As is known to all, errors are inevitable in the process of language learning for Chinese students. Should we ignore students' errors in learning English? In common with other questions, different people hold different opinions. All teachers agree that errors students make in written English are not allowed. For the errors students make in oral…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

This classroom-based study explored links among second language (L2) learners' interaction mindsets, interactional behaviors, and L2 development in the context of peer interaction. While peer interaction research has revealed that certain interactional behaviors (e.g., receiving corrective feedback and engaging in collaborative interaction) assist…

Recent neurological breakthroughs in our understanding of the Critical Period Hypothesis and prosody may suggest strategies on how phonics instruction could improve L2 language learning and in particular phoneme/grapheme decoding. We therefore conducted a randomised controlled-trial on the application of prosody and phonics techniques, to improve…

Purpose: This paper discusses the development of a system using SMS (short messaging system) to facilitate learning and also as a new method in the evaluation of teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach: The design of a system that uses SMS for the quiz is proposed as an alternative for formative assessment of teaching and learning for…

After over 60 years of plain writing advocacy calling for government agencies to increase the clarity of official communication, the Plain Writing Act (PWA) of 2010 codified the incorporation of plain language in any federal government document for pubic use. However, no extensive evaluation of government food assistance applications has been…

Literacy education is always a potentially problematic undertaking, one that shifts people's relationships among themselves, with bodies of transmitted knowledge and with structures of political control (Collins & Blot, 2003; Lee, 2004; Mazrui, 1990). The teaching of writing and composition in early 20th-century Japan presented a number of…

Electronic marking tools that incorporate statement banks have become increasingly prevalent within higher education. In an experiment, printed and emailed feedback was returned to 243 first-year students on a credit-bearing laboratory report assessment. A transmission approach was used, students being provided with comments on their work, but no…

This article reports on a classroom-based study that investigated the effectiveness of direct written corrective feedback in relation to learner differences in grammatical sensitivity and knowledge of metalanguage. The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design with two treatment sessions. Eighty-nine Greek English as a foreign…

The minimal-marking project conducted in Ryerson's School of Journalism throughout 2012 and early 2013 resulted in significantly higher grammar scores in two first-year classes of minimally marked university students when compared to two traditionally marked classes. The "minimal-marking" concept (Haswell, 1983), which requires…

This article adds a voice from Amazonia to the reflective discussion on documentation projects designed within a "participatory" or "collaborative" paradigm of language research. It offers a critical assessment of one such documentation project carried out from 2007-2011 with the Kotiria and Wa'ikhana (East Tukano) language…

This paper presents ForumMiner, a tool for the automatic analysis of students' posts in asynchronous discussions. ForumMiner uses a text mining system to extract graphs from texts that are given to students as a basis for their discussion. These graphs contain the most relevant terms found in the texts, as well as the relationships between them.…

There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., "hi [smiley face emoticon] how is ya?!!") could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children,…

Among the academic challenges faced by students from low-socioeconomic status (SES) homes is the loss of academic skills during the summer months. A total of 22 elementary students from low-SES homes participated in a summer program designed to improve oral and written narrative skills. We gathered oral and written narrative samples at the…

This study investigated the redundancy effect on older and younger persons' cognitive performance in a caregiver video training. Participants (N = 92) were recruited from one research-intensive university and three senior centers in a midsize city in the western United States. The mixed within- and between-subjects design was used. Participants…