This paper analyses the opportunities for presenting knowledge that are created when assessment allows senior high school biology students to draw on linguistic and visual resources when constructing meaning in response to short-answer examination-style questions requiring a sequential explanation. Students within one senior high school biology…

Dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) is a pedagogical approach that offers meaningful, manageable, constant, and timely corrective feedback on student writing (Hartshorn et al., 2010). It emphasizes indirect and comprehensive written error correction on short, daily writing assignments. Numerous studies have demonstrated that its use can…

This paper investigated how production task combined with teacher feedback (in the form of recasts) affects child second language development, and the effects of task complexity on their production performance. 92 child learners of English in three intact classes were assigned to three tasks of different complexity (simple, +complex, ++complex).…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

The purpose of this research was to identify the common errors made in English writing by Malaysian Chinese primary year 6 ESL students and to determine the extent of the influence of the first language, Mandarin in ESL writing. The Mandarin language uses a logographic writing system while the English language is written in alphabetic scripts. The…

This study investigated the effects of task complexity on child learners' second language (L2) gains, the relationship between aptitude and L2 development, and the extent to which task complexity influences this relationship when recasts are provided. Sixty child EFL learners were assigned to two experimental groups. During the treatment, one…

The aim of this article is to show that the use of Spanish grammatical aspect is biased by inherent aspect depending on the learner's first language (L1). It considers both the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH; Andersen, 1986, and his followers) and the L1 Transfer Hypothesis (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008; McManus, 2015), and it compares the use of…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

This paper is the result of a language analysis research project focused on the Russian Language. The study included a diverse literature review that included published materials as well as online sources in addition to an interview with a native Russian speaker residing in the United States. Areas of study include the origin and history of the…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…

Investigates to what extent ESL learners' syntactic errors in written communication cause comprehension breakdown. The variables considered are the omission, insertion, and wrong choice of articles and connectors. Results indicated that errors concerning connectors cause communication breakdown more often than do errors in article usage. (PMJ)