The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

This article analyzes the way English grammar is described in documents issued between 1998 and 2002 in England for the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and for the lower secondary Key Stage 3 (KS3) National Strategy. The analysis reveals that the NLS and KS3 Strategy do not consistently follow a recognised approach to grammatical description, and…

References to developmental stages and continua seem to be part and parcel of investigations into the acquisition of new grammars. Nonetheless, there seems to be an equivocation in the literature about which is actually the most helpful way of explaining how learner grammars evolve through time. Some see development essentially as gradual growth…

Rhetorical grammar analysis encourages students to view writing as a material social practice in which meaning is actively made, rather than passively relayed or effortlessly produced. The study of rhetorical grammar can demonstrate to students that language does purposeful, consequential work in the world--work that can be learned and applied.

This article investigates the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) for exploring students' achievements in writing, thus moving beyond "deficit models" of grammar in school English. It considers the semantic features of successful interpretations of examination narratives, using what I call the "symbolic reading".…

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure,…

This article presents an empirical and theoretical critique of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model (Myers-Scotton, 1993; Myers-Scotton and Jake, 2001), and includes a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2002) (JMSG) critique of MacSwan (1999, 2000) and reactions to their revision of the MLF model as a "modified minimalist approach." The…

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show inconsistent use of grammatical morphology. Children who are developing language typically also show a period during which they produce grammatical morphemes inconsistently. Various theories claim that both young typically developing children and children with SLI achieve correct production…

This classroom ethnography documents the developing critical literacy pedagogy of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructor over the course of several terms. My research, which involved extensive collaboration with the EAP instructor, explores how specific classroom practices and discourses are enacted and mediated through dialogic…

The study started as a critical response to a new sheltered science content course introduced by the school district where I teach ESOL students. Although the course was a bold and timely initiative, it was not supported by a well-built curriculum, realistic educational goals, and appropriate instructional materials. As I was unsatisfied with what…

Teaching English became a professional and academic field from a half century ago. Many researches for teacher education and teacher training have been conducted in order to raise the English as well as the foreign language trainers' knowledge and capabilities in carrying out effective lessons in classroom. During second millennium of speedily…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to analyze the historical development of HRD knowledge. The analysis aims to use the qualitative research technique of text deconstruction on an important management text from the human relations phase of organization theory. Deconstruction is not a common method to HRD. In this paper, HRD scholars…

This paper discusses issues surrounding the development of a learning object repository (FLORE) for teaching and learning French at the postsecondary level. An evaluation based on qualitative and quantitative data was set up in order to better assess how second-language (L2) students in French perceived the integration of this new repository into…