Reports results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of pragmatic development among three groups of primary school students in Hong Kong who complete a cartoon oral production task designed to elicit requests, apologies, and compliment responses. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the effects on middle school students of designing their own multimedia materials, including design knowledge, cognitive strategy, and motivation toward learning. Presents a theoretical framework, including project-based learning; describes questionnaires used; and discusses task ranking, planning and storyboarding, time management,…

Discusses self-regulation, learning to learn, and adaptive problem solving, and describes study of third, fifth, and eighth graders. The study investigated whether providing a model of self-regulating skills via teaching a computer to solve problems would increase the number tasks completed, and decrease the error and trial rate. (11 references)…

Describes the processes by which an educable mentally retarded high school student was placed and trained to work in a family-operated dairy. Outlines the task analysis procedure used by his job coach during five weeks of training. (SV)

Learning-disabled ninth-graders (n=58) completed a modified Piagetian isolation-of-variables task, and were compared to normally achieving ninth-graders and fourth-graders. Through cluster analysis, four different patterns of task approach were identified, representing normal performance, general conceptual disorder, specific developmental delay,…

Investigates whether there is any difference in the degree of difficulty between subject wh-questions and object wh-questions in the acquisition of wh-questions by Korean learners of English. Two experiments were conducted: a comprehension task and a production task. Results show the subject wh-questions are much easier for Korean learners than…

Provides support for a theoretical orientation toward viewing dialog as both a means of communication and a cognitive tool. Data to support this position come from an analysis of language-related episodes isolated in the dialog of two grade 8 French immersion students as they carry out a jigsaw task. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the efficacy of integrating task-based e-mail activities into a process-oriented English-as-Second-Language (ESL) writing class. Particular focus was on the linguistic characteristics of 132 pieces of e-mail writing by ESL students in tasks that differed in terms of purpose, audience interaction, and task structure. Computerized text…

Investigated the talk of 14 intermediate learners of English as a Second Language in a tertiary setting as they performed a passage-editing task collaboratively. Transcripts of the students' dialogs were analyzed for the kind of talk the task elicited, the grammatical items that drew the most attention from the learners, and the knowledge sources…

Describes a research project that is concerned with the design procedures followed by those engaged in designing pedagogic tasks for use in classrooms. Focuses on the part of the project that involves actual observation of designers in the process of developing one specific task for class use. Findings are presented under three headers: control…

Discusses the value of role-play in developing interpersonal skills and presents a 10-step model to help performance technologists design effective role-plays. Highlights include training objectives; designing assessment instruments; task analysis; generality and demonstration; designing social-communicative problems for the content; practice; and…

Analyzed the development of two morphological structures in Hebrew, one inflectional and the other derivational, and examined the mutual contribution of morphological knowledge and learning the written code. In a longitudinal design, 40 children were tested twice on two oral tasks--inflecting nouns for possession and deriving denominal…

Given recent claims that task-based instruction has desirable pedagogic qualities, this article investigates the effects of choosing different types of tasks, as well as different task implementation conditions, on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of the language that is produced when tasks are carried out. (Author/VWL)

This article presents an explorative study, which is part of a comprehensive project to examine the impact of epistemological beliefs on metacognitive calibration during learning processes within a complex hypermedia information system. More specifically, this study investigates: 1) if learners differentiate between tasks of different complexity,…

Assessing use of language learning strategies has become commonplace around the world. One strategy assessment tool is the questionnaire, which usually asks students to report on their typical, general use of language learning strategies. Because of this general focus, most questionnaires do not require respondents to complete an actual language…