Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We…

Children are known to be fast learners due to their neural plasticity. Learning a non-native language (L2) requires the mastering of new production patterns. In classroom settings, learners are not only exposed to the acoustic input, but also to the unfamiliar grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the L2 orthography. We tested how 9-10-year-old…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

The objective of this study is to detect the effect of using cooperative learning for teaching idioms to first grade students, learning French as a foreign language. The study was carried out on two groups -- experimental group and control group -- during the academic year of 2017-2018 in the lesson "Reading in French". The lesson was…

Michael Lewis' Lexical Approach attempted to turn the EFL world on its head by proposing that language acquisition comes from lexis rather than grammar. Lewis states that "language consists not of traditional grammar and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks" (1997:3). Lewis' 1997 handbook, "Implementing the…

The development of oral language and specifically increased control over literate discourse is critical to students' ability to create and comprehend texts in the early years of schooling and beyond. For students with home languages that differ from the forms of language used in school, the development of oral language through carefully designed…