The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of manipulating the cognitive complexity of three different types of oral tasks on interaction. The study first considers the concepts of task complexity and interaction and then examines the specific studies that have looked at the effects of increasing task complexity on conversational…

This study investigates to what degree, and in what manner, the L1 and L2(s) influence spoken French L3. The analysis is divided in two parts. The first examines the cross-linguistic lexemes of 30 Swedish learners, divided into three groups according to previous exposure to French. The results show that proficiency in the L3 is crucial: the least…

The analysis of circumstance adverbials in this paper was based on L1 and L2 corpora of student presentations, each of which consisting of approximately 30,000 words. The overall goal of the investigation was to identify specific functions L1 and L2 college students attributed to circumstance adverbials (the most frequently used adverbial class in…

This paper describes a corpus-based approach to teaching and learning spoken grammar for English for Academic Purposes with reference to Bhatia's (2002) multi-perspective model for discourse analysis: a textual perspective, a genre perspective and a social perspective. From a textual perspective, corpus-informed instruction helps students identify…

This study investigated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous CMC (computer-mediated communication)on the development of linguistic features of learners' speech in Japanese. Using learners from fourth-semester Japanese classes, the following research questions were examined: (a) Does CMC have positive effects on the development of oral…

More than 90 million Indian children are becoming literate in English, yet the home literacy environment for Indian children learning English has not been explored. Preschool children (N = 50) from Bangalore, India, were assessed for vocabulary, phonological awareness, and print skills in English, their language of schooling. Parents reported on…

This study investigates cross-linguistic influence (CLI)--also known as first language (L1) transfer--on referent introduction and tracking in oral narratives in Japanese as a second language (L2) within the framework of functional approaches to language learning. Narrative discourse produced by two groups of learners of Japanese, one whose L1 is…

As teachers have struggled to implement scientifically based instructional practices in reading, some researchers have begun to focus on ways to "boost the value of reading aloud to young children". Such studies seek ways to promote oral language as well as comprehension and vocabulary through read-aloud experiences. Interactive read-alouds…

In Malaysia, studies have shown that most Malay learners learning Arabic Language exhibit weak Arabic speaking skill despite spending years of learning the language. However, given the same learning environment and experience, some of them could be considered as good Arabic speakers as revealed by the results of Arabic Placement Test conducted by…

The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate the relationship between speech perception and speech production difficulties among Japanese second language (L2) learners of English, in their learning complex syllable structures. Japanese L2 learners and American English controls were tested in a categorical ABX discrimination task of…

The present study investigates whether three types of instruction (Focus on Meaning, Focus on FormS and Focus on Form instruction) have differential effects on the acquisition of the Spanish present subjunctive in complement/noun clauses. It seeks to establish whether "dictogloss", one of the proactive Focus on Form techniques, enhances the…

This article argues that Vygotsky's analysis of children's play and of the ways it can serve as a powerful matrix for learning and development has two important implications that are not always fully appreciated. First, children's social pretend play can promote development both in the domains of cognition and language "and" in…

In Study 1 we evaluated whether each of three kinds of reading fluency (oral, silent-sentences, silent-passages) contributed uniquely to reading comprehension when children were in second grade (when oral reading is emphasized) and again when they were in fourth grade (when silent reading is emphasized). In Study 2 we evaluated the relationship of…

This study explores the nature of reading comprehension difficulties among early adolescent language minority (LM) learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Sixth-grade students (399 LM learners, 182 native English speakers) were screened for difficulties, using a standardized measure of reading comprehension. Of these, 262 students…

The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) proposes that listening comprehension and decoding, properly measured, can account for all of the variance in reading comprehension. We assessed the simple view in community college students. In addition to listening comprehension and decoding, we included measures of oral vocabulary, nonverbal…