Defines logical connectives as terms that link ideas within and between sentences. Describes a project that set out to identify the more commonly occurring terms and to measure secondary school students' difficulties in comprehending them. (FL)

Ideally the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher should have access to elaborate audiovisual equipment. When this is not possible due to stringent budgeting, extremely effective lessons can be based on a simple picture or picture series. The same pictures can be reused to teach a variety of structures. (CFM)

Examines how Japanese learners of English transmit information in the target language. Results indicate that the amount of utterance and information did not necessarily correlate; speech patterns of the Japanese differed from those of native speakers; and the students possessed potential oral proficiency if given enough time. (26 references)…

Demonstrates how the teacher can use texts to confront learners with cultural representations. Four texts are used to represent a literary extract, a student essay, an advertising document, and a newspaper article. The article illustrates approaches that borrow from stylistics, linguistics, and discourse analysis. (21 references) (Author/CK)

Tests the understanding of French pronominal-verbal constructions on native and English speakers of French and assesses their sensitivity to the possible multiple readings such as: reflexive, reciprocal, intrinsic, and passive. The article attributes the superior performance of English speakers to the corresponding morphosyntactic and lexical…

Investigates adult second language learners' processing of English syntactically ambiguous sentences in which a prepositional phrase is interpreted as either a noun phrase or verb phrase attachment. Results reveal lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and contextual constraints on processing ambiguous sentences. (87 references) (Author/CK)

Presents a case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa. The study characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, points out the disparity between the usage patterns found in missionary letters and modern linguists' characterizations of their abilities, and suggests missionary English as an…

Discusses that Serbo-Croation is a language with a dual system of relative clause formation and describes elicited production and comprehension experiments conducted with preschool children. Results are discussed in the context of the cross-linguistic typology of relative clauses and previous studies of the acquisition of relative clauses. (27…

Describes Jacobson's New Concurrent Approach to bilingual instruction, which systematically incorporates intersentential code-switching to teach content to limited English proficient children raised in a bilingual environment, and how such incorporation and adaptation contributes to the balanced distribution of the two codes in question. (24…

A review of recent research concerning the syntactical and grammatical characteristics of business German precedes an exploration of the occurrence and sequencing of these characteristics in American college textbooks. Particular attention is given to the passive voice. (Author/CB)

The effect of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) specific sentence-level errors was examined using 18 randomly chosen essays representing the range of ESL writing found in most large testing situations. Results suggest that graders with insufficient training in evaluating ESL essays differ in their judgment of the weight assigned to ESL error,…

Two experiments investigated the focusing properties of thematic roles, and a third examined the view that thematic role preferences reflect a focusing on the consequences of the represented event. Results focus on the structure of represented events, top-down and bottom-up processes, thematic hierarchies and pronoun comprehension. (35 references)…

Demonstrates that the patterns of Japanese/English code-switching found in Canadian Niseis' in-group speech are conditioned by the varieties of bilingual speech characterized in terms of base language. When Japanese is the base, English nouns are used; when English is the base, Japanese phrases and sentences occur sporadically. (38 references)…

A study compared the influences of rhetorical and sentence-level features on holistic essay scores assigned by raters who are experienced writing instructors but not trained in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. In scoring six university-level essays, these raters placed emphasis on ESL sentence-level errors far more than on essays'…