Definitions that children provide can be a valuable measure of their syntax, and specifically, of their ability to produce relative clauses. This research explored the acquisition of subject, object, and indirect object relative clauses in 121 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 8 years, 6 months (3;5-8;6). The children were asked…

This study investigated the ability of 23 kindergarten children to construct stories drawing upon genre conventions in order to differentiate simple narrative stories, a familiar and often-visited genre in the kindergarten literacy classroom, and humorous stories, familiar to the children's literacy experiences mostly outside official literacy…

In 1997 I published a paper in Language Teaching entitled "Form-focused instruction and second language acquisition: A review of classroom and laboratory research". The paper reviewed the results of studies investigating the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language (L2) learning. It was organized around seven questions,…

Many K-12 teachers struggle to meet the needs of diverse learners as school reforms promote new disciplinary literacy requirements. In response, language education scholars have argued that teachers must develop "disciplinary linguistic knowledge" (DLK), or an understanding of language in their content area and an ability to design…

There is an increasing pressure from school leaders in many countries for teaching to be based solely on ICT tools. The present study is interested in what this does to pupils' attitudes towards ICT in language classrooms. Is a digital monopoly a good way for pupils to learn languages? Is it what they want? To understand for which tasks students…

Basil Bernstein (1971) introduced the notion of the Restricted and the Elaborated code, claiming that working-class speakers have access only to the former but middle-class members to both. In an attempt to test this theory in the Iranian context and to investigate the effect of social class on the quality of students language use, we examined the…

Previous studies revealed that isolated and integrated form-focused instruction (FFI) are two effective means of improving language proficiency of students, separately. However, few empirical studies have explored their complementarity in the context of English as a second language. This study, therefore, investigates the effects of combining…

Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice…

This paper evaluates the validity of teaching English grammar to preservice teachers in a teacher education course at a regional university. The course was delivered in blended mode using the grammar component of My Writing Lab Global (MWLG) and face-to-face instruction. The aim of this study was to establish if there are benefits to derive from…

Chinese EFL learners may have difficulty in speaking fluent and accurate English, for their speaking competence are likely to be influenced by cognitive, linguistic and affective factors. With the aim to enhance those learners' oral proficiency, this paper first discusses three effective models of teaching English speaking, and then proposes a…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL) through animated stories bears many prospects for an effective and meaningful language instruction as animated stories can help to contextualize the new language providing audiovisual input along with the story narration. In this study, the role of animated stories in teaching EFL (English as a Foreign…

This study used quantitative analyses complemented by the retrospective data obtained through a stimulated recall procedure to address three interrelated issues: (a) whether second language learners use online planning opportunities to carefully plan their speech to enhance the quality of the language they produce, (b) what kinds of self-repair…

Indigenous languages are used for instruction in elementary schools in Papua New Guinea, but teachers have generally received their own education in English. The challenges of identifying terminology to use in mathematics include many-to-one correspondences between English and the vernacular languages, and different grammatical structures.…

Evaluating language materials is very useful for language teachers, and one essential consideration in evaluating language materials is obtaining the teachers' views on its value (Tomlinson, 2003). Thus, this study aimed to explore Palestinian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' attitudes towards the different aspects of the English…