Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic…

This article investigates certain modal choices made by law students when writing in an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) adjunct class, illustrating areas of concern and instances of successful development of ideas in extracts from first-year undergraduate law students' essays on a problem in tort law. The study compares judgements of teachers…

This paper investigates what types of instruction-feedback combinations may contribute to the learning of English grammar for 120 Japanese university students. Students were given tests on grammaticality judgment and correction, using English ergative verbs in three trials of a post-instruction test. Subjects were divided into six groups according…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

A study investigated the encoding and decoding effects in English as a Second Language (ESL) and native English speaking (L1) students in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), by isolating the difficulties due to encoding and decoding in these students. The study examined specifically whether there are significant decoding effects based on…

No matter what pains translators take to produce a target-language text "identical" to the source-language text, criticism and/or translation of an original literary work cannot be the same in different language communities. That translation may change potentialities in the textual experience is particularly obvious in literature with a…

An interlingual communication support system that shows semantic matches and mismatches among languages being used for any transaction is discussed. The system uses a thesaurus approach to the meaning structure of language, which is hierarchical, but uses a cross-hierarchical approach to access different meanings for selection of the appropriate…

This study investigated the sensitivity of the pupillary response as an indicator of average mental load during three language processing tasks of varying complexity. The tasks included: (1) listening (without any subsequent comprehension testing); (2) speech shadowing (repeating a message in the same language while listening to it); and (3)…

The best way to teach writing is to make it the way to learn something else. Instructors need to look at written communication as it is used in real life. When students take pains with their writing, it is because what they have to say is important to them. The students' need to communicate a particular meaning for a particular purpose guides them…

Advanced learners of second languages and natural language processing systems both demand much more detailed lexical information than conventional dictionaries provide. Text composition, whether by humans or machines, requires a thorough understanding of relationships between words, such as selectional restrictions, case patterns, factives, and…

Focusing on talk as the vehicle through which the reading and writing processes can become more interactive and can more closely approach the processes of learning, the lessons presented in this booklet provide examples of how teachers can construct learning strategies to help children "talk their way into meaning" against a framework of…

A substantial amount of literature in education and psychology supports the notion that reading combined with writing enhances comprehension and recall. To investigate how various writing tasks affect thinking, a pilot study was conducted, which produced results consistent with the hypothesis that text engagement (student interaction with written…

Analysis and assessment of young children's spontaneous writing and drawing in daily journals may focus on three significant dimensions: what, who, and how: what stands for thought and meaning; who, for person; and how, for form. These categories may be further divided. Thought and meaning include theme(s), organization, and vocabulary; person…

Citing increased attention now focused on networking in organizational contexts, this paper addresses two networking questions related to an organization's strategic purpose: how the organization's formal and informal networking channels are connected, and how they are managed and maintained. Thought processing is defined as a networking system…

Language learning is complex and mysterious--because of the many diverse factors that affect its development and because of the many unanswered questions about its nature. Even so, the efforts of countless researchers have provided sufficient knowledge to prompt some recommendations about how adults may nurture the language and literacy…