Draws on the experience of a cohort of 22 multinational and multilingual students enrolled in a Master's in Education distance learning program administered by a British university. The purpose was to locate aims and philosophies of distance learning within the experiences of actual distance learners to see if learners needs were being met by the…

Analyzed the patterns and types of collaborative interactions taking place in three online teacher education classes and used the findings as a guide in the design of instructional interventions. (Author/VWL)

Considers implications for distance learning of negotiations by a group of intermediate learners of Italian interacting in dyads on a Web-based Italian native speaker (NS) chat program. Explores whether NS chat rooms are likely to offer an optimal environment for second language acquisition. (Author/VWL)

Ideas that resulted from reading Jean LeLoup and Robert Ponterio's tele-collaborative projects, Monsters.com, are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Some research has posited a natural order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a Second Language. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants--perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a…

Investigates whether Spanish- and Turkish-speaking learners of English discover the semantic and syntactic constraints on the causative/inchoative alternation in the absence of overt morphological clues. Results of a picture judgment task show that second language learners do discover these properties and that overall verbs appear to cluster in…

Students in lower-level Spanish classes completed a questionnaire assessing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for learning Spanish, feelings of autonomy and competence in language learning, integrative orientation, and perceptions of teachers' communication style. Results of a path analysis showed that the more controlling the teacher was…

Students 11-12 years old were asked to derive the meaning of five unknown words, each embedded in three contexts. Students Proficiency was examined in three activities: decontextualization, cumulative testing, and defining. Eight students of high- and low-verbal ability were compared. Showed that young students are capable of performing meaning…

Fifty-five children from multilingual backgrounds being educated in English were studied longitudinally over a 2-year period with measures taken of their phonological skill, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phonological segmentation ability and letter knowledge proved significant predictors of both concurrent and later reading achievement a year…

To examine the effect of diminutives on gender learning, adult native speakers of English were taught Russian nouns. Half the participants trained on diminutive nouns and half on nondiminutive baseforms. Over four sessions, participants learned to use adjectives that had to agree in gender with nouns. The diminutive training group demonstrated…

Native and experienced nonnatives listened to a text while performing a concurrent task. Half of each group was given the topic of the passage. Scores on the concurrent task were compared with baseline to index working memory (WM) consumption. Results showed greater WM consumption for nonnatives than natives when the topic was unavailable,…

Examines incidental and transitory focus on form. Learner uptake was studied in focus-on-form episodes occurring in 12 hours of communicative English-as-a-Second-Language teaching. Learner uptake was generally high and successful--to a much greater extent than has been reported for immersion classrooms. (Author/VWL)

Examines the nature and development of fluent second language English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) word integration skills involved in lower-level text processing. Four theoretical approaches to word integration and sentence processing in the first language and second language ESL literature are discussed in conjunction with a review of the relevant…

Addresses the question of whether there are different characteristics and language performance conditions (involving assumed different levels of cognitive demand) associated with different levels of fluency, complexity, or accuracy in test candidate responses. Participants were pre-university students taking English courses. (Author/VWL)

Examined writers' use of lexical repetition changes in relation to writing topic, cultural background, and development of writing ability. Multiple regression analysis indicates writing ability measures are the most important variables for predicting changes in repetition usage, with less significant effects found for cultural background.…