In this article, I examine how repairs in adult-child conversations guide children's acquisition of language. Children make unprompted self-repairs to their utterances. They also respond to prompts for repair, whether open ("Hm?," "What?") or restricted ("You hid what?"), and to restricted offers (Child: "I…

Teachers' online discussion forums play an important role in ESL teachers' professional development. They provide opportunities for in-depth peer-to peer interaction, self-directed learning, exchange of knowledge and expertise, and greater involvement in teaching-learning and student-teacher issues. Forum members can share resources such as tests,…

Reviews the grammatical, semantic, and stylistic difficulties in translating English passive constructions into French. (AM)

Critical analysis of three cases of grammatical borrowing of Frisian from Dutch leads to the specific conclusion that the Frisian grammatical system does not "Dutchify," and to general conclusions concerning the ways that minority languages can and cannot be influenced by dominant languages. (Author/CB)

Explains three elements of English that are particularly difficult for Chinese students to learn: the use of articles, which has no equivalent in Chinese; expression of tense, for which there is no Chinese equivalent; and the concepts of time, locality, and direction inherent in English usage of prepositions. (MSE)

Reviews aspects of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, emphasizing language functions, modality vs modulation, process types, transitivity, information distribution, and cohesion. Implications for language teaching are discussed. (AM)

Linguistics can be used explicitly in the teaching of foreign languages to mature students. Eight guidelines derived from this statement guide the discussion of the application of linguistics to the teaching of Latin verb paradigms to beginning students. The five tense/mood paradigms that are based on the present stem, that is, the present,…

What errors in English subject-to-verb agreement reveal about the syntactic nature of sentence subjects was investigated. Participants in 3 experiments included 104 undergraduates and 64 members of a university community. Results suggest the abstract syntactic relation of subject controls/mediates verb agreement, not notional properties and…

Examines the syntactic aspects of affixation and compounding, processes accounting for the great majority of new word formations documented in "6,000 Words" (1976). (AM)