Investigated how readers of different backgrounds evaluated 16 versions of Japanese university English as a foreign language (EFL) students' English compositions containing different culturally influenced rhetorical patterns. Results suggest that a flexible approach to permissible rhetorical patterns and a greater emphasis on coherence may be…

Investigated how Chinese-speaking English-as-a-Second-Language (L2) learners developed second language (L2) knowledge of conflation classes of verbs in the formation of prenominal adjectival participles. Groups of L2 learners and native English speakers judged the acceptability of prenominal adjectival participles placed in four linguistic…

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Analysis of basilang speech (in terms of word order, reference to time, and reference to space) of Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese speakers of English as a second language indicated that oriental subjects tended not to use prepositions and that Spanish-speaking subjects tended to use "in" to express most locative meanings. (Author/CB)

The linguistic complexity of grammatical structures depends on their usage. Such complexity must be purposefully controlled by the teacher of English as a second language. Examples of shortcomings in the presentation of various structures in current textbooks illustrate this point. (PMJ)

Investigated the acquisition of base-generated topics in Mandarin Chinese by British students learning Chinese. The hypothesis is not confirmed that it would not be difficult for English speakers to acquire the base-generated topic in Chinese because in the acquisition of Chinese, English-speaking learners are exposed to positive evidence of…

Examines the role of "routines" and grammatical patterns in first and second language acquisition by children and adults, specifically with regard to syntactic structures. (Author/AM)

A review of research about second language learning indicates that nonprimary acquisition is sensitive to the center-periphery distinction. There is clear evidence that this construct has reflexes in interlanguage word order with respect to the probability of native word order influence, difficulty, and order of emergence. (CB)

Dutch native children and Turkish immigrant children, born and reared in the Netherlands, were asked to tell a story from a series of pictures, at age six and again at age eight. The Turkish children exhibited about the same level of narrative proficiency in Dutch as their Dutch peers. (Author/LMO)

Reviews research findings on second-language (L2) interaction from the perspective of syntactic development. The article argues that better understanding of the role of negotiated interaction in L2 syntactic development requires examining the specific grammatical structures in interaction guided by the criteria of relevance, availability,…

Data on Dutch-Turkish language-mixing behavior of Turkish children growing up in The Netherlands are presented and analyzed. While functional characteristics of the children's language-mixing were compatible with models from earlier research, structural analysis suggests no universality of surface structure constraint rules for sentence-internal…

This study examined linguistic interdependence in 98 bilingual Turkish/Dutch children of Turkish background living in the Netherlands since birth, to determine whether language and literacy skills can be transferred from 1 language. The results indicated that, although the transference of lexicon and syntax skills was limited, pragmatic,…

Students in freshmen English classes (N=273) at a Japanese university were given translation and acceptability judgment tests involving the verb "give" (in text). The selective use of two predicate structures for "give" in appropriate contexts of usage were examined: (1) GIVE (noun phrase NP and participial phrase PP) and (2)…

Presents a replication of experiments which found that input practice is better than output practice for comprehension skills, and no worse than output practice for production skills in a second language (Spanish). Findings reveal that these patterns are obscured when the testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question…

Examines differences in oral narrative discourse of adult second-language learners of English on narrative tasks simulating the ability to describe events in the Here-and-Now versus the There-and-Then. Results indicate that complex tasks elicit less fluent, but more accurate and complex narration than do simpler tasks. (90 references) (Author/CK)