After identifying a major limitation of current research on telecollaboration, I propose to develop a methodological framework to empirically study the link between the sociocultural dimension and the linguistic dimension of interaction in eTandem via desktop videoconferencing. For the sociocultural dimension, I study which roles the learners take…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

Adjective- noun order errors are a common occurrence throughout all levels of English language students. Based on professional experiences, existing literature and revisiting what some may consider archaic methodologies, this reflective article aims to analyse adjective-noun order errors among Colombian learners of English, understand why it…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

Research has painted a pessimistic picture of students' second language (L2) writing skills in secondary education. One innovative tool that may help students foster their L2 proficiency, including writing ability, is in-class debate. Debate is commonly associated with oral communication and argumentation skills. However, debate may also offer…

Syntactic structures are unobserved theoretical constructs which are useful in explaining a wide range of linguistic and psychological phenomena. Language acquisition studies how such latent structures are acquired by human learners through many hypothesized learning mechanisms and apparatuses, which can be genetically endowed or of general…

This paper aims to shed light on how translation commissioning process relates to the level of the quality of translation set within the context of tourism promotional text translation. Translation quality has been one of the main concerns in the translation of tourism promotional materials. The translation of tourism promotional materials is…

Over the first weeks and months following birth, infants' initial, broad-based perceptual sensitivities become honed to the characteristics of their native language. In this article, we review this process of emerging specialization within the context of a cascading "critical period" (CP) framework, in which periods of maximal openness…

Purpose: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions that included aided AAC input (e.g., aided AAC modeling, aided language modeling, aided language stimulation, augmented input) on communicative outcomes (both comprehension and expression) for individuals with…

Definite discourse-new bridging reference (e.g., a school … "the teacher"; Clark, 1975) is a complex syntax-pragmatic component of referential movement, one that is subject to relatively opaque form-function contingency compared with forms used for discourse-old reference, and one that is especially prone to crosslinguistic influence.…

Purpose: This study assessed phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic abilities at 6th grade for a group of children previously tested at 2nd grade to address 4 questions: (a) Do children with cochlear implants (CIs) demonstrate deficits at 6th grade? (b) Are those deficits greater, the same, or lesser in magnitude than those observed at 2nd…

One of the new scales in the CEFR Companion Volume is online interaction. The new descriptors cover goal-oriented online transactions, including written correspondence and the use of formulaic language. In Dutch business schools, students learn German for special purposes at B1/2 level: they are expected to master German in a professional context…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

Purpose: This research attempted to replicate Hoffman's 2009 finding that the proportion of narrative utterances with semantic or syntactic errors (i.e., = 14% "restricted utterances") can differentiate school-age children with typical development from those with language impairment with a sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 88%.…