This article explores the effect of raters' background on assessments made in an occupation-specific oral language test, the Japanese Language Test for Tour Guides. Assessments of 51 test candidates made by 33 assessors were compared in order to determine what effect background has on assessments made on both linguistic and "real-world"…

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Polish and English forms of addressing people and the sociocultural rules of their use. It is pointed out that numerous similarities in the repertoires of English and Polish forms of address lead Polish English-as-a-Second-Language learners to assume wrongly that the similarities extend also to the…

This study investigated the usefulness of a test designed to explore speaker awareness of linguistic constraints on the variable omission of "ne" by native speakers of French and learners of French as a second language. Results suggest speakers do have awareness of some constraints and that some advanced nonnative learners have a particular…

Compared grammaticality judgment (GJ) test data with dehydrated sentence test data, collecting data about verb movement from three levels of adult second-language (L2) Spanish learners. The GJs of L2 learners were consistent, suggesting that a relationship exists between a standard GJ test and a dehydrated sentence test and noting that GJ data are…

Based on a survey of over 1,000 learners of 10 different languages at different levels of instruction, this study collected and analyzed data over a 3-year period to compare the beliefs about language learning reported in the present study with those of Horwitz's (1988). (Author/VWL)

In this study, a sentence interpretation experiment based on Bates and MacWhinney's Competition Model was administered to second language learners of English and Chinese at three different stages of learning. Examined how transfer patterns at the sentence processing level change as a function of proficiency and investigates whether or how transfer…

Provides a general overview of two books--"The Second Time Around: Minimalism and Second Language Acquisition" and "Second Language Syntax: A Generative Introduction--and shows how the respond to key issues in second language acquisition, including the process of second language acquisition, access to universal grammar, the role of…

Compares he use of linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor in a corpus of English and Spanish financial reports published in newspapers during the October 1997 stock market crash. Findings indicate much similarity in conceptual and linguistic metaphors between the two languages, but some differences in the frequency of particular linguistic…

This review article analyzes the results of several representative English morpheme-order studies conducted in the 1970s in light of current functional-category theory. Comparative analysis found significant discoveries related to category-specific development of functional projections in first language acquisition and cross-categorical…

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of what has become the standard approach to teaching relative clauses. To overcome the disadvantages, proposes a hierarchical teaching method that begins by introducing noun phrases that contain relative clauses before comparing them with similar structures in the learner's first language. Shows an…

Tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) in proficient Hebrew-English bilinguals were compared to those of age-matched monolinguals. Monolinguals retrieved words in English, and bilinguals retrieved words from both languages. Results showed an increased TOT rate in bilinguals. (Author/VWL)

The present chapter bridges two lines of neurocognitive research, which are, despite being related, usually discussed separately from each other. The two fields, second language (L2) sentence comprehension and artificial grammar processing, both depend on the successful learning of complex sequential structures. The comparison of the two research…

The facilitative role of explicit information in second language acquisition has been supported by a significant body of research (Alanen, 1995; Carroll & Swain, 1993; de Graaff, 1997; DeKeyser, 1995; Ellis, 1993; Robinson, 1996, 1997), but counterevidence is also available (Rosa & ONeill, 1999; VanPatten & Oikkenon, 1996). This experimental study…

This article compares ordinary conversational topics and targeted second language (L2) forms for their effectiveness in building and maintaining classroom discourse cohesion. In this study, 16 learners participated in 2 lessons, 1 with teacher turns determined by a grammatical object of instruction, and the other with turns determined by…

This study investigated whether a word-learning method in which learners infer the meaning of unknown words from the context, subsequently verify the meaning with the aid of a word list, and finally memorize the meaning ("meaning-inferred method") leads to better retention than one in which the meaning of unknown words is given in the form of a…