Category: learner language

Adverb use and language proficiency in young learners’ writing

Adverb use and language proficiency in young learners’ writing

Pascual Pérez-Paredes and María Sánchez-Tornel

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:2. 2014. iii, 137 pp. (pp. 178–200)

Our research examines the use of general adverbs by learners across grades 5, 6, 9 and 10 in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage (ICCI) by looking at whether this use increases with age. For our research we use data from the Polish, Spanish and Chinese components in the ICCI, in particular, those from the “food” and “money” topics. Our results show that general adverbs are more widely used as age increases. Statistically significant differences were found between grade 6 and 10 learners across all three L1 groups in terms of the frequency of use of general adverbs, which suggests that 10-graders integrate adverbs in their discourse in ways that differ from those in previous years. This study, together with Pérez-Paredes & Díez-Bedmar’s (2012), suggests that learners below grade 9 are more unlikely to use adverbs.

Keywords: International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage, interlanguage development, age, learner writing, general adverbs

The evidence is now in: the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning



According to The Guardian there is evidence that the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning. Nothing that surprises researchers in Form-focused instruction. The article has been written by Dr Catherine Walter, Lecturer in applied linguistics at the University of Oxford, co-author with Michael Swan of the Oxford English Grammar Course. 

What really interests me is the fact that such specialized topic has been discussed in a newspaper. I must say that we find these days more and more linguistics in everyday media and news, possibly one of the effects of globalization, “viral” language learning and the attention to apllied sciences.