The study reported in this paper investigated the relationship between components of aptitude and the fluency, lexical variety, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of performance in two types of written and spoken narrative tasks. We also addressed the question of how narrative performance varies in tasks of different cognitive complexity in the…

Vowels with extreme articulatory-acoustic properties act as natural referents. Infant perceptual asymmetries point to an underlying bias favoring these referent vowels. However, as language experience is gathered, distributional frequency of speech sounds could modify this initial bias. The perception of the /i/-/e/ contrast was explored in 144…

This article researches work by four pupils in a diachronic collection of Norwegian primary school workbooks. Given signs of a variety of voices and perspectives in chosen representations of central tenets and/or practices in religions and philosophical traditions, how can an analysis and discussion of a few chosen texts shed light on their…

In our increasingly diverse schools, students bring diverse ways of speaking to the classroom. In turn, as features from students' home language varieties transfer into their readings of texts, teachers' assessment and intervention plans may be directly affected. If teachers conflate dialect influence with reading error in Standard English, they…

This paper investigates Spanish dyslexic spelling abilities: specifically, the influence of syllabic linguistic structure (simple vs consonant cluster) on children's spelling performance. Consonant clusters are phonologically complex structures, so it was anticipated that there would be lower spelling performance for these syllabic structures than…

This paper illustrates how a freely available online corpus has been exploited in a module on teaching business letters covering the following four speech acts (functions) commonly found in business letters: invitations, requests, complaints and refusals. It is proposed that different strategies are required for teaching potentially…

Outwardly the rhetorical organisation of sections of research reports in different disciplines can appear similar. Close examination, however, may reveal subtle differences. Numerous studies have drawn on the genre-based approach developed by Swales (1990, 2004) to investigate the schematic structure of sections of articles in a range of…

This article investigates the acquisition of object shift in Norwegian child language. We show that object shift is complex derivationally, distributionally, and referentially, and propose a new analysis in terms of IP-internal topicalization. The results of an elicited production study with 27 monolingual Norwegian-speaking children (ages…

The present study utilized a latent variable modeling approach to examine the Simple View of Reading in a sample of students from 3rd, 7th, and 10th grades (N = 215, 188, and 180, respectively). Latent interaction modeling and other latent variable models were employed to investigate (a) the functional form of the relationship between decoding and…

Many teachers of foreign languages struggle with finding alternative ways of exposing their students to the target language. At Kent Gardens Elementary School (KGES) in McLean, Virginia, many students participate in an immersion program from first grade to sixth grade. These students spend half of every school day immersed in French while learning…

From the point of view of AILA's research network "CLIL and Immersion Education: Applied Linguistic Perspectives" this volume finally does justice to a strand of interest that has been part of the network from its inception. As the editors rightly point out in the introduction, ReN events and publications during the network's first…

English and Arabic have different word formation processes with which translation students must be familiar. Results of a needs-assessment questionnaire showed that junior translation students almost had no knowledge of English word formation processes such as compounding, derivation, back formation, conversion, extension, blending, clipping,…

This research paper aims to explore the usage of the English Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense Verb, using corpus based method among Malaysian form 4 and form 5 students. This study is conducted by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense verb in students' compositions from the MCSAW corpus…

As regards the status of English in today's globalization era, "culture" has turned out to be an essential component in the teaching and learning of English. Some Applied Linguists have even described it as the fifth skill--after listening, speaking, reading and writing--which must be handled adequately in EFL classrooms. By appreciating…

This article aims to explore whether well-attested findings in the fields of World Englishes (WE) and of English as a lingua franca (ELF) have determined a shift in perspective in the overall approach to English language teaching (ELT), and how far this shift has permeated teaching materials and coursebooks. The research study was carried out in…