The aim of this study was an attempt to investigate the use of conjunctions in argumentative essays written by English as a Foreign Language fourth-year undergraduate Libyan students majoring in English at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Libya. A corpus of 32 argumentative essays was collected from a sample of 16 students in order to be investigated…

This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

This study focuses on the pedagogical applications of structural priming research in an English for academic purposes (EAP) context, investigating whether priming activities are an effective tool for eliciting production of target grammatical structures. University students across four EAP classes carried out a total of 6 information-exchange…

Resumptive pronouns (RPs) are one of the most challenging grammatical points for EFL learners because this structure is different in their L1. We aimed to examine whether blended learning/TBLT are useful to teach RPs. We examined the extent to which such methods improve performance on the posttest. Forty learners took part in the study who were…

Numerous studies, examining the acquisition of non-referential it in [-pro-drop] English by learners of [+pro-drop] languages, have revealed that their participants omit non-referential subjects in English if their L1 allows null-subject position. However, due to the specificity of their focus, these studies have not considered other difficulties…

Purpose: This study examined child production of narrative features and of African American English (AAE) during a wordless storybook oral narrative task. Method: Participants were 30 AAE-speaking African American kindergarten and 1st grade students from low- and mid-socioeconomic status homes. Story grammar (SG), story literary technique (SLT),…

This study examines singular-plural distinction processes in Izon and highlights the difficulties these may pose to the teaching and learning of plural formation in English so as to suggest ways in which teachers can design an effective teaching method to tackle the perceived difficulties. The study, which made use of 100 subjects of an average…

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

This study looks at the discursive construction and negotiation of hybrid identities within binational couples. I analyze conversations produced by Anglophones married to German-speaking Swiss residing in central Switzerland. I employ Bucholtz & Hall's sociocultural linguistic model (2004, 2005, 2010), which views identity as emergent in…

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]-14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used…

In the current study, storytelling and story retelling by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed to explore ambiguous third-person pronoun use in narratives. Twenty-three children diagnosed with ASD aged 6;1 to 14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children aged 5;11 to 14;4 participated in the study. In the retelling task, no…

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

The second language acquisition (SLA) of Spanish pronominal object clitics (POCs) has been a topic of research with regards to clitic placement (Houston, 1997; Lee, 1987; LoCoco, 1987; VanPatten, 1984; and VanPatten & Houston 1998), acquiring specific dialectal norms (Geeslin, Garcia-Amaya, Hasler-Barker, Henriksen, & Killam, 2010), and…

In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Kove, an Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain Province of Papua New Guinea. Kove is primarily spoken in 18 villages, including some on the small islands north of New Britain. There are about 9,000 people living in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. The dissertation…