Previous research has identified numerous obstacles that counteract attempts to involve pupils in democratic processes in schools. Drawing from deliberative democratic theory and sociolinguistic research on dialogic teaching we discuss an intervention grounded on the ideas of deliberative communication and decision-making in an elementary…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

The New Zealand school curriculum was last revised in 2007, at which time a new emphasis was placed on culture in language teaching. The practice of intercultural language teaching is implicit in the curriculum document and explicit in the curriculum guide, which features a set of principles for intercultural communicative language teaching…

There has been little research into 'language play', the manipulation of language for enjoyment, in children's narrative writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated in their writing of an imaginative story. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design quantitative study of writing…

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between…

This edited volume offers critical reflections on an essential component of research method in the field of second language acquisition -- data. Scholars working on diverse areas (e.g., pragmatics, corrective feedback, phonology) and approaches (e.g., corpus linguistics, concept-oriented analyses, variationism) have come together to identify…

Whilst the links between learner corpus research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have long been debated, McEnery et al. (2019. "Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 39: 74-92. doi:10.1017/S0267190519000096) claim that learner corpus…

The fundamental point of this paper is to describe and evaluate some differences between spoken and written grammar in English, and compare some of the points with Vietnamese. This paper illustrates that spoken grammar is less rigid than written grammar. Moreover, it highlights the distinction between speaking and writing in terms of subordination…

The paper examines the preverbal markers in Mengrelian as the possible loci of post-syntactic phonological rules that affect the allomorphy of these preverbs. The goal of the paper is to pinpoint the series of these rules and the extent to which the final form of the derived material changes as a result of their application. The phonological rules…

These concluding reflections seek to put the articles of this special issue in a broader context. The article begins by looking at the ideas of cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity that are invoked. It then considers the questions that arise about the relationship between two or more languages in the same mind, the differences between…

This seminar took place on 19 April, 2013 at the Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Language and Education Studies, The Open University. The seminar was coordinated by Janet Maybin and Theresa Lillis and there were 28 participants, including four postgraduate students, from universities in Britain, Belgium and South Africa.

Although a growing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies take linguistic complexity as a dependent variable, the term is still poorly defined and often used with different meanings, thus posing serious problems for research synthesis and knowledge accumulation. This article proposes a simple, coherent view of the construct, which is…

Native speakers of English regularly hear sentences without overt subjects. Nevertheless, they maintain a [[superscript -]pro] grammar that requires sentences to have an overt subject. It is proposed that listeners of English recognize that speakers reduce predictable material and thus attribute null subjects to this process, rather than changing…

Song is a universal human phenomenon that can shed much light on the nature of language. Despite this, field linguists are not always equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze song texts and draw out their significances to other areas of language. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a language community to ask linguists working in the…