Examines theoretical views of language use, learning, and teaching that underlie the work on tasks. Two broad and disparate views are identified: the psycholinguistic perspective and a perspective based on sociocultural theory. (Author/VWL)

Outlines a scenario for the future of Teaching English as a Second or Other Languages that has seldom, if ever been considered in academic discussion: that advances in and availability of quality machine translation could mitigate the need for English language learning. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on semicommunication and accommodation and discusses two longer extracts from a large corpus of authentic communication from Scandinavia. Various aspects of a comprehensive model of semicommunication are presented and discussed, showing code switching and accommodation are not considered antagonistic but rather as scalar phenomena covering…

Using Biber's multidimensional analysis (1988) to examine a large corpus of world English literatures written in Indian, West African, Britain, Anglo-American, and Mexican American varieties of English, examines whether quantitative analyses can also be insightful and useful in the examination of the influence of gender on language and in…

Examines recent studies of linguistic corpora in Italian, and presents the results of an analysis of "piace" and "piacciono" conducted on a corpus of 3.5 million words of written Italian, accessible at the University of Birmingham in England. Focuses on pedagogical applications of the data and on the inductive methodologies…

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses…

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is…

Metadiscourse is self-reflective linguistic expressions referring to the evolving text, to the writer, and to the imagined readers of that text. It is based on a view of writing as a social engagement and, in academic contexts, reveals the ways writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their attitudes and commitments. In this…

This paper introduces the notion of frequent frames, distributional patterns based on co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences, then investigates the usefulness of this information in grammatical categorization. A frame is defined as two jointly occurring words with one word intervening. Qualitative and quantitative results from distributional…

Are morphological patterns learned in the form of rules? Some models deny this, attributing all morphology to analogical mechanisms. The dual mechanism model (Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1998). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. "Cognition," 28, 73-193) posits that speakers do…

This study investigates whether second language (L2) phonological learning can be characterized as a gradual and systematically patterned replacement of nonnative segments by native segments in learners' speech, conforming to a two-stage implicational scale. We adopt a dynamic approach to language variation based on Gatbonton's (1975, 1978)…

Corpora have been used for pedagogical purposes for more than two decades but empirical studies are relatively rare, particularly in the context of grammar teaching. The present study focuses on students' attitudes towards grammar and how these attitudes are affected by the introduction of concordancing. The principal aims of the project were to…

One of the choices available in English is between one-word verbs (train at the gym) and their multi-word counterparts (work out at the gym). Multi-word verbs tend to be colloquial in tone and are a particular feature of informal spoken discourse. Previous research suggests that English learners often have problems with multi-word verbs, and may…

Dramatic advances in personal computer technology have given language teachers access to vast quantities of machine-readable text, which can be analyzed with a view toward improving the basis of language instruction. Corpus linguistics provides analytic techniques and practical tools for studying language in use. This volume includes both an…

Within child language acquisition research, there has been a fair amount of controversy regarding children's knowledge of the grammatical properties associated with verbal inflection (e.g., tense, agreement, and aspect). Some researchers have proposed that the child's early grammar is fundamentally different from the adult grammar, whereas others…