Background: The literature on input addressed to children with specific language impairment (SLI) has shown contrasting results on the role that parents assume during conversational interactions. Some studies have shown that parents compensate for the child's linguistic limitations. In contrast, other studies have indicated that mothers are…

We often come across examples of vague reference in English learning, especially college English learning. On entering college, students tend to feel at a loss since their vocabulary is required to be enlarged rapidly and a variety of reference patterns are included in their learning materials which mostly come from American and European original…

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of the syntax and semantics of Comparative Correlative sentences in English such as "the bigger they are, the harder they fall or the faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there." The analysis is cast in a framework that distinguishes between argument structure and word order, called…

Right-edge boundary tones have earlier been found to restrict syntactic processing by closing a clause for further integration of incoming words. The role of left-edge intonation, however, has received little attention to date. We show that Swedish left-edge boundary tones selectively facilitate the on-line processing of main clauses, the…

There has been considerable research in Chinese as a second language (L2) in recent years, particularly in its morphological and syntactic aspects. This article reviews research in these aspects with reference to the broader discipline of second language acquisition (SLA) and suggests that L2 Chinese research has contributed to SLA through…

This study investigated the effect of mother tongue instruction and gender on second language acquisition using a causal-comparative quantitative research design. The two distinguishing groups compared were (i) learners that were taught in their mother tongue (Afrikaans) and (ii) learners that were not taught in their mother tongue but in English,…

This paper reports on the early stages of a locally funded research and development project taking place at Rennes 2 university. It aims at developing a comprehensive pedagogical framework for pronunciation training for adult learners of English. This framework will combine a direct approach to pronunciation training (face-to-face teaching) with…

The current study analyzes the oral production of advanced learners of English who have Catalan and Spanish as their first languages. Subjects participated in study abroad (SA) programmes in English-speaking countries as part of their undergraduate studies. A role-play task was used to elicit speech from learners prior to SA and upon arrival from…

Language play and its effects on second language learning have been addressed by many scholars in recent years with instances of language play being identified both inside and outside the classroom. However, only a few have integrated language play with classroom tasks, and they just sufficed to the qualitative analyses of the learners'…

Motivated by predictions of the theory of Input Processing, this study adds to previous research on second language (L2) Spanish pronunciation learning by investigating the impact of two distinct types of pronunciation assignments on first language (L1) English L2 Spanish students' improvement in pronunciation of the vowels /e, o/. Two sections of…

Lexicon Pirate was originally developed as a strategy intervention programme to treat lexical disorders of pre-school children. To evaluate the therapy's effectiveness for school-age students, a randomized controlled trial (RCT, N = 157) was conducted. Based on a pre--post-test design, the programme's impacts were compared with a control group…

Many students struggle with gaining knowledge and writing about content text material and therefore require effective intervention. In a randomized controlled trial study, 77 low-achieving fourth-grade students received reading comprehension instruction or reading comprehension plus writing instruction or were assigned to a no-treatment control.…

This paper examines the incidence of verbal concord rule violation in educated Nigeria ESL against the conceptual framework of interference and "intraference". Intraference is a coinage for the "overgeneralization of linguistic material and semantic features" or "intralingual interference". The paper is basically…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian-German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition…