Addresses past and current issues concerning teacher response to first-year student writing and suggests that teacher intervention should be viewed as a writing process itself. Describes the author's own process of responding to student writing, which he has found to be very effective. Concludes that individual teachers must decide for themselves…

Presents BANZAI, a new intelligent language tutor program that is designed to develop learners' grammatical and sentence production skills in Japanese as well as to instill cultural knowledge about Japan. Illustrates actual lesson plans and sample exercises provided by BANZAI. (Author/VWL)

A linguistic approach to language acquisition is based on two tenets: the workings of language must be studied through grammatical analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation, and understanding how a particular language is acquired requires cross-linguistic comparative research. Illustrates these tenets, discussing dative alternation in…

An output-centered approach to foreign language instruction is presented that emphasizes a focus on form. Argues that "pushed output" is a crucial element of the language classroom environment that is focused on oral skills development among learners. (Author/VWL)

Analyzed correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's wh-question data. Argues that two current movement rule accounts cannot explain patterning of early wh-questions. Data can be explained by the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and inversion and universion…

This study of the use of "then"/"after that" by Vietnamese English-as-a-Second-Language learners suggests that the temporal adverbial poses a significant learning challenge similar to morphological means of temporal reference. Learner usage is monitored by a looser notion of salience, which emerges from the transference of a salience-marking…

Relative to both same-age peers and younger typically developing children with similar mean lengths of utterance, 15 Spanish-speaking preschool children with specific language impairment showed more limited use of several different grammatical morphemes. These limitations were most marked for noun-related morphemes such as adjective-agreement…

Hopes that all young people in schools might have English classes that teach them spelling, punctuation and correctness but also help them toward the personal discovery of the Word as an instrument of creation, a power that lies within all of them, a power that might save them. (SG)

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

The authors report data from a longitudinal study that addresses the relations between working memory capacity and reading comprehension skills in children aged 8, 9, and 11 years. At each time point, the authors assessed children's reading ability, vocabulary and verbal skills, performance on 2 working memory assessments (sentence-span and digit…

A number of studies have shown that second language learners acquire vocabulary through reading, but only relatively small amounts. However, most of these studies used only short texts, measured only the acquisition of meaning, and did not credit partial learning of words. This case study of a learner of French explores whether an extensive…

The potential impact of implicit learning on education has been repeatedly stressed, though little research has examined this connection directly. The current paper describes two experiments that, inspired by artificial grammar learning experiments, examine the utility of implicit learning as a method for teaching atomic bonding rules to 11-12…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

The present chapter bridges two lines of neurocognitive research, which are, despite being related, usually discussed separately from each other. The two fields, second language (L2) sentence comprehension and artificial grammar processing, both depend on the successful learning of complex sequential structures. The comparison of the two research…

Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2-3-year-old…