Presents new evidence for the view that specific language impairment (SLI) involves a syntactic-feature deficit within non-evident grammar. The data involve morphological case and its interaction with verbal inflection. (Author/VWL)

Examines the importance in the instructed-learning setting of the second-language teacher's "knowledge about language" or metalinguistic awareness. Discusses three questions: (1) Do teachers need to know about language?; (2) if so, why and in what ways; and (3) what impact does the level of a teacher's metalinguistic awareness have on the input…

Focusing on languages for the Dublin Core, examines the experience of some related ways to seek semantic interoperability through simplicity: planned languages, interlingua constructs, and pidgins. Also defines the conceptual and organizational problem of maintaining a metadata standard in multiple languages. (AEF)

Summarizes an initiation to feminism through courses and an English for specific purposes curriculum evaluation completed as part of a thesis. Discusses how feminism can have an impact on fields such as TESL and applied linguistics, how feminist education and research relate to other epistemologies, and how feminist features can be applied to…

Reports the results of research attempting to document the role of learners' linguistic output in drawing their attention to linguistic form and in acquiring the form. Compares experimental and comparison groups that participated in a pretest, two post-tests, and four learning tasks. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by second language learners during a period of study abroad. Various aspects of sociolinguistic competence are discussed and some of the principal factors that affect it are described. (Author/VWL)

Examines structural consequences of intensive language contact on simultaneous first language (L1) and second language (L2) child language development in an L2-dominant environment. Based on the assumption that structural processes in language contact are operating at and determined by abstract lexical structure, various structural configurations…

Analysis of the first 4 months of word combinations recorded for an Estonian-English learning child suggests that meaning-based generativity may play a role in this important transition in that mixed language utterances, sequence reversals, and errors revealing early attempts at analysis provide clear evidence that distributional learning alone…

A review of research on second language (L2) speech looks at four issues of process and product: whether speech is different from writing; whether oral discourse patterns differ from one language to another; whether L2 speaker oral skills differ significantly from native speakers'; and how L2 speech develops. (MSE)

A study compared university students' Japanese and English native-language essays (22 expository, 24 persuasive) in terms of organization and macrolevel discourse features. Results indicate inductive rhetorical patterns were more common in Japanese than English essays and more common in persuasive than expository mode across languages. However,…

Examines the problem posed for French second-language learners by the irregular dropping of French final consonants, examining the rules presented in textbooks and comparing them with findings of various linguistic surveys conducted in France and Canada. Differences observed between theory and reality lead to practical advice for French teachers.…

Argues for a more rigorous application of accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, presenting an example of how such rigor might be pursued in an analysis of conversational Bislama, a creole spoken in the Republic of Vanuatu. Focus is on the link between speakers' identities and their linguistic behavior. (MSE)

A discussion of the term "grammar" in the context of second-language teaching and learning looks at various approaches to/definitions of grammar, including linguistic, psychological, sociological, and pedagogical grammars. Pedagogical grammars are viewed as learning tools for the second-language classroom, and their properties and components are…

Discusses issues in the role of non-native English variants as an endonormative standard in non-English-speaking countries, including the status of innovations in the nativization process, continued use of normative standards as a point of reference, ambivalence between recognition and acceptance of non-native norms, adequacy of pedagogical…

Three experiments are reported that showed effects of "structure priming," the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across successive sentences. These effects were demonstrated in Dutch, a previously untested language. All experiments studied spoken sentence production. (Author/JL)