This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the…

In this investigation mixed methods were used to examine flow within the context of a writing task. Forty-four secondary students aged between 15 and 18 years completed a computer-based writing task requiring them to examine information and then write on one of two topical issues. We examined the level of agreement between end-of-task ratings…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

ACCESS is an organizational framework to help educators plan instruction that prepares students for high-stakes tests and promotes self-regulated literacy learning. ACCESS stands for tasks that are authentic, that require collaboration among students, that challenge students, that culminate with an end product, that allow self-direction by giving…

Behavioral phenotypes of individuals with Williams syndrome and individuals with Down syndrome have been contrasted in relation to short-term memory. People with Down syndrome are stronger visuospatially and those with Williams syndrome are stronger verbally. We examined short-term memory, then explored whether dual-task processing further…

To what extent does language acquisition recruit domain-general processing mechanisms? In this dissertation, evidence concerning this question is garnered from the study of individual differences in infant speech perception and their predictive value with respect to language development in early childhood. In the first experiment, variation in the…

This study assesses reading processes and/or strategies needed to deploy deep processing that could push learners towards syntactic-based constructions in L2 classrooms. Research has found L2 acquisition to present varying degrees of success and/or fossilization (Bley-Vroman 1989, Birdsong 1992 and Sharwood Smith 1994). For example, learners have…

Blogs and podcasts open new ways for global communication and development of intercultural awareness. This article reports a Spanish-American telecollaborative project through which students created blogs and podcasts for intercultural exchanges in light of the sociocultural perspectives. The article outlines the methodology for the project…

This paper presents the results of a study investigating the impact of interactional feedback on interlanguage variation in terms of accuracy, complexity, and fluency of learners' discourse in performing tasks with familiar vs. unfamiliar topics. The participant of the study who were randomly assigned into an experimental and a control group were…

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,…

This study investigated the phonological awareness skills of a group of deaf adolescents and how these skills correlated with decoding skills (single word and non-word reading) and receptive vocabulary. Twenty, congenitally profoundly deaf adolescents with at least average nonverbal cognitive skills were tested on a range of phonological awareness…

Second language acquisition (SLA) researchers strive to understand the language and exchanges that learners generate in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Doughty and Long (2003) advocate replacing open-ended SCMC with task-based language teaching (TBLT) design principles. Since most task-based SCMC (TB-SCMC) research addresses an…

This study investigated the role of Voice Onset Time (VOT) as perceptual cue to the aspiration contrast of Cantonese initial stops produced by adolescent profoundly hearing impaired speakers. Speakers with normal hearing signalled the aspiration contrast through VOT differences. Hearing impaired speakers produced initial stops with no significant…

Lexical production in children with Down syndrome (DS) was investigated by examining spoken naming accuracy and the use of spontaneous gestures in a picture naming task. Fifteen children with DS (range 3.8-8.3 years) were compared to typically developing children (TD), matched for chronological age and developmental age (range 2.6-4.3 years).…

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…