This study investigated whether top-down or bottom-up cognitive processing was more important in listening comprehension in large-scale English-as-a-Second-Language tests administered to secondary school students in Hong Kong over a period of seven years. Results suggest that bottom-up processing was more important than top-down processing in…

Analysis of the term "communicative" as used by scholars and realized in textbooks suggests a gap between theory and practice and substantial differences between the perspectives held by scholars and those held by instructors, publishers, and others. Differences are reviewed and their sources traced to attempts to adapt the term itself to existing…

Argues for a redefinition of terms and reconsideration of methodology in research on language attitudes, suggesting that mentalistic definitions of attitudes be replaced with social ones and experimentation using the matched-guise technique be replaced by discourse-analytic research. A qualitative study on Finnish college student attitudes toward…

Argues for inclusion of more written input in first-year programs, and describes an experimental reading collection of children's books accompanied by guided tasks. The description includes results of a post-year survey that explored student perceptions of the cultural and linguistic benefits of working with children's books in a reading lab.…

Examined how living outside native-language environments, and subsequent language attrition, affected the language model provided by native speakers teaching English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) in Spain. Surveys indicated that the first language was a changeable system susceptible to the pervasive influence of the second language and to the…

Academic fieldworkers in language-endangered communities must be able to undertake all aspects of linguistic work, elicit linguistic information from speakers, document naturally occurring speech data, present research results in a comprehensible manner to the community and to academia, and develop cooperative programs based on mutual trust.…

To successfully maintain endangered Native American languages, Native communities must collectively recognize their language's vulnerability and commit to its continuity. Linguists need more experience with fieldwork and pragmatics, knowledge of various language transmission practices in cultures other than their own, an understanding of cultural…

Analyzes data on the acquisition of German by Italian and Spanish speakers. Findings reveal that children learning a first language and adults learning a second language build up syntactic structure in much the same manner, and propose that the weak continuity approach of language acquisition accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.…

Examines the generalizability of claims about the implicit learning of artificial grammars to the context of adult second-language acquisition (SLA). Specifically addressed are claims that implicit learning is more effective than explicit learning when the stimulus domain is complex, and explicit learning of simple and complex stimulus domains is…

Explored the relation between types of peer behavior in young children to children's level of intention understanding. Found level of intention understanding predicted types of overtures made, types of objects offered, monitoring of partner responses, partner compliance, and types of speech acts addressed to partners. (Author/DLH)

Discusses how language teacher education has shifted to constructivist, process-oriented theories of learning; the idea that teacher education programs have failed to prepare teachers for the classroom; the importance of teachers' prior experiences; and the concern that teaching be viewed as a profession where teachers have an active role in…

Biologists at Center for Biological Research found ways to improve their scientific writing without benefit of an English-language program. By tapping Internet biology forums for comprehensible input, and using computer-assisted retention strategy to profit from error correction, writing improved. Scientific dialog on Internet has helped group…

This article compares different claims that have been made concerning acquisition by transitional rule-based derivation theories and by optimality theory. Case studies of children with phonological delays are examined. Error patterns are argued to be implicationally related and optimality theory is shown to offer a principled explanation.…

Researchers have suggested that among bilinguals, solving word problems in mathematics is influenced by linguistic factors (K. Durkin & B. Shire, 1991; L. Verschaffel, B. Greer, & E. De Corte, 2000). Others have suggested that students exhibit a strong tendency to exclude real-world constraints in solving mathematics word problems (L. Verschaffel,…

This paper concerns three two-stage experiments the aim of which was to find out whether enactment- and mime-based (E&M) instruction--a key element both of the method known as Total Physical Response and of some less codified instruction at primary level--can be employed in order to help learners: (1) better acquire English manner-of-movement…