A study investigated "lexical inventions" in the advanced oral French of 39 native Dutch-speakers, 32 of whom had French as a second language (L2) and English as a third language (L3), with the others having L2 English and L3 French. A higher proportion of lexical inventions produced by French L2 speakers derived from non-standard use of…

This article presents a selective review of the work carried out recently in second language acquisition (SLA) research which makes use of oral learner corpora and computer technologies. In the first part, the reasons why the field of SLA needs corpora for addressing current theoretical issues are briefly reviewed. In the second part, recent…

This article discusses some of the challenges that researchers working in the fields of bilingualism and second-language acquisition (SLA) and in the field of language testing face in developing comparable and culturally and cognitively appropriate data collection and language assessment tools for bilingual children from rural minority-language…

A study investigated the relationship between syntax, discourse, and suprasegmentals in reported utterances (e.g., "He said,..."). The study is intended as both theoretical and descriptive, specifically, proposing a model of intonation in spontaneous oral Quebec French. The first chapter reviews research on Quebec French prosody, on oral…

In 1984, a new corpus of spoken Quebecois French (Canada) was added to the existing data. In developing it, half of the native speakers participating in a 1971 study were re-interviewed, providing previously unavailable data on individual language development. The report describes in detail the sociolinguistic methodology used in developing the…

A study examined student responses to teacher-initiated questions in classrooms of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study focused specifically on the similarities and differences in the questions asked by native-speaking (NS) teachers of ESL and by non-native-speaking (NNS) teachers of EFL, and to…

A three-year research project which will collect information on the grammar of British dialects is described. The project is part of a larger study of syntactic variation, undertaken to gain insight into the causes of and solutions to linguistic conflict in school. Information is to be gathered in selected schools from the speech of students 11-16…

The CapeVerdean Language Project's final report presents a phonemic analysis of the Capeverdean language, a derivation of Portuguese traditionally considered a dialect. The project's research is based on the assumption that Capeverdean is a language with its own dialects, and the research was intended to determine an autonomous phonemic…

The role of pragmatic particles such as "you know,""I guess," and "man," which occur primarily in spontaneous speech are examined. Pragmatic particles and impromptu speech are defined in terms of prototypes and the social and cognitive causes for the two phenomena are discussed. A distinction is made between core and…

Impromptu speech is characterized by the simultaneous processes of ideation (the elaboration and structuring of reasoning by the speaker as he improvises) and expression in the speaker. Other elements accompany this characteristic: division of speech flow into short segments, acoustic relief in the form of word stress following a pause, and both…

A study analyzed four dyadic conversations for evidence of the signals operating in the turn-taking process and facilitating the smooth exchange of turns. It found over 20 syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features occurring frequently with turn-taking. The five most significant factors correlating with turn-taking were a prosodically completed…

The language development of one child was examined from birth to three years of age in order to map the similarities and differences in the acquisition of oral language, reading, and writing skills. The study also sought to provide insight into why learning to read and write are not as naturally easy as learning to talk. Data were collected by…

The papers in this collection focus on the integration of child language development research into curriculum and instruction, which was the general topic of four conferences held in conjunction with the 1979 and 1980 annual conventions of the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. Section one, on child…

A total of 78 Mexican-American and 14 Anglo-American children participated in a study to determine the relationship of oral English proficiency, social acceptance, and academic achievement among fifth grade students. The students were administered measures of phonology and verbal expression. Scores from a standardized achievement test were used to…

The research reported here focuses on one aspect of the communicative environment, namely vocabulary. The central question motivating this research was whether there are social class and ethnic group differences in the vocabulary used in the home and in the school situation. A corpus of talk was searched for the use of words from four standardized…