A notable difference between signed and spoken languages is the use of nonmanual linguistic signals that co-occur with the production of signs. These nonmanual signals involve primarily the face and upper torso and are an important feature of American Sign Language (ASL). They include grammatical markers that indicate syntactic categories such as…

This paper reports on a study that examined a group of advanced German L2 learners' awareness and use of English focusing devices. Recent studies suggest that learners are aware of lexical resources, but lack awareness of grammatical structures. Focus constructions, i.e. pragmatically motivated word order variations, are pivotal to any text where…

This article contributes to the growing body of research investigating the effects of drawing learner attention to the problematic aspects of the linguistic input in the context of meaning-focused instruction. One specific approach to concentrate learner attention on form in the written input is known as textual enhancement. The pilot study…

This pilot study examined the development of complexity and fluency of second language (L2) spoken production among L2 learners who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks as constituent units of discourse. Twenty-two students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course at a U.S. university received classroom instruction on 40 grammatical…

This article describes a third-year Spanish grammar course that is taught in lecture/discussion format. The course, which enrolls over 150 students each semester, provides explicit instruction during a weekly lecture and opportunities for students to engage in meaningful output and interaction during small group discussion sessions. The goal is to…

In this study, we examined the influence of child gender and sociocultural (SCL) factors in language production. Subjects were French Parisian children in nine age groups (24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 42, 45 and 48 months). A total of 316 language samples were recorded during a 20-min standardized play session. Measures of grammatical and lexical…

Ten children (aged between 7;11 and 9;2) with mixed reading disability participated in an oral narrative intervention programme that focused on enhancing children's story structure knowledge. The participants had all demonstrated persistent reading and oral narrative comprehension and production difficulties in a two-year longitudinal study prior…

This article aims first to show how a teacher, working within a nationally proscriptive, standards-driven, mainstream context turns a form-focused phonics practice activity into a word game that engages the imagination, intellect, and identity of 5-6-year-old English language learners. Based on the assumption that teacher-student interactions are…

There is a common expectation, particularly amongst international students, that studying in an English-medium university should automatically produce a significant improvement in their English language skills. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that this is not necessarily the case. This paper reports on a study which investigated the…

This collection of papers is the first in a series resulting from the Polish-English Contrastive Project. The overall purposes of the project are to prepare a Polish-English contrastive grammar and to develop pedagogical materials. The basic model used for the research is the transformational generative one. The papers included in this volume are…

This work reports on an initial study of the possibility of providing a suitable framework for the teaching of a foreign language grammar through string analysis, using French as the target language. Analysis of a string word list (word-class sequences) yields an overall view of the grammar. Details are furnished in a set of restrictions which…

This report documents results of a two-year effort toward the study and investigation of the design of a prototype system for Chinese-English machine translation in the general area of physics. Previous work in Chinese-English machine translation is reviewed. Grammatical considerations in machine translation are discussed and detailed aspects of…

This study presents the procedures and results of an experiment conducted in Sweden to assess the relative effectiveness of two methods of teaching the grammatical structures of English as a foreign language to adults. The main objective of the study is to find indications as to which of the two theories (the audiolingual habit theory or the…

Noting that, contrary to the first conference, disagreements began to surface among the conference participants of the second conference, this proceedings contains papers presented at the second conference on the teaching of grammar (except for a preconference workshop and one paper). Papers in the proceedings are: "Keynote: Finding Reasons…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Some Problems of YES-NO Answers" (Aleksander Szwedek); "Danish versus Russian. A Short Analysis of the Verb" (Christian Hougaard); "Polish SIE Constructions and Their English Counterparts" (Wojciech Kubinski); "More on the Time Reference and the Analysis of Tense"…