The present study empirically scrutinizes the fixed natural order of grammatical morphemes relying on a manual analysis of an EFL learner corpus. Specifically, we test whether the accuracy order of L2 grammatical morphemes in the case of L1 Turkish speakers of English deviates from Krashen's (1977) natural order and whether proficiency levels play…

In this paper, a review of the role of input, output and instruction in second language acquisition is provided. Several pedagogical interventions in grammar instruction (e.g., processing instruction, input enhancement, structured output and collaborative output tasks) are presented and their effectiveness reviewed. A final and overall evaluation…

The present paper demonstrates that insights from the affordances perspective can contribute to developing a more comprehensive model of grammaticalization. The authors argue that the grammaticalization process is afforded differently depending on the values of three contributing parameters: the factor (schematized as a qualitative-quantitative…

Fundamental to complex dynamic systems theory is the assumption that the recursive behavior of complex systems results in the generation of physical forms and dynamic processes that are self-similar and scale-invariant. Such fractal-like structures and the organismic benefit that they engender has been widely noted in physiology, biology, and…

"Language awareness and language aptitude" often crop up in discussion of various second language acquisition phenomena, including age-related phenomena. There is a troublesome and ongoing definitional and theoretical problem in this connection: Different researchers have different perspectives on what is to be included in the respective…

According to the critical period hypothesis, the earlier the acquisition of a second language starts, the better. Owing to the plasticity of the brain, up until a certain age a second language can be acquired successfully according to this view. Early second language learners are commonly said to have an advantage over later ones especially in…

Functionally-oriented linguistic theories, such as cognitive grammar (CG), offer nuanced descriptions of the meanings and uses of grammatical features. A simplified characterization of the semantics of the English active and passive voice grounded in CG terms and based on the reference point model is presented, as it is the basis of the…

The present study aims to investigate the general characteristics of topicprominent typological interlanguage development of Chinese learners of English in terms of acquiring subject-prominent English structures from a discourse perspective. Topic structures mainly appear in Chinese discourse in the form of topic chains (Wang, 2002; 2004). The…

This paper examines the status of European English (EE) in current linguistic theory, in particular the hotly debated issue of whether or not it is possible to treat EE as an endonormative linguistic variety in its own right. Alternatively, EE may remain a form of English as a foreign language (EFL), and the decision has far-reaching…

This article critically reviews strategy research on learning Chinese both as a second and foreign language. Through a careful examination of major data bases in both the Chinese and English languages, the article summarizes research in the field and the principal research methods used in the studies reviewed. Moreover, key limitations in research…

Most current idiom processing models acknowledge, after Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999) that deriving an idiomatic meaning entails suppression of contextually inappropriate, literal meanings of idiom constituent words. While embedding idioms in the rich disambiguating context can promote earlier suppression of incompatible literal meanings,…