This note explores the role of contrastive rhetoric in writing pedagogy in the context of a monolingual class, in this case a group of students from the Russian Federation studying at an English medium university in Central Europe. The study compares students' argumentative essays written before and after a short writing course, which aimed to…

With examples from junior science lessons on magnets, Gibbons (1998, 2001a, 2002) argues that Teacher-Guided Reporting (TGR) is a familiar teaching stage with potential for the development of academic registers when there is linguistic task sequencing, significant student initiation, and press on linguistic resources. In exploring the potential of…

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the relative effects of processing instruction, structured input activities and explicit information on the acquisition of gender agreement in Italian adjectives. Subjects were divided into three groups: the first received processing instruction; the second group structured input only; the third…

The aim of the present study was to examine differences among "regular" and dyslexic adult bilingual readers when processing reading and reading related skills in their first (L1 Hebrew) and second (L2 English) languages. Brain activity during reading Hebrew and English unexpected sentence endings was also studied. Behavioral and…

Few studies have examined characteristics of both verbal and written language of individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study used parallel measures (picture description, word fluency, spelling to dictation, and confrontational naming) to compare verbal and written language of individuals with mild AD, moderate AD, and normal controls (14…

This article draws upon recent work in the cognitive neurosciences to suggest that the facilitation effect follows naturally within current psychological theory. A view of the mind as consisting of discrete mental modules, called psychological modularity, is defended with case study evidence of double dissociation. It is argued that transfer of…

Alongside developments in language research, the potential of corpora as a resource in language learning and teaching has been evident to researchers and teachers since the late 1960s. Despite publications which emphasise the benefits of corpus consultation for language learners (Bernardini, 2002; Kennedy & Miceli, 2001), there is little evidence…

In this paper we argue that investigation of third language (L3) acquisition by adults and children provides essential new insights about the language learning process that neither the study of first language (L1) nor second language (L2) acquisition alone can provide. The focus of this paper concerns the role the learner's L1 plays in succeeding…

Many authors note that the history of teaching Latin would be a fruitful topic for a comprehensive treatise. Although intense debates about the quality and necessity of teaching Latin date back as early as in the eighteenth century, Latin courses have persisted into the present and, notably, with few changes in content. The author supports the…

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…

This study examined visual, auditory, and cross-modal temporal pattern processing at the nonlinguistic and sublexical linguistic levels, and the relationships between these abilities and decoding skill. The central question addressed whether dyslexic readers are impaired in their perception of timing, as assessed by sensitivity to rhythm.…

Recent studies have suggested that cultures vary in subtle ways in the talk about talk that children hear and learn to produce. Twenty-two three-year-old children and their families in respectively Oslo, Norway and Cambridge, Massachusetts were observed during mealtime with the aim of identifying talk-focused talk. The analysis distinguished talk…

A series of experiments shows that Spanish learners of English acquire the "ship-sheep" contrast in a way specific to their target dialect (Scottish or Southern British English) and that many learners exhibit a perceptual strategy found in neither Spanish nor English. To account for these facts as well as for the findings of earlier research on…

The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible…