One of the great puzzles of language acquisition has been described as poverty of the stimulus: how are complex aspects of language acquired when they appear to be rare or even non-occurring in the input that a learner receives and comprehends? This article presents an emergentist solution to one aspect of this puzzle (involving relative clauses)…

English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing group of K-12 students in the United States. Most ELLs spend the entire school day in mainstream classrooms where instruction is in English. It is therefore important for all teachers to have the knowledge and skills needed to facilitate these students' academic language development and…

This study examined effects of word writing on second language vocabulary learning. In two experiments, English-speaking learners of Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns while viewing word-picture pairs. The participants copied 12 target words and wrote nothing for the other 12 target words being studied. Productive vocabulary learning on…

This article presents an autoethnographical account of my foray into Spanish immersion education in Costa Rica as a professor of multilingual education at a university in Canada. This language-learning journey was inspired by curiosity about the growing trend for Internet marketing of second-language learning as a form of tourism, which I label…

A 1991 study investigated the extent to which living in the United States and communicating daily in English provided students of English as a Second Language (ESL) with skills in interpreting implicature. Subjects were 30 students tested in a 1986 study of ESL implicature who were retested with a battery of four tests: structure; cloze;…

The review of research presented here examines studies based on Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which states that cultural traditions encourage certain types of thinking and are reinforced by structural characteristics of particular languages. Studies were selected for inclusion if: (1) the subjects were learners and speakers…

A study attempted to (1) define acoustically the learner's progress in acquisition of a set of phonological features, specifically interlingual differences in the voice onset time of voiceless stop consonants and the number of taps produced when attempting to produce the Spanish phoneme /r/ (trill); (2) determine if and at what stage of…

A two-year study is reported of the transfer of two literacy skills, narrative comprehension and learning from text, from elementary school children's first language (Spanish) to their second (English). For each skill, the primary research question was the degree to which the students' first language (L1) performance was predictive of their second…

Exercises are linguistically or content-oriented. There are three levels of silent reading: orienting, cursory and total. In designing exercises, emphasis should be placed on cursory reading. (Beginners have to concentrate on "total" reading.) Hints are given in acquiring skill in summarizing and excerpting. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

The appearance of English auxiliaries in the speech of five native speakers of Spanish is described, as well as these subjects' acquisition of the negative and interrogative transformations. (Author/RM)

Examines the learning strategies successful language learners employ and suggests that teachers can help their less successful students by paying more attention to learner strategies already seen as productive. (PMP)

Human capacity for language acquisition is not strictly compartmentalized, with one acquisitional mechanism for the native language and others totally unrelated to it; rather, it consists of a unified mechanism flexible enough to handle various differences in external settings. This learning system operates on the formal properties of the…

A distinction is made today between second-language acquisition and foreign-language learning based on the individual's internal processes of learning and the degree of consciousness brought to the learning task. In a second-language acquisition situation, the language is spoken in the immediate environment of the learner, who has good…

The principal objectives of this conference were: (1) to become aware of present research relevant to second language learning/teaching; (2) to stress the need for further research; and (3) to establish directions for this further research. Papers include: "Language Needs and Social Policy" (John Trim); "Some Priorities for Research in Second…

Five common assumptions are held by teachers about learners: (1) adults should choose what children need to learn; (2) oral language must be mastered before written language can be introduced; (3) real, whole language is too difficult for students learning language; (4) language learning is different in different languages, and simultaneous…