The study of Kurt Godel's proof of the "incompleteness" of a formal system such as "Principia Mathematica" is a great way to stimulate students' thinking and creative processes and interest in mathematics and its important developments. This article describes salient features of the proof together with ways to deal with…

Syntactic priming is the tendency for a speaker to produce a structure that was encountered in recent discourse and is measured by calculating how frequently speakers use the modelled structures as opposed to alternatives. Recent lab-based studies have shown that carrying out syntactic priming activities with trained interlocutors positively…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are effective tools for education. However, developing them is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that underlies the system's intelligence. The goal of this research is to reduce this knowledge acquisition bottleneck and better…

The claim that the words "for," "and," "nor," "but," "or," "yet," and "so" (FANBOYS) constitute a complete list of English coordinating conjunctions is examined though syntactic analysis and found wanting. This analysis is presented as an illustration of the need for teachers constantly to question the choice of material that we present to our…

When we use technology to teach mathematics, we hope to focus on the mathematics, restricting the computer software systems to providing support for our pedagogy. It is a matter of common experience, however, that students can become distracted or frustrated by the quirks of the particular software system being used. Here, experience using the…

Coursebooks as one of the major issues of language teaching/learning instruction can relieve the overburden as well as under-prepared teacher of a great deal of stress, time and additional work. Currently, both commercial and teacher-made English language teaching (ELT) coursebooks are available for use and seem flexible at hands. In any respect,…

This study investigated the effects of shared reading on oral vocabulary development with 42 second language (L2) learners in Dakar, Senegal. Participants, ranging from four to six years old, were taught French target words using predictable books, non-predicable books, and control activities of the typical local instructional practice of using…

Recasts are one type of corrective feedback that reformulates all or part of a learner's erroneous utterance during communicative interaction without changing the meaning. Categorized as implicit and input-providing corrective feedback, recasts have become the focus of debate in the area of interaction research in recent years. The debate…

"Constructions" are the central unit of grammatical analysis in cognitive linguistics. In formal linguistics "construction" referred to forms that were projected from lexical items rather than from an autonomous syntax. Thus, an expression, "I danced the night away" requires an intransitive verb in a transitive construction provided "away" is…

One dimension of language proficiency considered important for reading and writing academic texts is morphological awareness--the understanding of how complex words are formed from meaningful smaller units (i.e., affixes, roots) that contribute to words' meanings and functions. This quasi-experimental study evaluated the effects of instruction on…

The nature of knowledge needed for teaching elementary science and the development of such knowledge is a focus of ongoing research in science education. Internationally, there is a move to include scientific literacy as an aim of science education curricula. In order to teach such curricula teachers need two types of subject matter knowledge…

Researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) have increasingly discussed the role that attention plays in the learning of a second language (L2). This discussion has led to research on proposed pedagogical strategies aimed at directing L2 learners' attention to aspects of the L2 grammar that are difficult to learn or acquire. Research on one…

I provide an update on the state of the art of the research--the last one being Collentine (2003)--on the acquisition of the function of the subjunctive and mood selection, as well as the research's implications for pedagogy. The article considers what we currently know about the role of universal grammar, psycholinguistic perspectives on the…

Online translation (OT) sites such as Free Translation and Babel Fish are freely available to the general public and purport to convert inputted text, from single words to entire paragraphs, instantly from one language to another. Discussion in the literature about OT for second-language (L2) acquisition has generally focused either on the…

Whereas second language (L2) education research has extensively examined how different types of interactional feedback can be facilitative of L2 development in meaning-oriented classrooms, most of these primary studies have focused on recasts (i.e., teachers' reformulations of students' errors). Some researchers have claimed that recasts serve an…