The paper describes a research project which observes the teaching practices of trainers working in three non-linguistic skill ("other-skill") areas--music (classical singing), table tennis, and flight simulation. The aim is to compare these practices with those of the language teacher and to consider whether the latter has anything to learn from…

Language planning is normally thought of in terms of large-scale, usually national planning, often undertaken by governments and meant to influence, if not change, ways of speaking or literacy practices within a society. It normally encompasses four aspects: status planning (about society), corpus planning (about language), language-in-education…

The author of the "Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language" responds to two areas of criticism of the textbook: its size and its intended audience. These aspects and the general construction of the book are discussed in relation to the information needs of the foreign language learner and in comparison with the information…

One of the most difficult problems facing researchers on writing is to define writing as a construct. The way writing is conceptualized determines how writing assignments are created and how written products are analyzed and rated. A functional approach to defining writing as a construct is presented here. It begins with the overall construct of…

Characteristics of language production shared by interlanguage and agrammatism, a linguistic symptom of aphasia, are discussed, and it is proposed that the two constitute a reduced system within the language, derived from the language's conceptual system. (MSE)

Models of ethnographic research in education treat context in an arbitrary way, and the theory of language used is inadequate. However, a discourse analysis framework can be useful in improving qualitative research in education by relating accounts of specific sites and events to their social contexts. (27 references) (MSE)

A discussion of the relationship between the social sciences, teaching, and culture focuses on misunderstandings about the teaching of languages. Issues examined include the nature and role of applied linguistics, the nature of teaching, the influence of educational "fashions," and implications for the training of language teachers. (MSE)

This meta-analysis pools data from 25 years of research on the order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by students of English as a second language (ESL). Some researchers have posited a "natural" order of acquisition common to all ESL learners, but no single cause has been shown for this phenomenon. Our study investigated…

The interactionist perspective on second language learning has focused on the social aspects of interaction, with interaction viewed as the context and process through which language can be learned. Language learning through interaction can be viewed from several current theoretical perspectives of second language learning: as interaction of…

A model for analyzing classroom interaction is presented. The model focuses on two issues: management of turn-taking and the relationship between ways of interacting and outcome of the teaching/learning process. Turn-taking is seen as one element of conversational style, in which speakers signal degree of involvement by using different linguistic…

Contrasts two approaches for investigating second-language teaching, arguing that the educational approach, which starts with a pedagogical issue and examines it through pedagogical, theoretical, and empirical sources, is more comprehensive than the linguistic approach, which primarily consists of the applications of linguistic research.…

Research findings on semantic cohesion within a sentence and its effect on individuals' performance in using the sentences illustrate how research methodology can influence research outcomes. (MSE)

This article looks at issues affecting Robert Garioch's translation into Scots of a sonnet from Giuseppe Gioachino Belli's Romaneschi collection. It begins with the discussion of a problem involved in writing in dialects with no settled written standard. This 'standardizing' poetry is then looked at in terms of translation and theories of the…

The main difference between the information-processing and Bialystok's Analysis/Control framework for first and second language learning is in their focus. The latter is equipped mainly to account for performance differences on metalinguistic tasks, while the former accounts for construction and reconstruction of implicit and explicit mental…

By presenting two theories of first and second language learning dichotomously, their fundamental similarity as information-processing theories is obscured and details of both positions are misrepresented. (Author/MSE)