This qualitative study uses an analysis of literature circle discussions to illuminate larger issues of gender and social class for a group of fifth-grade students. By examining how four students were positioned and positioned themselves within these literature conversations, I demonstrate that the roles reproduced certain gender- and…

In this article, I describe Writing in Psychology, a semester-length 3-credit elective course designed to improve students' writing skills, familiarize them with psychology's writing conventions, and teach them American Psychological Association (APA) style. Students produced a case report, a report of an empirical study, a conference abstract,…

This article examines the relationship between group and individual patterns of variation in one area of the grammar: verbal morphology. The results of studies of the acquisition of English and Hungarian verbal morphology by Chinese learners show that individual patterns of variation closely match group patterns on several dimensions. Multivariate…

In this paper, we describe part of an Australian national research project that aimed to find out how well prepared beginning teachers are to teach literacy. A majority of beginning teachers participating in a series of national surveys and focus group meetings were confident about their personal literacy skills, their conceptual understandings of…

Purpose: The current study focuses on describing the English language narrative skills of children who have been exposed to the Filipino language. Method: Eight children between the ages of 6;0 (years;months) and 7;7 who spoke primarily English but who were exposed to the Filipino language at home participated. Each child produced three narrative…

Understanding the mechanisms learners use to process target language input is crucial to developing a complete model of both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. If adult L2 learners are found to process the target language with mechanisms that differ from those used by child L1 learners and adult native speakers, what…

In the present study we investigate sentence production in the German interlanguage of Turkish students who have learned German as a first and English as a second foreign language. The students know both languages at an (advanced) intermediate level. Nevertheless, we observed some properties of the German interlanguage that seem to indicate an…

This paper reviews studies of teacher cognition in relation to the teaching of grammar in first, second, and foreign language classrooms. Teacher cognition encompasses a range of psychological constructs and these are reflected in the research reviewed here. Thus, in turn, I discuss studies of teachers' declarative knowledge about grammar, of…

This study examined the on-line processing of French sentences in a grammaticality judgment experiment. Three age groups of French children (mean age: 6;8, 8;6 and 10;10 years) and a group of adults were asked to detect grammatical violations as quickly as possible. Three factors were studied: the violation type: agreement violations (number and…

Building on previous studies of the effects of planning on second language (L2) learners' oral narratives and drawing on Kellog's (1996) model of writing, this article reports a study of the effects of three types of planning conditions (pretask planning, unpressured on-line planning, and no planning) on 42 Chinese learners' written narratives…

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the contributions of explicit and implicit processes during second language (L2) sentence comprehension. We used a L2 grammaticality judgment task (GJT) to test 20 native English speakers enrolled in the first four semesters of Spanish while recording both accuracy and ERP data. Because…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the potential benefits of two corrective feedback techniques (recasts and prompts) for learners of different proficiency levels. Sixty-four students in three intact grade 6 intensive English as a second language classes in the Montreal area were assigned to the two experimental conditions--one received…

This study places the predictions of the bilingual interactive activation model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998) and the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) in the same context to investigate lexical processing in a second language (L2). The performances of two groups of native English speakers, one less proficient and the other more…

In this paper the effect of interaction between learners of English as a second language during a dictogloss task on the acquisition of the passive form is investigated. Subjects were 34 Dutch high school students in their fifth year of English. The experimental group was given two dictogloss tasks, which consisted in the reconstruction in small…

How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilizing the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of "formal-shift"…