The terms "interactional competence" and "learning" are discussed in the context of recent research in the areas of cognitive science and ethnomethodological conversation analysis studies of language learning. Two data excerpts from a longitudinal case study of a beginning learner of English are presented to illustrate (1) the…

As a subfield of linguistics, phonetics and phonology have as their main axis the concern of articulation of sounds; that is, how human beings produce speech. Although dated back over 2000 years ago, modern contributions of scientists and scholars regarding phonetics and phonology have involved various fields of science and schools of thought such…

The purpose of this study was to determine if Morphological Instruction (knowledge of the Germanic, Latin, and Greek words, roots, and affixes of English) was an effective instructional approach towards accelerating the acquisition of spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension and closing at least a 6,000 word gap between English language…

This article examines rule-governed characteristics of Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) by applying Hyme's Verse Analysis to its discourse processes. Focusing on versification and reiteration, the article concludes that the narrative structure of HCE is poetic and metrical, and that these structures might constitute part of narrative grammar in creole…

Describes linguistic model known as British Contextualism in the Federal Republic of Germany as a basis for the practical language component in second language teacher training programs. Concept goes beyond orthodox structuralism by adding a level of context. (Author/BK)

The relevance, the application, and the importance of linguistics to teaching English as a foreign language is discussed. The author's assumption is that linguistics is "irrelevant to the aims, and inapplicable to the tasks of such teaching," and agrees with linguists such as Rosenbaum that the goal of linguistic science is "to determine…

Attempts a sketchy classification of English causative verbs, using various linguistic theories but primarily that of generative grammar. (Text is in French.) (AM)

In this essay, the relationship of American linguistic theory to teaching English as a second language (ESL) is traced over the past few decades. The limitations of the structuralist paradigm in a language learning situation are discussed. The use of pattern drills based on the structuralist surface feature attention to word placement. The…

Seeks to establish a criterion for selection of language content not based on language, but rather on the process of language acquisition. (DS)

Compares sentence grammar with text linguistics, giving a survey of the treatment of indirect discourse in school grammars, and finding them inadequate. Recommends rules derived from text linguistics in spite of their greater complexity, because they do not hold the student to mechanical recasting of sentences. (IFS/WGA)

Critiques Pienemann and Johnston (1987), an influential model of the acquisition of English as a second language (ESL) morphology. The article demonstrates that their proposals are incompatible with syntactic analyses of word formation and emphasizes that second language researchers must ensure that models of second language acquisition are…

Two dimensions of the definition of idiom (the semantic and the structural) that may be relevant to the foreign language learner language learner are abstracted from non-specialist dictionary definitions of the term "idiom." The structural dimension is further subdivided into two aspects: place in a structural hierarchy, and degree of…