This study explores the long-term effects of starting age and the effects of input in an instructed language learning setting. First, with respect to the effects of starting age, the findings suggest that in the long term and after similar amounts of input, starting age is not a predictor of language outcomes. Second, the study examines the…

Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…

With the ever-changing dynamics of society, teachers are often faced with a classroom of students who have diverse linguistic and academic needs. Research has shown that schools are becoming more linguistically diverse throughout the United States and that English language learners (ELLs) are posing their own sets of challenges for teachers.…

We report on international research that compares linguistic ecosystems, that is, socially constructed public attitudes and ideologies concerned with foreign-language (FL) learning, in Canada and Japan. Analyzing responses to three interview questions from 125 interviews with five categories of respondent in each country, we suggest that there are…

This paper describes one reviewer's experience of reviewing for the journal "System" over an eight-year period, 2003-2011. The paper reports on the reviews produced by the single reviewer, which have been compiled into a specific purpose--an "occluded"--corpus (Swales, 1996) of 122 reviews, comprising 93,000 words. The paper first describes the…

Purpose: To extend the use of the Spanish Computer-assisted Anomia Rehabilitation Program (CARP-2) for anomia from a single case to a group of 15 people with aphasia. To evaluate whether the treatment is active (Phase 1) for this group (Robey & Schultz, 1998), providing potential explanations as to why. Methods: Fifteen participants with chronic…

This paper deals with Chinglish as Chinese-English translations found on public bilingual signage in the People's Republic of China. After a short review of the existing literature, this study attempts to establish a typology of Chinglish with corpus-based research. Additionally, the corpus serves for geographical and statistical analysis. This…

Although the use of corpus data in language learning is a steadily growing research area, direct access to corpora by teachers and learners and the use of the data in the classroom are developing slowly. This paper explores how teachers can integrate corpus approaches in their practice. After situating the topic in relation to current research and…

Dutch, unlike English, contains two gender-marked forms of the definite article. Does the presence of multiple definite article forms lead Dutch learners to be delayed relative to English learners in the acquisition of their determiner system? Using the Preferential Looking Procedure, we found that Dutch-learning children aged 1 ; 7 to 2 ; 0 use…

In this paper we report on a visual world eye-tracking experiment that investigated the differing abilities of adults and children to use referential scene information during reanalysis to overcome lexical biases during sentence processing. The results showed that adults incorporated aspects of the referential scene into their parse as soon as it…

Compared with English learners, Spanish learners have fewer resources for automatic error detection and revision and following the current integrative Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), we combined corpus-based approach and CALL to create the System of Error Detection and Revision Suggestion (SEDRS) for learning Spanish. Through…

This research studied the use of modals in argumentative written tasks by Form 5 Malaysian secondary school ESL students. The aim of this study was to examine the use of English modals at the syntactic level from data presented in the MCSAW Corpus. The research design comprised a qualitative technique through discourse analysis aided by…

This corpus-based study examined the usage, mastery and developmental pattern (Norwati, 2004) of English prepositions of place, "in" and "on" across three different academic levels namely Form 4, Form 5 and College students. The Malaysian Corpus of Students Argumentative Writing (MCSAW) was used as the source of data in…

This study was conducted with the participation of nine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students and two EFL teachers of the Department of Applied English at an institute of technology in central Taiwan. Based on in-depth interviews with the students and teachers, the findings suggest that the participating students' perspectives of culture…

This study describes the language environment of preschool programs serving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and examines relationships between child characteristics and an automated measure of adult and child language in the classroom. The Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system was used with 40 children with ASD to collect data…