This paper presents a series of experiments that tested the usefulness of teaching Spanish mood using an approach to Cognitive Grammar specifically developed for the foreign language classroom: "Operational Grammar." Mood selection is one of the most difficult aspects of learning Spanish as a FL, and it is one of the last features…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

Non-native speakers of English often experience problems in pronunciation as they are learning English, many such problems persisting even when the speaker has achieved a high degree of fluency. Research has shown that for a non-native speaker to sound most natural and intelligible in his or her second language, the speaker must acquire proper…

The present study is a corpus-based analysis of a selection of polysemous lexical verbs used to express modality in student argumentative writing. Twenty-three lexical verbs were searched for in three 100,000-word corpora of argumentative essays written in English by American, Filipino and Spanish university students. Concordance lines were…

This dissertation examines the effects of service learning experiences on participants' attitudes towards the Spanish language and culture and their language proficiency. It was hypothesized that using the Spanish language outside the confines of the academic environment would affect participants' attitudes and have an impact on their language…

This paper examines the connection between heritage language and culture and the construction and maintenance of social and personal identities of the Cora, an indigenous people of the Mexican Sierra del Nayar, in Northwestern Mexico. Using the frameworks of the socially and linguistically mediated mind (Dennet, 1991; Harre & Gillet, 1994;…

This essay focuses on the status of Spanish within the American educational system. The central argument of the article is that the high number of native speakers of Spanish and non-native learners of the language in the United States should not mask a number of serious issues facing the language in that country.

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? "Journal of Memory Language" 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian-Galles (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America" 110, 1608-1618.] found that…

The notion that academic writing is not only a conventional entity but also carries the representation of the writer has been supported by several researchers. Few studies have explored identity representation in language across two written cultures, such as English and Spanish, although Spanish might be a language of interest for non-native…

In the context of adult learners with low English proficiency enrolled in an organization offering instruction in both language and civics content, the purpose of the study was to determine. (1) the nature of grammatical knowledge in the context in the learners' second language (L2) and the nature of civics content knowledge in the learners' first…

The purpose of this case study was to determine if two samples of health education literature (one in print media; the other in electronic media), and published by the same health education organization, provided the requisite reading level for their intended audiences: immigrants and native speakers with a fourth-grade level of literacy. A…

This study draws from sociocultural theory to examine how biographical factors interplay with contextual factors to shape the professional identity of a Spanish language teacher candidate. Specifically, it explores the student teaching experience of Marcos, a 30-year-old language teacher candidate from South America. Analysis of the data reveals…

In Spanish, aspectual morphology is a critical element that speakers use to narrate and discuss past events. Previous qualitative accounts have shown that native Spanish-speakers apply past-tense aspectual morphology to verbs in order to distinguish between events viewed as perfective (bounded, discrete events) and imperfective (unbounded,…

This study investigates students' attitudes toward native and nonnative speaking instructors of Spanish. A quantitative questionnaire was administered to 292 students enrolled in three different levels of undergraduate Spanish courses at a U.S. university. Participants were asked to rate Likert scale items related to native versus nonnative…

Language performance assessments typically require human raters, introducing possible error. In international examinations of English proficiency, rater language background is an especially salient factor that needs to be considered. The existence of rater language background-related bias in writing performance assessment is the object of this…