The present study evaluated the effects of explicit instruction on advanced French second language (L2) learners' (n = 18) contextually appropriate use of two stylistic variables (/l/ deletion vs. retention and "ne" deletion vs. retention) using two different task types. A planned and unplanned oral task was used to assess students'…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

This article examines the work of Geneva Smitherman, its contribution to the development of composition studies, and its relation to recent scholarship on translingualism and code-meshing. Analyzing her prodigious output in relation to these contemporary studies of language diversity and writing instruction, the article considers Smitherman's…

This article offers the author's commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in the present issue. Multiple Grammars advances the claim that optionality is a constitutive characteristic of any one grammar, with interlanguage grammars being perhaps the clearest examples of a…

This article offers commentary on the Multiple Grammars (MG) language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue. It argues that more precise definitions are needed for the terms "rule," "simple," and "productive." Topics discussed include Amaral and Roeper's verb second (V2) rule,…

Amaral & Roeper's Multiple Grammars (MG) proposal offers an appealingly simple way of thinking about the linguistic representations of bilingual speakers. This article presents a commentary on the MG language acquisition theory proposed by Luiz Amaral and Tom Roeper in this issue, focusing on the theory's implications for child…

Given the current methodological interest in eliciting direct data on the cognitive processes L2 learners employ as they interact with L2 data during the early stages of the learning process, this article takes a critical and comparative look at three concurrent data elicitation procedures currently employed in the SLA literature: Think aloud (TA)…

Research on second language (L2) communication strategies over the past three decades has concerned itself broadly with defining their usage in terms of planning and compensation, as well as with the use of taxonomies for coding different types of strategies. Taking a Conversation Analytic (CA) perspective, this article examines the fine-grained…

This study examined the comprehension of actional and psychological verbs in both their active and passive (short and long) forms by 99 Serbian-speaking children. The children, whose age ranged between 3 years, 6 months (3;6) and 7 years, 6 months (7;6), were divided into three groups: 3;6-5 ("M" = 4.3), 5;1-6;1 ("M" = 5.6),…

Many age-related second language (L2) studies have confirmed that young children have a better chance to become nativelike in L2 acquisition than adults. The current study investigated whether age effects exist in the L2 acquisition of Japanese and whether nativelike proficiency is guaranteed for early child L2 starters after constant target…

Recent studies in linguistics have shown that metaphor is ubiquitous. This has important consequences for language learners who need to use it appropriately in their speech and writing. This study aims to provide a preliminary measure of the amount and distribution of metaphor used by language learners in their writing across Common European…

To acquire the meanings of verbs, toddlers make use of the surrounding linguistic information. For example, 2-year-olds successfully acquire novel transitive verbs that appear in semantically rich frames containing content nouns ("The boy is gonna pilk a balloon"), but they have difficulty with pronominal frames ("He is gonna pilk…

It is clear that a proper understanding of what academic English is and how to use it is crucial for success in college, and yet students face multiple obstacles in acquiring this new "code", not least that their professors often cannot agree amongst themselves on a definition and a set of rules. "Understanding Language Use in the…

Students at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) are required to study a foreign language. In order to place students into appropriate language courses, especially less commonly taught languages defined by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), effective language placement policies are essential. The author…

Philosophical theories are often repudiated, or taken to be repudiated, by identifying counter-examples. These counter-examples are typically based upon our natural response to a real or hypothetical scenario, also called our intuition about the scenario. This methodology of appealing to intuition has been the focus of recent debates about…