We used a multiple baseline across students design to evaluate the effects of an intervention program consisting of vocabulary instruction, error correction, and fluency building on oral reading rate and comprehension of five English-language learners who were struggling readers in a primary school. During the first intervention condition (new…

A single subject alternating treatment design was used to compare the effectiveness of embedded and small-group instruction to teach vocabulary word definitions to four middle school students with developmental disabilities. Embedded instruction was implemented in the students' general education classes. Students were taught to verbally define…

The interest in the application of large-scale computerized adaptive testing has served to focus attention on issues that arise when theoretical advances are made operational. Some of these issues stem less from changes in testing conditions and more from changes in testing paradigms. One such issue is that of the order in which questions are…

Drawing data from audiotaped lessons with 10 native-speaker English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teachers and 12 EFL learners of varied linguistic backgrounds, a study explored some of the ways in which classroom talk by learners is collaboratively built to repair errors, misunderstandings, and non-communication. Focus is on both explicit and…

The relationship between the notion of "error" in linguistics and language teaching theory and its potential application to error correction in the second language classroom is examined. Definitions of "error" in psycholinguistics, native speech, and English second language instruction are discussed, and the relationship of interlanguage…

This study examined the relationship between discrimination error (determined by content analysis and tryout data) and confidence of response (determined by self report). Subjects were 63 undergraduate students enrolled in a biology class for nonmajors who received classroom expository information and read a text on the topic before they completed…

A review of the literature and teacher observations are used to examine the processes and strategies by which second language learners attain and organize verbal knowledge. Classroom data are derived from experience in teaching German to Dutch-speaking university students. The analysis looks at the relationship of morphology and word recognition…

This paper contends that classrooms should be safe places for students and their teachers to be wrong, suggesting that this concept should provide the mainspring for educational reform in Hong Kong and in other places in the world. It notes that education in Hong Kong is harsh and has a tendency to label students; for the majority of students,…

A study investigated the use of teasing as a teaching technique in a first-year college-level Russian class at a major university in California. The instructor is a native Russian speaker, and the class consisted of nine undergraduate students. A review of literature on teasing reveals its dual nature for conveying both a literal message of insult…

Describes a parser-driven Japanese tutor, "BANZAI," designed for second-language instruction and presents an empirical study of the program. Results indicate that ongoing rule-driven deductive feedback is more effective than example-driven inductive feedback for learning relatively complex structures whose grammatical rules are not…

Discusses a study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Findings indicate the presence of disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in the corpus of recorded speech data. It is concluded that speech is not overly laden with errors, and there is nothing in the data to mislead the language…

Reports on a small-scale study of recasts--a form of corrective feedback. Subjects were eight adult second language learners (L2) of English. Data consisted of oral and written narratives primed by cartoon series and produced by both subjects in both groups. Recasts were found to be successful because they heightened the L2 learners awareness and…

The tips discussed here center around favor asking and English as a Second Language, a collaborative writing activity, e-mail assignments nd online correction, and facilitating full-time employment in TESOL (Author/VWL)

Explores psycholinguistic processes underlying second language (L2) self-repair behavior by means of analyzing the timing of various types of self-corrections found in the speech of 30 Hungarian speakers of English at three proficiency levels. Discusses relevance of timing data for existing models of speech monitoring and examines how level of…

Explores the relationship between teacher feedback and student revision in two academic writing classes. Adopts a case study approach and looks at all the feedback given to six students over a complete course. Examines the extent to which teachers focused on formal language concerns when they gave feedback and the use that students made of this…