Literature on research by language teachers is reviewed, and the relationship between teachers and research productivity is discussed, focusing on social aspects. Cultures of research in elementary/secondary and higher education are compared, traditional explanations of problems in the teacher/research relationship examined, and effects of working…

Examines the idea that one goal of English language teaching should be to replicate "natural" rather than "traditional" classroom communication. The article argues that this goal is unattainable and that it would be more satisfactory to take an institutional discourse approach, where classroom discourse is regarded as an institutional variety of…

Offers additional means of evaluating parent speech by examining frequencies of individual nouns, verbs, and descriptors, and examining the learning task presented to children. Study one examines transcripts from the CHILDES database of English-speaking parents' speech to children at five developmental levels; study two examines 50 transcripts of…

This single subject design study examined two models of intervention: Denver Model (which merges behavioral, developmental, and relationship-oriented intervention), and PROMPT (a neuro-developmental approach for speech production disorders). Ten young, nonverbal children with autism were matched in pairs and randomized to treatment. They received…

Many authors have argued that word-learning constraints help guide a word-learner's hypotheses as to the meaning of a newly heard word. One such class of constraints derives from the observation that word-learners of all ages prefer to map novel labels to novel objects in situations of referential ambiguity. In this paper I use eye-tracking to…

This article presents the results of a meta-analysis of 30 hemodynamic experiments comparing first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing in a range of tasks. The results suggest that reliably stronger activation during L2 processing is found (a) only for task-specific subgroups of L2 speakers and (b) within some, but not all regions…

This study examines the perception of English vowels by native speakers of Italian. In two preliminary experiments, Italian university students who had lived in Canada for 3 months were found to have difficulty discriminating because they often identified both members of each contrast as instances of a single Italian vowel. The participants in two…

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

A problem facing investigations of implicit and explicit learning is the lack of valid measures of second language implicit and explicit knowledge. This paper attempts to establish operational definitions of these two constructs and reports a psychometric study of a battery of tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them.…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

Recent research on second language acquisition (SLA) has strengthened foreign (FL) and second language (L2) teaching methodologies supporting the development of communicative tasks, interactive activities in the classroom, and learner-centred instruction. However, these and any other trends in FL and L2 teaching and learning could be more…

The expansion of interpretation research projects across national boundaries contributes to improved personal, professional, and intellectual outcomes for researchers and practitioners. Establishing and maintaining these collaborative teams may be especially beneficial to strengthening the research agenda of new researchers. Conducting…

The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare…

Research on the development of efficiency in spoken language understanding has focused largely on middle-class children learning English. Here we extend this research to Spanish-learning children (n=49; M=2;0; range=1;3-3;1) living in the USA in Latino families from primarily low socioeconomic backgrounds. Children looked at pictures of familiar…

Considerable research has now been undertaken into the development of different approaches to exploiting language corpora for pedagogic purposes in the context of ESP. The question of how language corpora might be utilized by students beyond the immediate language-teaching context is, however, one as yet seldom addressed in the literature. This…