The use of present and past participles and gerunds was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, English dictionaries, and online articles, in order for English language…

The purpose of this article is to help ESL (English as a Second Language) students or English language learners (ELLs) how to express or use moods correctly when they study English. The expression of moods was summarized and illustrated from various examples cited or given, on the basis of the writer's more than twenty years' teaching experience…

Purpose: A variety of pediatric clinical populations have difficulty with the correct use of pronouns. The available clinical literature labels these errors in inconsistent terms leading to great variation in how treatment objectives are worded. The purpose of this tutorial is to encourage a shift in pronoun assessment and treatment planning…

How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper…

The basic form of the superlative suffix in German is -"st (kleinst"-), with some adjectives requiring a longer form, -"est (lautest"-). While the superlative has long been a topic in teaching materials, the accuracy of textbook treatments continues to be less than satisfactory. The difficulty arises in characterizing the…

Using a corpora approach involves using a series of texts in the language under study as a type of corpus on which to base acquisition. Languages in all forms (written, spoken, performed, formal, informal, etc.) are captured all the time through online and digital platforms, apps, etc. making them highly accessible. Applying corpora in teaching…

The use of the infinitive was summarized and illustrated from various examples, on the basis of the writer's teaching experience, and extensive review of different English grammar books, reference books, magazines, newspapers, books, and English dictionaries, in order for English language learners (whose native language is not English) to further…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

What teachers write about students has enormous potential to affect their lives. Lauren Porosoff encourages teachers to use their words to empower students to take an active role in their own learning. When teachers use adjectives to describe students, they may be attaching certain fixed characteristics to those students. Verbs, on the other hand,…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

ESL/EFL teachers can face several challenges when it comes to a focus on language forms in the classroom. How should teachers integrate the instruction of structural language forms with meaning-based activities? How necessary is a focus on form for student language learning? In what contexts is an explicit focus on form in the classroom most…

The extensive literature on subject expression in Spanish makes for rich comparisons between generative (formal) and usage-based (functional) approaches to language acquisition. This article explores how the problem of subject expression has been conceptualized within each research tradition, as well as unanswered questions that both approaches…

"English Grammar and Teaching Strategies" aims to demystify grammar and equip any teacher to teach it in the classroom. Carefully set out for ease of reference, this book covers every aspect of grammar, from nouns, adjectives and verbs to punctuation and prepositions. Each grammatical term is clearly defined and accompanied by varieties…

The work of L.S. Vygotsky was popularised in the West between two great waves of educational thought: constructivism and cognitivism. Reception was therefore colored by three metaphors introduced by Jerome Bruner: 'construction', 'scaffolding' and 'narrative'. Narratives were to be characterized by features we call SELF: Subjects, Expectancy and…