Possessive determiners (PDs) "his" and "her" are challenging for L2 learners to acquire, and this difficulty has been attributed to several factors, including negative L1 transfer effects (White et al., 2007). What researchers have not yet considered is how PDs are acquired by learners whose L1 predicts positive transfer…

Feature-based approaches to acquisition principally focus on second language (L2) learners' ability to perceive non-native consonants when the features required are either contrastively present or entirely absent from the first language (L1) grammar. As features may function contrastively or allophonically in the consonant and/or vowel systems of…

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial "wh"-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative…

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the processing of grammatical gender agreement involving gender regular and irregular forms recruit the same or distinct neurocognitive mechanisms and whether different grammatical gender agreement conditions elicit the same or diverse ERP signals. Native speakers of Brazilian…

The present study examines the production and intuition of Spanish clitics in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) structures among 26 Spanish heritage speakers (HSs) born and raised in Brazil. We tested clitic production and intuition in contexts in which Spanish clitics vary as a function of the semantic features of the object that they refer to.…

Straddling between the purely political and the poetically artistic, I am arguing, is a Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN), which is yet to be charted and its cartography is yet to be demarcated. Taking two examples, the first a Hip-Hop song from within the Arab Spring and the second from the "favelas" in Brazil, my intent is to show what…

Edmodo has a significant role and place in the language teaching and learning contexts. However, there is no conclusive evidence on how Edmodo affects the language learning process. This study aims to present a review of the studies to make recommendations for teachers and researchers for further research. The study concludes that learners and…

This article proposes that second language learners can use indirect positive evidence (IPE) to acquire a phonological grammar that is a subset of their L1 grammar. IPE is evidence from errors in the learner's L1 made by native speakers of the learner's L2. It has been assumed that subset grammars may be acquired using direct or indirect negative…

This study investigated the views of teachers and learners regarding the timing of grammatical instruction, conceptualized as a distinction between isolated and integrated form-focused instruction (FFI) proposed by Spada and Lightbown (2008). Both types of FFI are described as taking place in primarily meaning-based communicative classrooms. They…

This article focuses on English language teaching in Brazilian public schools, based on experiences in primary and secondary education, as well as in Teaching Practicum courses at a university. Through these experiences, the article critiques the overemphasis on grammar and the lack of an intercultural approach. The author engages the reader with…

The researchers designed, implemented and analyze a project to teach the contents of First Aid and Waves in English as a foreign language in Brazil using the Content and Language Integrated (CLIL) approach. Seventy participants belonging to two intact classes in a Navy Boarding School took part in the study. Both content and language teachers…

Linguistic relativity, the idea that language affects the way that people think, and that people who speak different languages think differently, has implications for mathematics education because people use different languages to teach, learn and practice mathematics. This paper reviews research on linguistic relativity and number, looking at…

The primary goal of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between Universal Grammar and the properties that Universal Grammar constrains, by investigating how language is created/acquired. The framework proposed in this dissertation provides us with tools for predicting what will and will not appear in linguistic systems of…

For Chinese as a second language (L2 Chinese), there has been little research into "distinguishing features" (Fulcher, 1996; Iwashita et al., 2008) used in scoring L2 Chinese speaking performance. The study reported here investigates the relationship between the distinguishing features of L2 Chinese spoken performances and the scores…

Purpose: The objective of this research was to compare the number and types of grammatical and non-grammatical silent pauses presented by stutterers and subjects with Asperger syndrome in their narratives. Method: Ten children who stutter and four participants with Asperger syndrome (mean ages of both groups 10 years) were assessed at the Speech…