This study investigates the use of "this" and "these" as pronouns versus determiners in a corpus of research articles in Applied Linguistics and Materials and Civil Engineering. The study reveals that authors in the two disciplines use both structures in a similar manner, with pronominal uses constituting one-fifth of all occurrences. Five types…

This paper presents the findings of an experiment in which a group of 17 French post-secondary EFL learners used Google to self-correct several "untreatable" written errors. Whether or not error correction leads to improved writing has been much debated, some researchers dismissing it is as useless and others arguing that error feedback…

Results of a study are presented that suggest the grammatical structures of English some deaf and hard of hearing students struggle to acquire. A review of the literature from the past 40 years is presented, exploring particular lexical and morphosyntactic areas in which deaf and hard of hearing children have traditionally exhibited difficulty.…

This study investigates whether practice with computer-administered feedback in the absence of meaning-focused interaction can help second language learners notice the corrective intent of recasts and develop linguistic accuracy. A group of 218 beginning Anglophone learners of Spanish received 1 of 4 types of automated feedback (no feedback,…

This study explored relationships between writing sample features and LMS usage patterns for 366 college students who enrolled in Theology courses, junior-level courses cross-listed with theology courses, or Senior Perspective Program courses in the fall semester of 2012. These hybrid courses were managed inside the Canvas(TM) learning management…

An area that has recently attracted increasing attention is providing feedback on learners' writing accuracy through the Internet. However, research in this area has largely focused on synchronous communication, i.e., chatting, with fewer studies assessing asynchronous technologies, i.e., e-mailing. Therefore, this study investigates the…

The purpose of this mixed method descriptive study was to investigate the relationship between deaf educators' perceived efficacy of a specifically-designed curriculum and DHH learners' use and comprehension of function words in written text, and explore unknown perceptions related to the research topic. The study was conducted to…

This study analyses the behavior and the preferences of the Greek learners of Turkish language, who use a particular e-learning website in parallel with their studies, namely: http://turkish.pgeorgalas.gr. The website offers free online material in Greek and English language for learning the Turkish language and grammar. The traffic of several…

Purpose: This study explores the hypothesis that vocabulary growth can have 2 types of effects in morphosyntactic development. One is a general effect, where vocabulary growth globally determines utterance complexity, defined in terms of sentence length and rates of subordination. There are also specific effects, where vocabulary size has a…

Nonstandard grammatical forms are often present in the writing of deaf students that are rarely, if ever, seen in the writing of hearing students. With the implementation of Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) in previous studies, students have demonstrated significant gains in high-level writing skills (e.g., text structure) but…

The place of grammar in an English or literacy curriculum has long been a source of debate, one in which professionals, politicians and the public have often engaged with unbridled enthusiasm. As such, the debate has sometimes been characterised more by ideology or polemic, than by intellectual engagement with the core ideas. In part, this is…

Morphosyntactic skills in spontaneous and elicited production of a 7-year-old boy with specific language impairment (SLI) were examined and compared to those of younger, mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched, typically-developing children. This study focused on inflectional phrase structures as well as complex constructions in order to…

This study's purpose was to examine the acquisition and use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries by African American English (AAE)-speaking children. The impetus for this work was the lack of information regarding the developmental trajectory of these auxiliary types and their use, in AAE relative to what is known about auxiliary acquisition and use…

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, "i.e.", how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are…

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…