The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the…

This paper questions the assumption that corpora are authentic, with particular reference to their application in language pedagogy. The author argues that, because of the form the corpus takes, authentic source texts forfeit a crucial criterion for authenticity, namely context, in the transition from source to electronic data. Other authentic…

Research on interaction has provided important insights on how second languages may be acquired through interaction, and on how second language learners use their second language in various settings and tasks. Research into computer mediated communication (CMC) in a second language learning context has been a logical outcome of interactionist…

Colloquial Singapore English is an outer circle variety that exhibits contact induced linguistic change. It has been characterized as the L variant in diglossic opposition to standard English. In this paper, the authors address two related issues: (1) the extent to which the Singapore English diglossia is supported by corpus data, and (2) the…

Quite often, educators tell families of children who are learning English as a second language to speak only English, and not their native language, at home. Although these educators may have good intentions, the authors argue that the educators' advice to families is misguided and stems from misunderstandings about the nature of bilingualism and…

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to…

What are the effects of globalisation on patterns of language use in the domain of media in Singapore? Rather than only cultural imperialism of hegemonic English, which is no doubt the case, the use of languages in the "mediascap" also shows the consumption of non-English languages and cultures. Though English may be the main language of…

One of the choices available in English is between one-word verbs (train at the gym) and their multi-word counterparts (work out at the gym). Multi-word verbs tend to be colloquial in tone and are a particular feature of informal spoken discourse. Previous research suggests that English learners often have problems with multi-word verbs, and may…

This study focuses on the characteristics of discourse between Latino immigrant children and their teacher during science instruction. Peer interaction was analyzed to identify the use and importance of the native language (L1) for the development of content knowledge during group collaboration. In addition, the interaction between teacher and…

Examples are given of real lexical errors made by learner writers, and consideration is given to the way in which three learners' dictionaries could deal with the lexical items that were misused. The dictionaries were the "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary," the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English," and the "Chambers Universal Learners'…

Situations are given with which to teach beginners the English simple present in its meaning of habitual action. For advanced students, situations and dialogs are suggested with which the future meaning of the simple present can be expressed and learned. (IFS/WGA)

A system for teaching foreign languages to adults is described. The course material is divided into categories based on the language needs of the students, and credits are given for each completed category. (Text is in French.) (PMP)

A comparison is made of American and Japanese humor in a class of English as a second language. American humor is categorized into four types: anecdotal, wordplay, wise sayings and contrived. (AG)

Discusses various uses of testing in language teaching as well as testing that occurs in normal language use. (RM)

Urges student involvement in classroom activities, rather than formal classroom teaching, in learning English as a second language. (LG)