Grammar has always been considered by language learners as well as by those engaged in language education as an essential component of language, and their expectations from and planning for any language education programs have been conditioned accordingly. The definitions of the term grammar and its categories in all languages go back to…

This project examines whether second-language (L2) learners can converge on a native-like pattern at the interface between syntax and discourse under low and high processing pressure, using Spanish clitic-doubled left dislocation (CLLD) as a test case. The original version of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) predicts that L2 competence on…

Interlanguage has been the main development of field research on second language acquisition (SLA). According to Richard et al (1996) Interlanguage is one of the kinds of language that can be produced by second language learners in the process of acquiring or learning a new language. The influence of the universal grammar of the first language in…

In pedagogical debates about Global Englishes (GE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), there is widespread agreement concerning an urgent need for liberating teachers and students from the normative constraints of ELT's orientation towards standard English by raising their awareness of the characteristics and complexities of GE/ELF…

In vocabulary research there has been a shift from focusing on single words to considering multiword sequences, such as collocations. Despite the general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication, particularly oral communication, language-testing researchers have made…

This article presents a didactic experience carried out in the Degree of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and it is part of a project of Innovation and Teaching Development. The main objective is the development in students of a metaphoric competence -- metaphorical awareness and strategies to…

Describes a "Vichian" approach (involving linguistic imagination and creativity) to the exploration of basic pedagogical matters in classroom language teaching. The approach is based on principles involving: (1) concrete language knowledge; (2) development from the concrete to the abstract; (3) the role of metaphor in verbal creativity;…

Reviews the various definitions of communicative competence, and argues for a view of communicative competence as language use, a lesser but more readily achievable ambition for both theory and pedagogy. (Author/CB)

Literature concerning human information processing is examined for its implications and extensions into the realm of input processing during second language learning. It is argued that learners can process input solely for meaning, and that once meaning can be accessed automatically, attention can be directed to certain "non-important" structures…

Reviews and synthesizes speech act analysis (Austin and Searles), politeness phenomena (Brown and Levinson), rules affecting speaking (Hymes), and activity analysis (Wittgenstein). Advances the notion that the theories are complementary rather than contradictory. (EKN)

A theory of language may prove conducive to many important and complex issues in philosophy of education. After grouping these issues into four main categories, I explore the possibility and need to back up the categories with a comprehensive theory of language or a cluster of theories of compatible assumptions. I argue that Habermas's universal…

This study provides an account of the distributional information and the production rates in a particularly rich corpus of German child and adult language. Three structural domains are analysed: the parts-of-speech distribution for a coded corpus of circa one million words as well as the internal constituency of 300,000 noun phrases and almost…

This paper examines the evidence used to support the claim that children initially do not encode new referents like adults do (e.g., Maratsos 1974; Warden 1976; Emslie and Stevenson 1981; Hickmann et al. 1996). It argues that a better understanding of the information structure of the target language forces a reinterpretation of previous…

Describes attempts to formalize and characterize a theory of communicative competence, focusing on the advantages of a preference model (which identifies and grades learning variables in order of importance) and of models developed on the premise of parallel distributed processing (which suggest that such rule-based processing are in fact gross…

Proficiency, which refers to a concept that is more complex than is generally acknowledged, is an overworked term in second language teaching that lacks a satisfactory operational definition. Linguistic knowledge is currently defined most often in terms of what an individual is able to do with the knowledge, as in the movement for competency-based…