were asked to perform a translation task. The subjects were divided into two subgroups:…