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The Grammar Dimension in Instructed Second Language Learning
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 256

The Grammar Dimension in Instructed Second Language Learning

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2013-12-19
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  • Publisher: A&C Black

One of the key issues in second language learning and teaching concerns the role and practice of grammar instruction. Does it make a difference? How do we teach grammar in the language classroom? Is there an effective technique to teach grammar that is better than others? While some linguists address these questions to develop a better understanding of how people acquire a grammar, language acquisition scholars are in search of the most effective way to approach the teaching of grammar in the language classroom. The individual chapters in this volume will explore a variety of approaches to grammar teaching and offer a list of principles and guidelines that those involved in language acquisition should consider to design and implement effective grammar tasks during their teaching. It proposes that the key issue is not whether or not we should teach grammar but how we incorporate a teaching grammar component in our communicative language teaching practices.

Individuals in Time
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 296

Individuals in Time

This monograph investigates the temporal properties of those predicates referring to individuals – the so-called individual-level (IL) predicates – in contrast to those known as stage-level (SL) predicates. Many of the traditional tenets attributed to the IL/SL dichotomy are not solidly founded, this book claims, as it examines current theoretical issues concerning the syntax/semantics inter­face such as the relation between semantic prop­erties of predicates and their syntactic structure. By using the contrast found in Spanish copular clauses (ser vs. estar), Individuals in Time shows that the conception of IL predicates as permanent and stative cannot be maintained. The existence of nonstative IL predicates is demonstrated through analyzing the correlation between the syntactic presence of certain projections (specifi­cally, preposi­tional complements) and process-like aspect properties. This detailed examin­ation of IL predicates in the domains of inner aspect, outer aspect, and tense will be welcomed by scholars and students with an interest in event structure, tense, and aspect.

The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 320

The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

How special are early birds? Foreign language teaching and learning
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 244

How special are early birds? Foreign language teaching and learning

This volume honours the academic achievements and scholarship of Professor Florence Myles as a world-leading scholar in the fields of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and French Linguistics, in particular for her work in corpus-based SLA and language policy in primary school education. In addition to reviews of the field (e.g., primary languages policy in the UK), the volume presents new research studies reflective of key theoretical and methodological issues in current SLA research, including theory-building, corpus-based investigations, studies of language development, as well as informing teacher professional development through research. Taken together, this edited book provides a wide-ranging and balanced account of Myles’s work and speaks to her influence on SLA research and primary languages policy. We invite readers to learn more about the fascinating research presented here as inspired by Florence’s dedication to field.

Second Language Acquisition
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 416

Second Language Acquisition

This textbook approaches second language acquisition from the perspective of generative linguistics. Roumyana Slabakova reviews and discusses paradigms and findings from the last thirty years of research in the field, focussing in particular on how the second or additional language is represented in the mind and how it is used in communication. The adoption and analysis of a specific model of acquisition, the Bottleneck Hypothesis, provides a unifying perspective. The book assumes some non-technical knowledge of linguistics, but important concepts are clearly introduced and defined throughout, making it a valuable resource not only for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, but also for researchers in cognitive science and language teachers.

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 200

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese is among the first books to try to incorporate both advanced linguistic and acquisition perspectives to show how eight sentence-final particles are represented in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese. This book will inform researchers of the general construction of the right periphery in L2 grammars. Drawing on up-to-date theoretical frameworks and findings from advanced empirical studies, it sketches the general picture of the periphery that these particles occupy in English-Chinese interlanguages. Readers will grasp the problems and difficulties, and particularly the ambiguities, which learners of Chinese must grapple with in the process of acquiring sentence-final particles. Possible influential factors underlying the acquisition process are explicitly discussed as well. Researchers will also find insights in the advanced methodologies and statistics that are used to study Chinese. The book will be illuminating for researchers interested in SLA, linguists of generative theories, and educators teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.

Overt and Null Subjects in Bulgarian and in L1 Bulgarian-L2 German Interlanguage
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 316

Overt and Null Subjects in Bulgarian and in L1 Bulgarian-L2 German Interlanguage

This book addresses the realization of pronominal subjects in Bulgarian and its implications for late near-native competence of German as a second/foreign language. Since Bulgarian is under-researched, typological investigations were carried out prior to the empirical study of L2 subject use. The book covers the adequate classification of Bulgarian, ascertaining its pro-drop nature, and explores the possible impact of related cross-linguistic differences on near-native interlanguage grammars of speakers with the language combination L1-Bulgarian/L2-German. Although German is not pro-drop, it allows null topics and requires some obligatory null expletives, so that null subject contexts superficially overlap for the two languages. This is a source of interlanguage deficits if no proper differentiation between subject types is made.

The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 581

The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition

Bringing together a comprehensive collection of newly-commissioned articles, this Handbook covers the most recent developments across a range of sub-fields relevant to the study of second language Spanish. Provides a unique and much-needed collection of new research in this subject, compiled and written by experts in the field Offers a critical account of the most current, ground-breaking developments across key fields, each of which has seen innovative empirical research in the past decade Covers a broad range of issues including current theoretical approaches, alongside a variety of entries within such areas as the sound system, morphosyntax, individual and social factors, and instructed language learning Presents a variety of methodological approaches spanning the active areas of research in language acquisition

Current Research in Applied Linguistics
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 310

Current Research in Applied Linguistics

This volume offers a representative selection of the papers presented at the Third ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC3), held in Santiago de Compostela, 21–22 September 2012. The book is structured into four parts. Part I comprises syntactic studies on the auxiliary verb get in Indian English, the grammar of verbs capable of occurring with or without an object in Contemporary English, and isolated if-clauses. Part II includes two papers dealing with word formation patterns and with crosslinguistic influences on motion expression in English and Spanish. The studies in Part III discuss topics related to second language acquisition, such as the difficulties encountered by Spanish speakers in learning English pronunciation, verbal morphology production by Japanese learners of English, and the effects of elicitation on students’ production of English past tense forms. The papers in Part IV revolve around discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, addressing topics such as automatic sentiment detection, perspectival construal patterns in language and cognition, and the effect of emotional valence on disambiguation processes.