Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

This empirical study presented the description of two teaching methods called "deductive" and "inductive" approaches. The first involved providing a group of participants with rules and then examples directly and separately, but the second approach involves providing another group of participants with examples or content…

By centralizing the issue of test fairness in language proficiency assessments, this study responds to a call by researchers for developing greater social responsibility in the language testing agenda. As inquiries into language attitude and psychology indicate, there is an underlying uncertainty pertaining to the validity of test use and score…

We often speak about developing students' cultural and intercultural awareness as part of the language learning process. However, these elements are often dealt with superficially and the methods used are somewhat unclear to many practitioners and to learners themselves. As a result, we very often hear that learners do not learn a language at the…

SV sentences with unaccusative verbs like "The leaf fell" involve movement from object to subject position. This line of studies tested whether young children can produce this movement and whether they represent SV sentences with unaccusatives as derived by movement. In Hebrew, unaccusatives appear in both SV and VS orders. This optionality allows…

Students in higher learning institutions need to write lots of reports based on the projects done. Since they are at the tertiary level of education, they are required to use English in their reports. This is to ensure that they are able to function well in English later at the workplace. Writing requires students to apply rules regarding sentence…

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in…

Observation of sentences shows that expected incompatibility of the present perfect in English and adverbs of finished time may be ignored by speakers who focus on the current relevance of the event to the moment of speaking. Communicational problems and conflicts may be resolved pragmatically with reference to the principal purpose of…

This study explored the comprehension and production of sentences derived by syntactic movement, in orally trained school-age Hebrew-speaking children with moderate to profound hearing impairment, aged 7;8?9;9 years. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of relative clauses and topicalization sentences (with word orders of OVS [object,…

David Lightfoot's "How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change" (1991), which adopts the principles and parameters approach developed by Chomsky as part of the theory of government and binding, is reviewed. (Contains 34 references.) (LB)

It is argued that the restrictions on "wh"-movement out of negative and factive islands cannot be explained solely by the Empty Category Principle but that embedded properties assigned by matrix verbs also intervene. (Contains 48 references.) (LB)

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…

Eighty-one seventh- and eighth-grade students (age 12-14) learning English in Japanese classrooms were tested on their knowledge of English case-marked pronouns in sentences like "He likes her," *"He likes she" and *"Him likes her." The aim of the study was to evaluate the predictions of three theories of second…

Discusses functional and anaphoric control in complex sentences (sentences with more than one verb) in Jordanian Arabic within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. It is argued that Jordanian Arabic utilizes anaphoric rather that functional control. (18 references) (JL)

The behavior of non-terms in Shaba Swahili is examined within the framework of relational grammar. Shaba Swahili is peculiar because it reflects a complex linguistic situation; its population consisted of people coming from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The behavior of Shaba Swahili non-terms is discussed with reference to several…