Many English language proficiency (ELP) tests used for university admissions and placement now include integrated writing tasks that require examinees to use external sources when writing. Integrated writing tasks improve test authenticity and impact, but they raise several validity questions, such as what academic language skills they engage and…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the progress of 14 Spanish-speaking learners of English during a period abroad from a longitudinal perspective. Oral and written data were collected three times during an academic year at a British university. These samples were analyzed in terms of fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical richness, and…

Syntactic priming is the tendency for a speaker to produce a structure that was encountered in recent discourse and is measured by calculating how frequently speakers use the modelled structures as opposed to alternatives. Recent lab-based studies have shown that carrying out syntactic priming activities with trained interlocutors positively…

Debates the merits of the claim that "symbolic technologies push cognitive growth earlier and longer." The results of an assessment are presented that involved three adult male peasants (two literate, one nonliterate) living in rural China and their ability to recall the text of "The Lonesome Opossum." (25 references) (GLR)

Test results for final-year French students in Canadian universities show they have not mastered the gender of some of the most frequent French nouns. Two recommendations are to continue to seek simplification of the learning of gender and to require students to use the full range of syntactic transformations. (MSE)

Shows how one teacher skillfully integrates vocabulary instruction with his subject matter teaching. The teacher links the target vocabulary to the students' experiences and concentrates on word meanings and their written and oral forms and syntactic behavior, pushing students to accurate use of the words in context. (12 references) (Author/CK)