The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) has long been considered pertinent to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, especially when the native language (NL) and target language (TL) have different NSP settings. The study aimed to investigate whether seventy English L2 learners in Puerto Rico who were native Spanish speakers transferred their L1…

Many language learners lack the motivation to read complex texts. Because high-immersion Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly reported to be highly motivating, the goal of our study was to compare English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' (N=79) motivation while reading a story with subtitles in VR (experimental group) versus reading the same…

English language learners are often more grammatically accurate in writing than in speaking. As students focus on meaning while speaking, their spoken fluency comes at a cost: their grammatical accuracy decreases. The author wanted to find a way to help her students improve their oral grammar; that is, she wanted them to focus on grammar while…

A study investigated the ability of 75 Italian secondary school students to subordinate in English. The students were learning English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) through formal instruction. The differences in learning a foreign language in formal versus informal situations are discussed, and a study of two adult Italians learning ESL informally is…

The thesis that classroom instruction in the grammatical forms of a language is undesirable, currently held by a number of applied linguists, is rejected. However, although it has been found that inducement of grammatical consciousness is not necessarily a pedagogical liability, its worth depends to a large extent upon the kinds of facts to be…

In regard to the teaching of English, which is replacing French as a foreign language, Viet Nam presents some unique aspects and some individual problems. More secondary school students are selecting English as their foreign language choice; English departments in the universities are expanding rapidly; the teacher shortage is increasing. One…

Examines similarities and differences in loss of grammatical systems across languages, investigating structural changes in six attrited languages as compared to nonattrited languages and demonstrating significant parallelism in structural changes across languages. Correlation between levels of grammatical and lexical loss are discussed, noting a…

This paper gives a contrastive analysis of noun phrases in English and Chinese. The syntactic features of the structures, the devices used to mark distinctions in number, case and gender, as well as the similarities and differences between English and Chinese relative clauses are discussed. Partly due to the documented differences between these…

The process of acquisition of three syntactic structures in Engish (i.e., yes-no questions, wh-questions, and negation) was studied. The subjects were 30 school children whose native language as well as medium of instruction was Malayalam, one of the four dominant Dravidian languages. The children were in the second, fourth, and sixth year of…

Reviews research findings on second-language (L2) interaction from the perspective of syntactic development. The article argues that better understanding of the role of negotiated interaction in L2 syntactic development requires examining the specific grammatical structures in interaction guided by the criteria of relevance, availability,…

The notion of a functional syllabus has received widespread attention in recent years, so much so that in many cases it is being used where it is not suitable. One question is to what extent the functional syllabus may provide a framework for learning language structure, as it is difficult to impose any kind of structural organization on a…

A contrastive analysis of English and Korean sentences, including error analysis, is presented. The study focuses on word order, comparing the languages' similarities and differences with the objective of understanding better how the structural differences inhibit the progress of the Korean learner of English. The English data are derived from…

Discussion of eight major works relevant to a linguistic description of Puerto Rican English seeks to contribute to a more unified theory of bilingualism and second language acquisition. The author's observations on phonological, lexical and morphological, and syntactic implications are presented in an attempt to coordinate the theory. The works,…

This collection of 50 articles by 45 authors, largely from the United Kingdom and America, serves as an introduction for teachers preparing to teach English as a second or foreign language, or for administrators planning a program of English study as a second language. The readings are grouped in nine sections, each with an overview, according to…