The utmost goal of foreign language instruction is aimed at helping the learner master the language. At the same time the learner shall become equipped with linguistic, pragmatic and social-linguistic competence. This study was done to explore if review activities in EFL classes should be mandatory for learners to learn the new knowledge. One…

Study abroad (SA) is one of the flagship offerings among United States higher education institutions. Approximately 220,000 students studied abroad in the 2005/2006 academic year, 52.8% of whom studied on programs that lasted eight weeks or less. The effect of these short-term programs on second language development has been little investigated,…

Perceptions of Asian students as silent have been widely debated in the disciplines of applied linguistics and education. These debates have been largely concerned with the extent to which essentialised notions of Japanese culture are in operation and the consequences for teaching and learning. The silences of students and the expectations of…

Speaking tasks involving peer-to-peer candidate interaction are increasingly being incorporated into language proficiency assessments, in both large-scale international testing contexts, and in smaller-scale, for example course-related, ones. This growth in the popularity and use of paired and group orals has stimulated research, particularly into…

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages--five, eight, ten, and young adults--using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" (Mayer, 1969).…

Teaching students with intellectual disabilities (ID) to read is extremely challenging. Fortunately, the outlook for students with ID is improving because we now know much more about how to teach reading to students who struggle, including those with ID. The central theme of this article is that reading instruction for students with ID must be a…

Acquiring an adequate vocabulary is a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. Varied exposures to newly acquired words as they occur in meaningful contexts may facilitate the process of vocabulary learning. In this study we investigated the effects of such a multiple-strategy-based vocabulary teaching approach. We conducted an…

In the light of recommendations made by the Tomlinson and Dearing reports, this article explores the distinctive contribution that vocational language courses can make to the language learning experience of secondary-school pupils. It starts by presenting an overview of vocational options currently on offer to stem the disaffection with modern…

Purpose: This investigation examined the effects of nebulized hypertonic saline, isotonic saline (IS), and sterile (hypotonic) water on phonation threshold pressure (PTP) and self-perceived phonatory effort (PPE) following a surface laryngeal dehydration challenge. Method: In a double-blind, randomized experimental trial, 60 vocally healthy women…

In the past, the nature of the compositional units proposed for spoken language has largely diverged from the types of control units pursued in the domains of other skilled motor tasks. A classic source of evidence as to the units structuring speech has been patterns observed in speech errors--"slips of the tongue". The present study reports, for…

Songs convey emotion by means of expressive performance cues (e.g. pitch level, tempo, vocal tone) and lyrics. Although children can interpret both types of cues, it is unclear whether they would focus on performance cues or salient verbal cues when judging the feelings of a singer. To investigate this question, we had 5- to 10-year-old children…

Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval…

Twenty mothers' provision of responsive, supportive behavioural directive, and intrusive behavioural and attentional directive speech was investigated during interactions with their children at ages 0 ; 10, 1 ; 1, 1 ; 5 and 1 ; 9 in two natural contexts, free play and bathtime. Issues examined included developmental change, contextual differences,…

This paper presents the results of research on information structure and word order in narrative sentences taken from signed short stories in Croatian Sign Language (HZJ). The basic word order in HZJ is SVO. Factors that result in other word orders include: reversible arguments, verb categories, locative constructions, contrastive focus, and prior…

The present article offers comments on the infusion of methodologies, approaches, reasoning strategies, and findings from the fields of genetics and genomics into studies of complex human behaviors (hereafter, complex phenotypes). Specifically, I discuss issues of generality and specificity, causality, and replicability as they pertain to…