The purpose of this research is to investigate the variable production of English Object-Experiencer (OE) psych predicates among 80 L1 Thai EFL first-year university students. Psych verbs are notable for posing difficulty for learners due to a unique property that violates Grimshaw's (1990) Thematic Hierarchy. The participants were given a cloze…

Second language (L2) acquisition research has explored the acquisition of various syntactic constraints by L2 learners, one of which is "wanna" contraction. However, there is still a very limited body of research regarding the acquisition of "wanna" contraction, both in first language (L1) and L2. The purpose of the study is to…

Discusses the appropriateness of using cloze technique exercises for teaching a highly inflected language, such as Latin. Describes a cloze program for early second-year Latin students. (EKN)

Five orders of approximation to normal English prose were constructed; 5th, 10th, 25th, 50th, and 100th plus. Five cloze tests were then constructed by inserting blanks for deleted words in 5 word segments (5th order), 10 word segments (10th), 25 word segments (25th), 50 word segments (50th), and 100 word segments of five different passages of…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)

A study focused on the nature and effect of constraints on the hypotheses that learners make about the meanings of words. Two experiments were conducted at a large midwestern university: the first, involving 68 undergraduate students divided randomly into two groups, tested taxonomic and durative constraints on nouns, and time of day and cessation…

A study analyzed the accuracy of Spanish second-language production across three tasks (narrative, multiple-choice cloze test, fill-in cloze test) on three discourse-determined grammatical items (subject pronouns, articles, past tense aspect) among 74 intermediate and advanced college-level learners. Results revealed different rates of accuracy…

A study of Japanese learners' acquisition of the article system in English noun phrases investigated whether (1) presence or absence of a modifier affected the choice of definite article used, and (2) whether the choice of definite article was influenced by reliance on knowledge of commonly-occurring sequences. Subjects were 111 Japanese…

This paper presents some reasons for reconsidering the use of discrete structure-point tests of language proficiency, and suggests an alternative basis for designing proficiency tests. Discrete point tests are one of the primary tools of the audio-lingual method of teaching a foreign language and are based on certain assumptions, including the…