To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns. Half the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on nondiminutive baseforms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated…

Spatial relations in American Sign Language (ASL) are often signed from the perspective of the signer and so involve a shift in perspective and mental rotation. This study examined developing knowledge of language used to refer to the spatial relations "front," "behind," "left," "right," "towards," "away," "above," and "below" by children learning…

In the study of language acquisition, one of the central problems is how to bridge a qualitative gap between the primary linguistic data (PLD) that children are exposed to and the final state of a particular grammar that children acquire. Universal Grammar (UG) is assumed to play a crucial role in this problem. The aims of this report are: (1) to…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the concept and method of deriving various English "true possessives" by nominalizing sentences of the form "X has Y." First considered is the motivation for deriving genetives from underlying sentences rather than for treating only the surface form of such genitives: the use of auxiliary…

Presents a transformationally oriented analysis of the relative clause in English, Hindi, and Baghdad Arabic and points out differences in emphasis which must be observed when teaching the English restrictive relative clause to Hindi and Baghdad Arabic speakers. (FB)

Four games are described that were developed to give students of English as a foreign language oral practice with articles and the prerequisite mass-count noun distinction. The games provide guided, concentrated practice in contexts naturally called for particle subcases of article use. With suitable vocabulary control, they are applicable for…

Reviews methods for analyzing gender bias in English-as-a- Second-Language textbooks and suggests a methodology that deals with (1) continuous discourse (prose) and context-reduced language (sentence-level items); and (2) interpreting language content (meaning) and counting language items (number of occurrences) based on the work of M.A.K.…

Several basic problems in the field of the selection of vocabulary for teaching English as a foreign language are discussed. The nature of word frequency and word availability are considered, along with their limitations as measures of the usefulness of concrete nouns. Word familiarity is proposed as a psycholinguistic measure for noun selection,…

Results indicate that the pattern of acquisition of noun plurals in English is comparable for both children having English as their first language and those acquiring English as a second language. (Authors)

Six brief articles discuss these aspects of language instruction: contrasting the imperative "let" with other imperative forms; distinguishing between perfect and nonperfect tenses in English; the various functions a question can perform; use of humor to illustrate language quirks; learning appropriate uses of count versus noncount nouns; and…

Analyzes the use of verb-noun collocations by advanced German speaking students of English in free written production. Types of mistakes that learners make when producing collocations are identified. The influence of the degree of restriction of a combination and of learners' first language on the production of collocations is investigated. (VWL)

Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of what has become the standard approach to teaching relative clauses. To overcome the disadvantages, proposes a hierarchical teaching method that begins by introducing noun phrases that contain relative clauses before comparing them with similar structures in the learner's first language. Shows an…

The influence of syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of known words on the acquisition of the English stress system was investigated in ten native Thai speakers. All participants were adult learners of English with an average length of residence in the US of 1.4 years. They were asked to produce and give perceptual judgments on…

Rules for determining word stress for verbs, nouns and adjectives are given as a useful tool for foreign learners of English. (CJ)

The concept of register refers to variations in language determined by function, medium and formality or style. An examination of the registers of verb forms and noun phrases yielded results important to the writer of English language courses. (CK)