Despite the contributions language centres across the globe have made to language education and higher education in general, few publications have a specific focus on research work produced by language centre faculty. The purpose of this reviewed, edited volume entitled "Tertiary Education Language Learning: A Collection of Research,"…

Cutting-edge in its approach and international in its authorship, this fourth monograph in a series sponsored by the Chinese Language Teachers Association features eight research studies that explore a variety of themes, topics, and perspectives important to a variety of stakeholders in the Chinese language learning community. Employing a wide…

One aspect of linguistic input that may vary in bilingual speech communities is the use of overregularization (e.g., "catched"). In an earlier study, typically developing bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children were noted to use overregularizations in an elicited production task, accept these forms in a grammaticality judgment task, and reject…

English titles of medical research articles (RAs) are of great importance, the quality of which can, to a certain degree, affect impact factors of the articles, because many readers will make a decision as to whether to read on after reading titles. However, the special genre has not been extensively studied to date. This paper is designed to…

Proposes that a traditional rule of French grammar concerning the impersonal expression (il + est + adjective + de + infinitive) is so oversimplified as to be fallacious and untenable. (MSE)

Discusses semantic differences in the use of "simple" and "continuous" forms of the verb in English. Also discussed are variations found in the various temporal levels: present, future, perfect, and past, as well as in combinations with the modals "may" and "must,""could" and "might," and…

A simplified pattern of noun formation is outlined that can assist the German teacher in helping students understand constituent relationships in long or obscure German nouns, providing an overview of significant patterns that covers a relatively complete noun system. First, significant patterns in nouns outside the process of formation, and…

Describes exercises designed to teach students the differences between one-word and two-word forms. (HOD)

Significant features of the official October 1990 orthographic reforms in French are outlined and their pedagogical implications are discussed briefly. The changes, primarily simplifications and not major changes, affect use of the hyphen, plurals, diacritical markings, verb tenses, and correction of anomalies. (MSE)

A theory introduced by Ronald Langacker is used to analyze the English modal auxiliary verb system. The theory synthesizes generative semantics and notions from cognitive psychology, and posits a close link between form and meaning and denies the existence of autonomous syntactic and semantic components in linguistic structure. The intent of the…

Six brief articles discuss these aspects of language instruction: contrasting the imperative "let" with other imperative forms; distinguishing between perfect and nonperfect tenses in English; the various functions a question can perform; use of humor to illustrate language quirks; learning appropriate uses of count versus noncount nouns; and…

It is proposed that the concepts of location and goal are helpful instructional tools in Russian, encouraging competence and discouraging incorrect analyses of sentence structure. Minor reorganization of conventional instructional materials and addition of a few sentences for discussion would be of significant assistance in student understanding.…

The innovative use of a visual cueing device, or rods, in a second language class to represent the parts of speech and the grammatical structure of a sentence is explained and illustrated. The advantages found in it are that individual structures are not learned as isolated elements but rather as parts of a larger system, and that there is more…

An approach to teaching the paradigmatic and reciprocal uses of the "se" construction in Spanish is presented. A system of eight basic categories of the paradigmatic reflexives is outlined, including "do-it-yourself," reciprocal, reflexive of change, consumer, reflexive of interest, optional, change of meaning, and reflexive-only classifications.…

Instructional materials for the preterite tense in Spanish are based on Robert Terry's technique of using familiar stories in the foreign language, written in the present tense, which students must place in the past by changing verb forms. The objective is to avoid the disadvantages of simply translating verb tenses and to allow the student to get…