The article analyses the system of methodological principles employed in the comprehensive study of linguistic variation in diachrony. In particular, the author defines the essence of the scientific principle as a means of linguistic study as well as thoroughly describes the system of methodological principles of a diachronic study of any…

There have been many studies on first language interference towards learners' second or foreign language learning, but not many on the otherwise. This study investigates the effects of learning Japanese as a foreign language towards learners' first language use, Indonesian. The data for this qualitative study were obtained from five Japanese…

Purpose: The general aim of this study is to enhance our understanding of the patterns of language growth in Spanish and English during the school years. In this study, we used a longitudinal retrospective approach to explore the growth of the percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) in both Spanish and English in 2 groups of English learners…

This paper firstly presents and examines the pedagogical intervention called Processing Instruction (PI). Secondly, it reviews and discusses the main findings of the empirical research conducted to measure the relative effects of PI. Current research trends within the PI research framework will be outlined. Experimental research investigating the…

It is clearly observed that EFL teachers' language proficiency has been great concern for researchers in recent decades. However, there seems to be few studies conducted in Turkey to conceive EFL teachers' language proficiency level. Language proficiency refers to competency of performing a language where receptive and productive awareness of…

This case study explores how English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners reconstructed their writing beliefs when exposed to a systemic functional linguistics (SFL)--based writing curriculum. The study was conducted through qualitative content analyses of four EFL students' interviews, journal entries, teacher/peer feedback, as well as their…

The role of attention has been central to theoretical and empirical inquiries in second language (L2) acquisition. The current eye-tracking study examined how external and internal attentional manipulations (Chun, Golomb, &Turk-Browne, 2011) promote L2 grammatical development. Participants (n = 55) were exposed to Spanish direct-object…

The current study responds to the call for increased dialogue among different areas of additional language research. Specifically, we bring together learner corpus research and variationist approaches to second language acquisition to advance learner corpus research in two ways: (a) by modeling interlanguage development and variability and (b) by…

The present study examined the effects of different types of written input on the learning and retention of collocational knowledge. Eighty-three second language (L2) learners from four intact classes were divided into a control group and three treatment groups. The treatment groups were provided with infrequent grammatical collocations embedded…

Purpose: In African American English and Southern White English, we examined whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) overtly mark tense and agreement structures at lower percentages than typically developing (TD) controls, while also examining the effects of dialect, structure, and scoring approach. Method: One hundred six…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

We examine the syntactic structures exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation. Traditionally, research on the linguistic abilities of persons with dementia is either observational (reports kept by caregivers) or experimental (e.g. based on comprehension tasks), and the focus is not on the syntactic competence of the speaker. We combine…

The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Pragmatic competence is an indispensable dimension of overall language ability, and proper interpretation of implied meanings is a major constituent of pragmatic competence. In this regard, this study aimed to investigate the efficiency of a film-based instruction program devised to facilitate the interpretation of implied meanings in English. It…

An enduring question is whether language learning aptitude is a stable trait or is one influenced by experience, such as living with two languages. We investigated aptitude in bilinguals and treated their bilingual experience as an aggregate of variables, focusing on how individual differences in (a) language experience variables of proficiency,…