TutorWhile assessment and its effects on learning such as "washback" have been the subject of much debate (e.g. Alderson & Wall, 1993; Bachman, 1995: 356; Alderson & Hamp Lyons, 1996; Shohamy "et al", 1996; Andrews "et al", 2002), assessment as a tool for developmental, not merely evaluative, purposes has…

This paper investigates what types of instruction-feedback combinations may contribute to the learning of English grammar for 120 Japanese university students. Students were given tests on grammaticality judgment and correction, using English ergative verbs in three trials of a post-instruction test. Subjects were divided into six groups according…

Investigates the effectiveness of two types of computer feedback: one is traditional computer feedback that indicates only missing or unexpected words in the learner's response, and the other is intelligent computer feedback that provides further information about the nature of the errors in the form of metalinguistic rules. (17 references)…

This article reports on the ATLAS project, which addressed the problem of poor recruitment to university courses in the less widely taught (LWT) languages. The results of a survey of school students' attitudes towards learning languages and towards using the web were used to help design a website to encourage students to consider taking up a new…

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby…

Presents the results of three experiments investigating the time course of grammaticality judgement. The high correlations among the experiments suggest that the incremental tasks assigned were tapping into the same decision-making process as is found online. The article discusses the findings' implications for the error types that do and do not…

Examined preschool and primary school students' ability to recognize differences between spoken samples of languages foreign to them. Results found that, although both groups performed as well as adults when the languages within a pair differed, preschoolers performed significantly worse than primary school and college students when the speakers…