Analyzes the speech of a German-French bilingual boy and observes two major developmental phases: (1) one characterized by object drop similar to that seen in Chinese; and (2) one characterized by the acquisition of the object clitic paradigm and a shift to an adult-like morphological licensing mechanism. (84 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the nature of input available to learners in the institutional setting of the academic advising session. Results indicate that evidence for the realization of speech acts, positive evidence from peers and status unequals, the effect of stereotypes, and limitations of a learner's pragmatic and grammatical competence are influential…

Presents an approach to developing a grammatical scope and sequence for elementary and intermediate foreign-language instruction that is different from the standard model, which bases the grammatical syllabus of a textbook on tradition, intuition, or both. The article argues that different descriptions of grammar are needed for each of the skills…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…

Studied the use of verbal morphology in oral narratives by eight advanced learners of Spanish. Learners commented in an immediate retrospective protocol on their use of perfective and imperfective morphology. Some reasons for tense-aspect morphological selections have implications for research methodology in future studies on acquisition and use…

Addresses three issues of interest to language teachers: the relevance of research studies in second language acquisition (SLA) for classroom teaching, the effectiveness of the formal teaching of grammatical rules, and the identification of good strategies to enable learners to internalize grammar. (Author/VWL)

Examines the impact of interaction enhancement (IE) on the learning of English articles. IE is a treatment that guides learners to focus on form by providing interactional modifications and leads learners to produce modified output within a problem-solving task (strategic interaction). (Author/VWL)

Examines the occurrence and use of recasts in adult native-speaker/nonnative-speaker interactions in a classroom setting. Focuses on native speaker recasts in three types of negotiations: one-signal negotiated interactions, extended negotiated interactions, and non-negotiated interactions, and on recasts in response to nonnative speaker levels of…

Identifies the status of "be" based on Korean English-as-Foreign-Language learners' developing interlanguage grammars. Korean English learners' utterance data were analyzed, with a special focus on one middle school learner. Analyses from the perspectives of developmental process and head direction suggest that the early emerging…

Argues that in the initial stages of learning a new form in a foreign language and its associated functions, communicative needs and learning needs are fundamentally opposed. Suggests that what is needed is an orientation to language that is based on prior familiarity with specific forms and meaning that can be used in discourse as anchors to…

Investigates whether age of onset of bilingualism has an effect on ultimate attainment and documents incomplete acquisition and attrition of tense/aspect morphology in Spanish. Results suggest that morpho-phonological spell-outs and semantic features of functional categories are affected by incomplete acquisition and language loss, and that many…

Contrasts the English past tense inflection with a more complex morphological subsystem, the Polish genitive. The genitive case has three different markers, each restricted to a different subset of nouns, in both the singular and the plural. Analysis of the spontaneous speech of three children between 1 and 5 years of age showed that they…

Offers quotes from articles about English teaching in the United States published in professional journals from 1847 to 1955. Suggests there never was a "golden age" of English teaching. Shows discussion and controversy about teaching writing, about what literature should be allowed in the schools, whether teaching grammar is worthwhile, and…

Describes a series of communicative tasks designed for use by learners of Thai as a second or foreign language and reports on a study that tested the tasks' effectiveness at providing opportunities for learners to focus on linguistic form during conversational interaction. (Author/VWL)