L1 habits often tend to interfere with the process of learning a second language. The vowel habits of Arab learners of English are one such interference. Arabic orthography is such that certain vowels indicated by diacritics are often omitted, since an experienced reader of Arabic knows, by habit, the exact vowel sound in each phonetic…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

This paper reports on a small-scale study into the effects of uncoded correction (writing the correct forms above each error) and coded annotations (writing symbols that encourage learners to self-correct) on Colombian university-level EFL learners' written work. The study finds that while both coded annotations and uncoded correction appear to…

This study investigated the specific ways secondary English learners (ELs) and redesignated fluent English-proficient learners (RFEPs) use academic vocabulary that assesses interpretive reading and analytical writing ability. The research examines how ELs and RFEPs, formerly ELs, differ in use and misuse of academic words. The study extends…

The current research investigated the acquisition of the copula "be" in Present Simple Tense (PST) in English by native speakers of Russian. The aim of the study was to determine whether or not Russian students with different levels of English proficiency would encounter any problems while using the copula "be" in PST in English. The study also…

Background: Children who are bilingual and have speech sound disorder are likely to be under-referred, possibly due to confusion about typical speech acquisition in bilingual children. Aims: To investigate what is known about the impact of bilingualism on children's acquisition of speech in English to facilitate the identification and treatment of…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between proactive and reactive Focus on Form (FonF) and gestures. Two English classes in a public high school in Japan taught by a native speaker of English were observed and videotaped for 96 min and analyzed. Overall, 64 proactive FonF and 43 reactive FonF were provided. Among them,…

This study investigated the role of verbal working memory on bilingual lexical disambiguation. Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences that ended in either a cognate or noncognate homonym or a control word. Participants decided whether follow-up target words were related in meaning to the sentences. On critical trials, sentences biased the…

In the seven decades since Leopold's groundbreaking 1939 study, there has been no longitudinal study covering more than two years of a Japanese bilingual subject's development. Despite the lack of longitudinal research, however, we have been broadly informed by the veritable outpouring of research on a short-term basis since the late twentieth…

This study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Thai language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast. 120 English paragraphs written by 40 second year English major students were analyzed by using Error Analysis (EA).The results revealed…

Bilingual children are frequently misdiagnosed as having Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Misdiagnosis may be minimized by tests with high degrees of sensitivity and specificity. The current study used a new test, the School-Age Sentence Imitation Test-English 32 (SASIT-E32), to investigate sentence repetition in monolingual and bilingual…

This study investigated sentence-processing strategies adopted by advanced nonnative speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs) of English in the context of an English structure with which NNSs reportedly have an acquisition difficulty (e.g., Swan & Smith, 2001)--namely, modal perfect (MP). Participants read MP sentences such as "He could have…

Collocation is practically very tough to Chinese English learners. The main reason lies in the fact that English and Chinese belong to two distinct language systems. And the deep reason is that learners tend to develop different metaphorical concept in accordance with distinct ways of thinking in Chinese. The paper, taking "absorb…