Incidental vocabulary learning from context and 2 factors that might influence it, access to a dictionary and verbal ability, were examined among 112 second-year university students. Results indicate that subjects learned more words while reading for meaning, but high verbal ability students and those using a dictionary learn more. (71 references)…

Several points regarding the distinction between second-language theory and practice in professional and public discourse are discussed, including theorists are rarely full-time teachers; theory tends to be imported from other disciplines; discourse tends to be authoritarian and prescriptive; and it underestimates institutional, political, and…

Questions about language classroom life are addressed that can be illuminated by current research findings on second-language learning and teaching, including first language and cultural adjustment; practices that emphasize learner comprehension; strengths/limitations of classroom management strategies; pronunciation accuracy; and class…

Reviews research related to oral communication and discourse. Asserts that discourse analysis is the theory and method of studying social practices and the actions that constitute them. Recommends collecting naturalistic records of interaction that will allow analysts to consider activities in their sequential context. (CFR)

After a terminological clarification, this article discusses several aspects relevant to the development of a multilingual model of second and foreign language teaching: the importance of the student's native language, the relative effectiveness of monolingual and bilingual instruction, and communicative survival and cultural competence needs in…

Investigated adult and three- and five-year-old children's use of verb inflections to guide their initial mapping of verb meanings in two studies that explored use of the -ing and -ed verb inflections during mapping of novel verb meanings. Results are applied to implications for early verb learning and the use of the bootstrapping construct in…

Discusses the various components necessary for a formal model of the acquisition of the prosodic phonology of a second language and reports on empirical investigations of the acquisition of English metrical parameters by native speakers of Polish, Hungarian, and Spanish. (50 references) (MDM)

Develops analytical techniques to determine "borrowability," the ease with which a lexical item or category of lexical items can be borrowed by one language from another. These techniques are then applied to Spanish borrowings in Bolivian Quechua on the basis of a set of bilingual texts. (29 references) (MDM)

Examines the ways in which social process, sociology, anthropology, and media studies recently seem to have replaced pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology as the major preoccupations in British applied linguistics. The role that applied linguistics research can occupy in an emerging political order characterized by free-market economics and…

A method for examining intelligibility is studied that involves recording undergraduates' immediate feedback on communication breakdowns, and then analyzing those breakdowns with English-as-a-Second-Language specialists. Pronunciation was found to be the major cause of unintelligibility. (10 references) (Author/LB)

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…

Responses of native and nonnative English speaking undergraduates regarding the grammaticality of sentences with varying object and subject structures demonstrated that native speakers exhibited a processing preference, as did nonnatives whose native language grammar did not bias them toward another certain structure. (19 references) (Author/CB)

This study is a continuation of an ethnographic study of a six-year-old Japanese child learning English as a Second Language. It is concluded that language transfer, overgeneralization, and simplification combined with natural development all worked together in the development of the subject's interlanguage, irrespective of the overwhelming input…

Investigated whether there were differences in retention of language when both visual and auditory stimuli were employed as opposed to just a visual stimulus. It was found that reading-only resulted in higher scores on tests taken immediately, whereas combined listening and reading resulted in higher tests when tests were delayed. (12 references)…

Examined overregularization of irregular verb forms in children's language learning. Found that overregularization errors are relatively rare; occur at a constant rate; and are not correlated with the proportion of regular verbs in parents' or children's speech. Also found that a period of correct performance precedes the child's first error. (BC)