Riemer (2009) complains that a large number of sentences, despite appearing to be acceptable to many native speakers of English--including himself--are treated as ungrammatical in recent works that subscribe to the generative approach to (the English) language. In his opinion, this need not be considered "as evidence of an overly narrow…

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge work on second language learning, this "Handbook," written by a team of leading experts, surveys the nature of second language learning and its implications for teaching. Prominent theories and methods from linguistics, psycholinguistics, processing-based, and cognitive approaches are…

The "e-rater"® automated essay scoring system is used operationally in the scoring of the argument and issue tasks that form the Analytical Writing measure of the "GRE"® General Test. For each of these tasks, this study explored the value added of reporting 4 trait scores for each of these 2 tasks over the total e-rater score.…

In the Storyline approach, a fictive world is created in the classroom, with learners working in small groups, taking on the role of characters in a story. The story develops as they work on a range of tasks which integrate the practical and theoretical content of the curriculum. This article reports on a study based on the syllabus for English,…

This study investigates whether adult second language learners' online processing of "wh"-dependencies is constrained by island constraints on movement. Proficiency-matched Spanish and Korean learners of English completed a grammaticality judgment task and a stop-making-sense task designed to examine their knowledge of the relative…

This article uses a conversation analysis methodology to examine how lexical Focus on Form is interactionally accomplished in teachers' vocabulary explanations in secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms. Recent conversation-analytic work has focused on the interactional organisation of vocabulary explanations in…

This study investigated the long-term effects of structural priming on children's use of indirect speech clauses in a narrative context. Forty-two monolingual English-speaking 5-year-olds in two primary classrooms took part in a story-retelling task including reported speech. Testing took place in three individual sessions (pre-test, post-test 1,…

Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners' sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the…

Numerous second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have tried to define grammatical difficulty in second and foreign language acquisition--often as part of an attempt to relate the efficacy of different types of instruction to the degree of difficulty of grammatical structures. The resulting proliferation of definitions and the lack of a…

The curriculum for teaching undergraduate university students in Iran majoring in English generally includes paragraph writing in the second year and essay writing (4-5 paragraphs) in the third year. The first-year course 'Grammar and Writing (I & II)' offered in two consecutive semesters covers grammar only, despite the inclusion of writing…

This report evaluates a developmental project designed by School 21 and the University of Cambridge to improve Year 7 students' oracy skills. The project involved developing an Oracy Skills Framework, which sets out the physical, linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional oracy skills required by students for education and life. Other components…

Voxy, an English-language-learning company, has developed a custom, in-house proficiency exam, the Voxy Proficiency Assessment (VPA), which is given to all learners at the beginning and end of their courses. Using Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR), the impact of covariates, such as total learning activities completed and total number of…

This study examined the effect of type of podcasts and learning styles on speaking, listening, and confidence when college used podcasts for learning Chinese. It focused on college students enrolled in a beginning-level Chinese course at a large university in the southeastern United States. Findings indicated that listening to grammar podcasts…

This article introduces a pedagogical intervention that includes a set of creative activities designed to improve the oral and written production of students in the English classroom, especially those who have shown a lack of interest or attention. It was observed that participants initially seemed careless about studying the language. Eventually…

As part of a longitudinal study on learner and instructor attitudes and patterns of computer and mobile device usage, we have attempted to identify how language instructors and students value their use in L2 learning. During the past five years at Aoyama Gakuin University (AGU) in Tokyo, we have surveyed both students and instructors annually in…