Recent work suggests that language production exhibits a bias towards efficient information transmission. Speakers tend to provide more linguistic signal for meaning elements that are difficult to recover while reducing contextually inferrable (more frequent, probable, or expected) elements. This tradeoff has been hypothesized to shape grammatical systems over generations, contributing to cross...

By most accounts, language is uniquely human. No other species has a communicative system with such expressive power, one that allows us to transmit a seemingly endless set of meanings to our conspecifics. Every sentence we produce is composed of smaller linguistic units put together in a rule-governed manner. The standard view is that sentences are put together using syntactic rules that defin...

Since the introduction of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), many textbooks have been written to incorporate communicative activities, authentic materials and personalized contexts. However, where the teaching and learning of grammar is concerned, most textbooks do not reflect CLT principles. As demonstrated in this paper, grammar activities in some Malaysian and Taiwanese textbooks retain ...

1 Introduction Second language (L2) effects-of-instruction research over the past decade have investigated what types of instruction are most effective for fostering second or foreign language learning in L2 classrooms (Doughty & Williams, 1998; Doughty, 2003). Indeed, a number of L2 pronunciation researchers appeared to claim that classroom instruction should involve systematic treatments to d...

A 3D virtually synchronous communication architecture for situated language learning has been designed to foster communicative competence among undergraduate students who have studied English as a foreign language (EFL). We present an innovative approach that offers better e-learning than the previous virtual reality educational applications. The proposed method supplies learners with autonomy ...