Describes the computer as a hammer, a tool with unique qualities that allows people to perceive, manipulate, and express language in ways quite different from traditional media. Explores the tool of the multimedia presentation, a common use of technology in classrooms today. Describes a simple project with sixth graders that incorporates reading,…

Examines the processing of Spanish future tense morphology incidentally while reading in a second language. Participants had no previous knowledge of future tense morphology so that, as they read the passage used in the study, they encountered the target form for the first time, which is an accented "a" on the end of an infinitive--for example,…

This paper reports an exploratory study of questions about English grammar sent in by a group of Hong Kong English-as-a-Second-Language teachers to a teacher support network, "Telenex." The study examines the questions Hong Kong ESL teachers ask about the English language. (Author/JL)

Describes some stable syntactic features of Swazi English. Discusses, among others, the use of the modal auxiliary "must," the use of "as to," the conflation of the emphatic "do" with the simple past tense, and dangling modifiers. (Author/JL)

Examines aspects of the knowledge base that experienced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers draw on in their teaching, primarily in giving explanations of grammar and other language points. Focuses on three categories of teacher knowledge: content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge; and knowledge of learners. (Author/VWL)

A study assessed the ability of 20 bilingual Spanish- English-speaking children (ages 4-5) with specific language impairments (SLI) to detect and produce grammatically valid "definite article + noun" forms in Spanish. Students were more likely to offer an accurate response when the response followed an implicit morphemic rule. (Contains…

Examines the effectiveness of an early literacy intervention project for inner-city children in grades 1-4. Discusses the factors that predicted reading growth as the number of rime patterns taught, story grammar instruction, the number of words the child read at home, and parent involvement in recreational reading. Considers results and…

Explores the role of lexical phrases in language teaching. Lexical phrases are an important feature in language use and language acquisition and offer advantages for language teaching. (Author/VWL)

Reviews current views about the status of grammar learning through task work and suggests that grammar learning can be addressed at different stages during task performance: prior to the task, during the task, and after the task. Examples are given of how this can be achieved in materials' design and in the classroom.(Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on…

When-questions are one of the last wh-questions produced by children learning English either as a first language (L1) or as a second language (L2). This article proposes a possible explanation based on internal linguistic factors, which suggest that in a when-question tense is a bound variable. Data collected by the National Center for Bilingual…

Studied second language acquisition (SLA) designed with Web-based elicitation tasks to obtain greater internal and external validity. Tested the acquisition of the properties subsumed under the verb movement parameter and the null subject parameter by English native speakers enrolled in college French. (Author/VWL)

Variation in mothers' child-directed speech and in their children's rates of language development are examined as a function of childbirth order and family socioeconomic status. Findings suggest that language experience plays a non-trivial role in language development, and that the nature of that role is different for different components of…

Identifies a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms and three Spanish verb forms used in Galician with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. Shows that this variation is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones. (Author/VWL)

A word association experiment examined conceptual representation in bilingual memory. Dutch-English bilinguals associated twice to nouns and verbs that varied on concreteness and cognate status. Findings suggest that conceptual representation in bilingual memory depends on word-type and grammatical class: concrete translations, cognates, and noun…

Examined whether variations in adult native speaker performance arise from variations in working memory capacity or variations in procedural grammatical competence. Three groups of 18-year-old native speakers of English were tested on comprehension and recall of English complex noun phrase constructions. Results support the view that variations in…