Because English grammar consists of a long list of features, it is impractical to include all of them in a single grammar test. It would be useful to identify among all those features the best indicators of students' grammatical knowledge and ability so that we could focus on what were the most representative knowledge and skills and simplify…

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis…

Conversation Analysis (CA) has established repair (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1979; Kitzinger 2013) as a conversational mechanism for managing contingencies of talk-in-interaction. In this dissertation, I look at a particular sort of "repair" termed TCU-continuations (or otherwise known increments in other…

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument dependencies is vital for interpretation tasks like information extraction and question answering, and unbounded dependencies may account for a significant portion of the dependencies in any given text. This thesis describes a Generalized Categorial Grammar (GCG) which, like other categorial grammars,…

The authors tested theoretically driven predictions as to the ways in which syntactic awareness, or awareness of word order within sentences, might contribute to reading comprehension, the end goal of reading development and instruction. They conducted a longitudinal study of 100 English-speaking children followed from Grade 3 to 4. Children…

Writing is considered varied with context and cannot be distilled down to a set of abstract cognitive or technical abilities. It always involve a combination of talent and skill and that makes it complex yet writing becomes more complex for ESL learner when they write using the second language in the academic context. With the growing interest in…

The number of English learners continues to increase in the United States. Additionally, many English learners will experience language and learning disabilities. These students require specialized instruction by highly qualified educators. This article addresses the various cross-language strategies that can benefit English learners with…

The purpose of this study was to explore the ways emergent bilingual first-graders draw on multiple linguistic resources during reading assessments and the participation of their Spanish-dominant parents in those assessments, as children engaged in English and Spanish retelling tasks. Informed by a translanguaging lens, sociopsycholinguistic and…

Although sentences are thought to be generally easier to process when given information precedes new information, closer examination reveals that these preferences only manifest within some syntactic structures. Here, we examine the consequences of the relative ordering of given and new information ("information structure") for the on-line…

Growing out of the renewed attention to text complexity in the United States and the large population of youth who are deeply committed to reading scripture, this study explores 16 Latter-day Saint and Methodist youths' experiences with complex, religious texts. The study took place in the Midwestern United States. Data consisted of an academic…

A novel online reading methodology termed Self-Guided Reading (SGR) is examined to determine if it can successfully detect well-studied syntactic processing behaviours. In SGR, a participant runs their finger under masked text in order to reveal a sentence. It is therefore similar to self-paced reading in presentation of stimuli, but different in…

The aims of the present study were to explore the effects of two different types of task conditions (topic choice vs. no choice) on the quality of written production in a second language (lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and cohesion) and to investigate the effects of these two different task conditions on task motivation. This research…

Entropy is a central concept in thermodynamics, but has been found to be challenging to students due to its abstract nature and the fact that it is not part of students' everyday language. Interviews with three pairs of engineering students (N = 6) were conducted and video recorded regarding their interpretation and use of the entropy concept, one…

The 2 × 2 model of perfectionism conceptualizes perfectionism as the within-person combinations of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism to define four subtypes of perfectionism. This model posits that each subtype is distinctively associated with self-determined motivation and psychological adjustment. Results of latent moderated…

This article aims to examine the factors which must be taken into consideration before attempting to utilize Kasper and Petrello's nonjudgmental approach to English composition classes at a small 2-year college in the American Southwest. The majority of the students there are Navajo. Navajo oral tradition and syntax are two important factors to…