Examines whether learners initiate attention to form, as requests for assistance, feedback on error, modeling, or repetitions, recasts, and requests for clarification. Results suggest that learners can and do attend to form, though relatively infrequently. The most frequent way they they do this is to request assistance from their teachers.…

Twenty-five advanced Chinese learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) provided grammaticality judents in full-sentence and word-by-word conditions. The results indicated that parsing, and not grammatical competence, is the source of difficulty on performance with subject extraction sentences. Contains 58 references. (MDM)

Investigated how 30 tertiary English-as-a-Second-Language learners, at advanced and intermediate levels, engaged in a text reconstruction task. The study examined the types of grammatical items that caused the students most concern, and the reasoning they used to arrive at grammatical decisions. (Author/JL)

Looks ahead to some of the software capabilities soon to be available on the Web for helping learners notice linguistic form in text and Web-based audio materials. Points out that some of the general purpose authoring tools on the Web are ideally suited for developing English as a Second or Other Language learning materials. (Author/VWL)

Examines similarities and differences in loss of grammatical systems across languages, investigating structural changes in six attrited languages as compared to nonattrited languages and demonstrating significant parallelism in structural changes across languages. Correlation between levels of grammatical and lexical loss are discussed, noting a…

This action research investigated the problem of college students' participation in German class, examining how to engage students in focusing on form when grammar and accuracy held no interest for them. The action research showed how collaborative work could inform a teacher's perception of classroom events, leading to definable changes and…

Considers various theoretical and practical issues in language teaching that could help bridge the current methodological divide and proposes several reforms to the way that languages are currently taught in secondary schools and higher education. The paper emphasizes contemporary approaches to grammar, use of the first and second language in the…

In this study, we test the prediction, derived from the Critical Period Hypothesis, that a native level in L2 grammar cannot be attained by learners who start acquiring a second language after childhood. We selected 43 very advanced late learners of Dutch (native speakers of German, French and Turkish) and compared their performance on a grammar…

In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show…

Grammar instruction has long been a troubling issue for many language arts teachers. This collaborative research between an elementary classroom teacher and university faculty, based on the assumption that grammar is most effectively taught in reading and writing, looks into the short- and long-term effect of error-based grammar instruction on the…

This study carried out at Lander University attempts to make a qualitative comparison between the contributions to a student newspaper made by foreign students and American students as well as make some analytical assessments as to the focus and world view brought to bear on the writings in the student paper. It shows that foreign students…

In this paper, the authors explore a methodology for assessing learners' meta-pragmatic awareness of variation in French language use. "Meta-pragmatic awareness" is defined as knowledge of the social meaning of variable second language forms and awareness of the ways in which these forms mark different aspects of social contexts, and is therefore…

This paper explores a narrative approach to diversity in teacher education. One story is presented, initially without context; as layers of context are added additional possible readings of the story are suggested. A second story is contrasted with the first by using a three-dimensional space--temporal, interactional and in-place--to provide…

Within '"communicative language teaching," "natural" language has had a privileged position, and a focus on form has been seen as something inauthentic or as something that is inconsequential for learning (for a critique, see Kramsch and Sullivan 1996; Cook 1997). Yet in the present study of an immersion classroom, it was found that children with…

This paper gives a contrastive analysis of noun phrases in English and Chinese. The syntactic features of the structures, the devices used to mark distinctions in number, case and gender, as well as the similarities and differences between English and Chinese relative clauses are discussed. Partly due to the documented differences between these…