This paper discusses Aboriginal English speakers in Australia, noting the importance of recognizing prior learning and of recognizing Aboriginal English within the context of programs that understand the particular areas where Aboriginal English speakers need support to achieve outcomes in standard English. It defines recognition of prior learning…

This review of the current literature on second language learning was to inform the following four questions: (1) what are the effects of learning a second language on the first language? (2) What is the role of content instruction in offering a second language? (3) What are the effects of learning a second language on students with special needs?…

A notable feature of developing interlanguage grammars is the apparent optionality in those areas of grammar where optionality is not characteristic of stable state grammars. In the Valueless Features Hypothesis, it is proposed that the appearance of apparent optionality in the very early stages of interlanguage development is due to the partial…

This collection of conference papers begins with "Introduction" (Ronald P. Leow and Cristina Sanz), then presents five sections. Section 1, "Morphosyntax," includes "Preterit and Imperfect in Spanish: The Early Stages of Development" (Joaquim Camps); "The Relationship between Syntactic and Morphological Abilities in Advanced FL Learners of…

This paper describes and discusses the University of Alaska's language programs for Eskimo-Aleut languages like Yupik and Inupiaq, offered through its Alaska Native Language Center. The paper is critical of the program's over-emphasis on the emphasis on teaching grammar and vocabulary. It argues that, though well intentioned when the framework for…

Examines the morpho-syntax of task-based interaction and reports some possible grammatical consequences of interaction in split and shared information tasks undertaken by adult second language learners of English. Results indicate that communication tasks for language learning can be designed to influence the use of particular linguistic…

Evaluates the writing of Hispanic students in bilingual and submersion programs, comparing it with the writing of native English speakers in regular programs. Five dependent variables are evaluated: rhetorical effectiveness, overall quality of writing, productivity, syntactic maturity, and error frequency. (46 references) (Author/OD)

Calls into question the data of grammaticality judgment tasks on which several GB-based studies on the second-language acquisition of accusative verbs by Japanese learners of English base their arguments and reports the results of a pilot study. (Author/VWL)

Profiles interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second-language acquisition (SLA) research by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics shedding light on basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories illuminating aspects of pragmatic…

This article is the second part of a report on research that examined immersion language teachers' strategies to modify their speech in order to maintain use of the target language. As described in the first part in "Babel," Volume 40, Number 2 (Veque, 2005), this classroom-based research, undertaken at Methodist Ladies College (MLC) in…

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, syntax, association, grammatical…

This article examines alternating verbs (such as "quemar"(se) "to burn") in second language (L2) Spanish by considering the learnability problem from a sequence learning perspective (N. Ellis, 1996, 2002). In Spanish, verbs of the alternating class are obligatorily marked with the clitic "se" in their intransitive form. Errors of omission among…

The project reported in this paper aims to test the concept of "learner developmental readiness" and its pedagogic effectiveness in the teaching of foreign language grammar. It focuses on the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) in a formal classroom context. The aim is to ascertain whether a specific teaching order based on…

The grammar is designed to be used as a reference for addressing structural problems in Czech. The guide is organized into 11 chapters. The first describes the pronunciation of written Czech and explains spelling conventions. Aspects of the language covered here include the alphabet, arrangement of words in the dictionary, vowels, diphthongs,…

Six papers on interlanguage are presented. The first, "Language Transfer," experimentally tests Robert Lado's contrastive analysis principles on the transfer of language skills to second language acquisition. The second paper, called "Interlanguage," builds on this work in discussing the structured nature of interlanguage and…