An account of the development of research and thinking in the field of learner language. Draws on wide-ranging research into contrastive analysis, bilingualism, theoretical linguistics and experimental psychology.

This book shows the evolution of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a famous and innovative dictionary for native speakers of English. It traces changes in the dictionary from 1911 to recent times. By comparing samples from each edition, the author provides insights into the revisions of the dictionary. The analysis sheds light on the editors' policy on various aspects of the dictionary's structure, including definition style, vocabulary selection and sense discrimination. The study shows how the editors abandoned the telegraphic style of definitions and adapted them to the needs of the target users. As the dictionary evolved towards greater user-friendliness, it also aimed at broader vocabulary coverage.

The 21st-century global linguistic landscape has seen many changes for language learners. New assessments have been made in a host of areas, especially regarding learners' needs, motives, the target of instruction, and methodologies. The new realities, locales and purposes of communication all necessitate a shift in attitude and a new set of competencies is required of the teacher. This volume comprises a multi-faceted and thoughtful response to these changes in both modern reality and teaching philosophy. It is a study of a few of the other ways to tackle situations outside of norms and routines. The authors of this volume possess many years of teaching experience, and have stepped off the roads most travelled to explore new avenues and find novel solutions in foreign language teaching. This volume familiarises readers with contemporary theoretical debate and new research, and demonstrates how to easily translate these into practical, everyday classroom applications.

Based on a research project funded by the Army Research Institute, Foreign Language Learning reports original empirical and theoretical research on foreign language acquisition and makes recommendations about applications to foreign language instruction. The ultimate goal of this project was to identify a set of psychological principles that can provide the foundation for--or at least, argumentation for--a foreign language training course. This book reviews the various studies of which the project is comprised. It begins with an overview chapter outlining the scope of the project and summarizing some of the experiments that were conducted in the laboratory. In each of the following chapters, the contributors report on previously unpublished research on selected specific psycholinguistic training principles; vocabulary and concept acquisition; language comprehension; reading processes; and bilingualism. The final chapter--prepared by a prominent expert on second language training--provides an overview and evaluation of the contribution of the research described in earlier chapters to the goal of improving instructional methods in foreign language learning. Sandwiched between the introductory and final chapters are four major sections: * Vocabulary and Concept Acquisition, which discusses the effect of first-language phonological configuration on lexical acquisition in a second language, contextual inference effects in foreign language vocabulary acquisition and retention, mediated processes in foreign language vocabulary acquisition and retention, and the status of the count-mass distinction in a mental grammar; * Language Comprehension, which addresses voice communication between air traffic controllers and pilots who are nonnative speakers of English, cognitive strategies in discourse processing, and the effects of context and word order in Maasai sentence production and comprehension; * Reading Processes, which discusses the enhancement of text comprehension through highlighting, the effect of alphabet and fluency on unitization processes in reading, and reading proficiency of bilinguals in their first and second languages; and * Bilingualism, which addresses Stroop interference effects in bilinguals between similar and dissimilar languages, the individual differences in second language proficiency, and the hierarchical model of bilingual representation.

This book showcases how language learner agency can be understood and researched from varying perspectives by providing, for the first time, a collection of diverse approaches in one volume. The volume is organised into three main sections:the first sections offers an introduction to varying theoretical approaches to agency; the second section presents analyses of agency in a variety of empirical studies; and the third section focuses on the pedagogical implications of data-based studies of agency. The volume includes the work of researchers working in languages including English (ESL and EFL), Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Truku (an indigenous language in Taiwan) and with both child and adult language learners. This collection will serve as a key reference for researchers of language learning and teaching, sociolinguistics and language and identity.

The monograph, based on broad studies into the Polish diaspora in Sweden, provides a picture of the social factors influencing the maintenance of the heritage language and culture by the second generation of emigrants. The author's main objective, however, is to discover the systemic mechanisms underlying language acquisition by children in a bilingual setting and to investigate the influence of the interference from the dominant language on the acquisition of Polish. A particular attention is devoted to the category of case, which is absent from Swedish. Although it, generally, represents a description of a particular linguistic material, in fact the book addresses problems of the theory of language acquisition. The results and conclusions enable a better understanding of the universal semiotic and psychological principles that motivate the structure of the grammatical system of a natural language.

This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.

This addition to the Cognitive Science and Second Language Acquisition series presents a comprehensive review of the latest research findings on sentence processing in second language acquisition. The book begins with a broad overview of the core issues of second language sentence processing research and then narrows its focus by dedicating individual chapters to each of these key areas. While a number of publications have discussed research findings on knowledge of formal syntactic principles as part of theories of second language acquisition, there are fewer resources dedicated to the role of second language sentence processing in this context. This volume will act as the first full-length literature review of the field on the market.

The proceedings cover new perspectives in the field of lexicography, including both theoretical and practical topics, and new aspects of special and bilingual dictionaries. The volume also includes contributions dealing with morphology, word-formation, semantics, neologisms, the history of lexicography, and the techniques of computerized dictionary production.

As the first title in the new series, New Directions in Communication Disorders Research: Integrative Approaches, this volume discusses a unique phenomenon in cognitive science, single-word reading, which is an essential element in successful reading competence. Single-word reading is an interdisciplinary area of research that incorporates phonological, orthographic, graphemic, and semantic information in the representations suitable for the task demands of reading. Editors Elena L. Grigorenko and Adam J. Naples have organized a collection of essays written by an outstanding group of scholars in order to systematically sample research on this important topic, as well as to describe the research within different experimental paradigms. Single-Word Reading provides an introduction to unfamiliar areas of research, and is an inspiration for future study. The introductory chapter sets up a contextual stage for connections between spoken and written word processing, the stage-based nature of their development, and the role of education. Succeeding chapters address visual word processing; the role of morphology in word recognition; the role of lexical representation; the biological bases of single-word reading and related processes; and more. Reading researchers will take interest in this substantial book, as will professionals and practitioners linked to the teaching of reading in the departments of school psychology, special education, communication disorders, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and reading.

"Auch" and "noch" in Child and Adult German is an empirical study of the early acquisition of "auch" (also) and "noch" (also/still) in German, and the adult use of these additive particles in spoken language. It centres around the question of how children acquire these particles, but it also investigates the way in which adults use these particles in order to determine what children actually have to learn and what the input they get is like. Previous studies on focus particles in adult German mainly focused on the semantic and syntactic properties of primarily constructed examples. Based on several corpora of spoken German, this is the first comprehensive study of natural language data that systematically analyses the intonation of focus particle utterances as well as their semantic, syntactic and information structural properties. The study of the child data, an extensive longitudinal corpus of one German child, was carried out against the background of the adult data. It offers a thorough characterisation of the acquisition of the two additive particles that also takes into account results from previous studies on the acquisition of focus particles, mainly on their comprehension. In addition to studying the acquisition of these particles, the author also introduces an analysis of focus particles that emphasises the differences between stressed and unstressed particles, which makes this book not only interesting to researchers in language acquisition and psycholinguistics, but also to those interested in phonology/prosody, semantics, syntax and information structure.

Legal lexicography or jurilexicography is the most neglected aspect of the discipline of jurilinguistics, despite its great relevance for translators, academics and comparative lawyers. This volume seeks to bridge this gap in legal literature by bringing together contributions from ten jurisdictions from leading experts in the field. The work addresses aspects of legal lexicography, both monolingual and bilingual, in its various manifestations in both civilian and common law systems. It thus compares epistemic approaches in a subject that is inextricably bound up with specific legal systems and specific languages. Topics covered include the history of French legal lexicography, ordinary language as defined by the courts, the use of law dictionaries by the judiciary, legal lexicography and translation, and a proposed multilingual dictionary for the EU citizen. While the majority of contributions are in English, the volume includes three written in French. The collection will be a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners engaging with language in the mechanism of the law.

This book includes six studies on the acquisition of single Mesoamerican indigenous languages, (Huichol, Zapotec, and the Mayan languages Ch'ol, Tzeltal, K'iche', and Yukatek); and a crosslinguistic study of five Mayan languages (K'anjob'al, K'iche', Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Yukatek). Three topics are theoretically and methodologically discussed and empirically demonstrated: with respect to ergativity, the ergative-absolutive cross-referencing pattern on the morphological level, noun-verb distinction and the acquisition of body-part locatives in the early lexicon, and the role of semantic properties and cultural context in language acquisition and socialization. This book makes important claims regarding the methodology of cross-linguistic studies as well as the results of these studies and the comparative method used in the book (structural and discursive factors in language acquisition, cross-linguistic relationships and variation).

Testing of second language pragmatics has grown as a research area but still suffers from a tension between construct coverage and practicality. In this book, the authors describe the development and validation of a web-based test of second language pragmatics for learners of English. The test has a sociopragmatic orientation and strives for a broad coverage of the construct by assessing learners' metapragmatic judgments as well as their ability to co-construct discourse. To ensure practicality, the test is delivered online and is scored partially automatically and partially by human raters. We used the argument-based approach to validation, which showed that the test can support low-stakes decisions about learners' knowledge of sociopragmatics in English.

This book aims to aid English teachers at the junior and senior secondary school levels in teaching pronunciation within a regular EFL syllabus. It presents such a way of incorporating the phonetic and lexical components so as to facilitate students' acquisition of a standard phonetic system and to prevent them from forming habitual mistakes in individual words. It highlights key areas of the English phonetic system and provides examples of strategies how to use a course-book for the sake of teaching pronunciation. The discussion of teaching the phonetic system relies on the comparison between its conscious and unconscious acquisition. Teaching individual vocabulary items (especially reversing habitual mispronunciations) is analysed through contrasting mental and behavioural learning.

With a particular focus on the morphosyntactic features of second language, this book discusses the idea that language acquisition is a discontinuous and 'quantized' process and thus that some items might be learned twice, statistically and grammatically. It argues that the switch from one way of learning to another is statistically-driven and grammatically motivated. The volume brings together and discusses insights and evidence from learner corpora analysis and electrophysiological data in an attempt to provide the reader with a unified outlook and it suggests a new, developmentally-oriented interpretation of findings. The topics discussed will be of interest to researchers working in the field of psycho- and neurolinguistics and SLA.

A volume on second-language acquisition theory and pedagogy is, at the same time, a mark of progress and a bit of an anomaly. The progress is shown by the fact that the two disciplines have established themselves as areas of study not only distinct from each other, but also different from linguistic theory. This was not always the case, at least not in the United States. The anomaly results from the fact that this book deals with the relationship between L2 theory and pedagogy despite the conclusion that there is currently no widely-accepted theory of SLA. Grouped into five sections, the papers in this volume: * consider questions about L2 theory and pedagogy at the macro-level, from the standpoint of the L2 setting; * consider input in terms of factors which are internal to the learner; * examine the question of external factors affecting the input, such as the issue of whether points of grammar can be explicitly taught; * deal with questions of certain complex, linguistic behaviors and the various external and social variables that influence learners; and * discuss issues surrounding the teaching of pronunciation factors that affect a non-native accent.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition offers a user-friendly, authoritative survey of terms and constructs that are important to understanding research in second language acquisition (SLA) and its applications. The Encyclopedia is designed for use as a reference tool by students, researchers, teachers and professionals with an interest in SLA. The Encyclopedia has the following features: * 252 alphabetized entries written in an accessible style, including cross references to other related entries in the Encyclopedia and suggestions for further reading * Among these, 9 survey entries that cover the foundational areas of SLA in detail: Development in SLA, Discourse and Pragmatics in SLA, Individual Differences in SLA, Instructed SLA, Language and the Lexicon in SLA, Measuring and Researching SLA, Psycholingustics of SLA, Social and Sociocultural Approaches to SLA, Theoretical Constructs in SLA. * The rest of the entries cover all the major subdisciplines, methodologies and concepts of SLA, from "Accommodation" to the "ZISA project." Written by an international team of specialists, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition is an invaluable resource for students and researchers with an academic interest in SLA.

The aim of this pioneering volume is to advance our understanding of written language learning in instructed SLA by offering a collection of empirical studies in which the contribution of diverse theoretical perspectives to our understanding of L2 writing development will be explored. As such, the book represents a further attempt to situate written language learning at the core of applied linguistics research, in general, and SLA research, in particular, hence attempting to redress the oral bias of theoretical and empirical work in these fields. It adds a further building block onto recent TESOL initiatives aimed at understanding "development" in second and foreign language learning. Continuity from one chapter to another is provided by adherence to a consistent chapter model. The volume will be of great interest to academics in the disciplines of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA) and second/foreign language (L2) writing.

This study deals with the frequency and use of clausal complementation in the oral production of two different Spanish learner groups (i.e. Galician/Spanish learners and Spanish learners) as compared with a further learner group (i.e. German learners) and with native speakers (British students). By using corpus and learner linguistic approaches, this research aims to find out and explain the similarities and differences regarding the use of clausal complementation structures in the oral English of several groups of non-native and native speakers. In addition, this study also depicts the process of collection of the oral corpus VICOLSE, which contains transcripts of spoken English data produced by bilingual Galician/Spanish learners. The identification of variation in the use of clausal complementation across the data sheds light on the particular characteristics of spoken learner language syntax/structuring.

This monograph offers an incisive analysis of how the second language learner can achieve cultural proficiency, which is more than a set of rules and facts to be memorized by rote. How can the cultural dimension be taken into account, among the many choices of instructional material and language assessment tools? Is it possible to distinguish levels of cultural competence? How can the degree of cultural proximity between the source language and the target language influence the acquisition process? What strategies should be implemented in order to decode any cultural pitfalls? This handy guide addresses these and many other frequently asked questions underpinning language teaching methodology. Illustrated with a broad range of classroom-based examples, this book presents language as inextricably intertwined with social relations. The variety of languages involved (Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, French and English) makes the volume especially attractive for language educators seeking effective teaching strategies in specific local contexts around the globe.

Volume I is the first of two volumes that document the three components of the CHILDES Project. It is divided into two parts which provide an introduction to the use of computational tools for studying language learning. The first part is the CHAT manual, which describes the conventions and principles of CHAT transcription and recommends specific methods for data collection and digitization. The second part is the CLAN manual, which describes the uses of the editor, sonic CHAT, and the various analytic commands. The book will be useful for both novice and experienced users of the CHILDES tools, as well as instructors and students working with transcripts of child language. Volume II describes in detail all of the corpora included in the CHILDES database. The conversational interactions in the corpora come from monolingual children and their caregivers and siblings, as well as bilingual children, older school-aged children, adult second-language learners, children with various types of language disabilities, and aphasic recovering from language loss. The database includes transcripts in 26 different languages.The CD-ROM that accompanies these volumes includes the transcript files described in Volume II. It runs on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. For more information or updates to the files, visit the CHILDES website at http: //childes.psy.cmu.ed

Accompanied by: "To Arne Zettersten on the occasion of his 60th anniversary." (12 p.; 21 cm).