Research in the active-passive verb relation has indicated that there is an interaction between syntactic form and verb semantics among children of preschool age. The present study examines the contribution of active-passive syntax and verb semantics to comprehension difficulty for preschoolers, 6-year-olds, 7-year-olds, and adults. An additional…

English as second language (ESL) learners often avoid using the present perfect or use it improperly. In contrast with native speakers of English sampled from newspaper editorials, of whom 75 percent used the present perfect, only 22 percent of ESL college students used the present perfect correctly. This avoidance is due in part to lack of…

Chinese students have particular problems with the intersection of two English verb classes: transitional event verbs and state verbs of having and being. The problem is that these two verb classes appear to "pair up." Chinese students tend to be unaware that these two classes pair up. This study investigated whether lexical aspect could…

This paper illustrates the functional similarities between the English and German past perfect tense which are extremely difficult for native Japanese-speaking learners of the two languages. By the time that Japanese university students begin study of the German language, most have had at least 6 years of English language study. Yet, German is…

The tendency for individuals to reduce their own efforts when others are available to respond has been called "social loafing." Social loafing has been found also to characterize collective endeavors on tasks considered cognitively efffortful. To test the hypothesis that reduced cognitive effort related to the presence of a coacting group would…

This paper presents results from a contrastive study of qualification devices used in a 400,000-word corpus of English argumentative texts, written by English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) Spanish university students, U.S. university students, and native professional writers (newspaper editorials in English). The study attempted to account for the…

Using Bloom's taxonomy as the basis for an empirical investigation, this paper examines what engineering students and professionals want from engineering education. Fifty engineering students, from Computer Science and Information Technology courses, were asked to rank activity verbs in order of their impression about frequency of their occurrence…

A study investigated differential processing of adjectival and verbal passives in English, and the implications for linguistic theory. The subjects, 30 native-English-speaking college students, were presented with word triples in which one member was an adjective, one an adjectival passive, and one a verbal passive, and with three two-sentence…

A study investigated the variability of language performance on different types of testing task, global versus discrete-focus. Three tests (cloze, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank) were developed to measure learners' knowledge of five verb forms. The tests, containing corresponding items designed to elicit equivalent structures, were…

A study of individual variability in second-language learners' performance in specific classroom tasks is presented as evidence that instruction in language for special purposes (LSP) has an important role to play. Subjects were 17 Singapore university students in a remedial English course; all had studied English since elementary school. The…

Foreign language teaching methodology is confronted with the problem of teaching Spanish to English-dominant native Spanish speakers. Linguistic documentation is lacking to accurately evaluate the linguistic competence of the bilingual student, documentation also useful in the preparation of adequate instructional materials. This paper describes…