Structure Grammar Research Articles

Adjective Identification in Television Advertisements

Learning the Malay language has been a challenging task for foreign language learners. Learners have to learn Malay grammar structure rules in order to write simple sentences. The word choice is important in constructing a sentence. Therefore, the study focuses on the use of adjectives in television advertisements among Korean learners at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea. The objectives of the study were to identify and discuss adjectives incorporated into the advertisements. The students involved in the study were ten male and female subjects from a Malay language class. The subjects had to choose one television advertisement and view it several times. They were given three weeks to identify and discuss the adjectives in the advertisements. The subjects were interviewed on their views about the adjectives in the advertisements. The interviews were video recorded and analyzed for the purpose of the study. The results of the study revealed that each subject managed to identify five adjectives per advertisement. They also managed to offer their views on the adjectives, which were not directly uttered by the models in the advertisements. It is hoped that a future study will focus on the use of adjectives via other means of media technology.

The Role of the Article in the Semantic Interpretation of the Antecedent in Attributive Clauses

The role of the article in all grammar structures leaves no doubt. Attributive clauses prove no exception. Here, the article used with the antecedent contributes to the distinction of the attributive clause. Attributive clauses can be divisible and non-divisible. The antecedent of the latter is closely connected to the thematic continuation which acts as its characterization and does not need any restriction in the use of the article, i.e. both definite and indefinite article may be used here. Unlike non-divisible sentences, the antecedent in divisible attributive clauses is not strongly bound with its subordinate continuation since the latter contains additional information only. The semantic emphasis of the antecedent requires the use of only the definite article which can be used in zero category as an antecedent used in the presence of proper nouns.

Diagnosing Students’ Language Knowledge and Skills

At present there exists bulk of different placement tests, such as Cambridge English Placement Test or Oxford Online Placement Test, whose aim is to place students on the basis of their scores in the placement test into the right language class/course. However, most of the tests focus just on one language; in most cases it is English. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to discuss DIALANG - the test which can test more than one language and other skills than just grammar structures and vocabulary. In addition, this test is free of charge and provides students with useful advice on how to improve their language skills. The paper also lists advantages and disadvantages of taking this test and gives specific examples drawn on the test of writing.

Using Concordances as Supplementary Materials in Teaching Grammar

In many educational institutions in Turkey, including universities, state schools, and private schools, a common problem in grammar teaching is the lack of authenticity due to the wide use of rule-based teaching. Consequently, some teachers prefer to adopt a deductive teaching approach with more explanation for grammar structures and less use of examples from various contexts. This case may sometimes end up with a traditional English lesson with mechanical exercises, as students call it, “Ali goes to cinema” kind of exercises, and it is not uncommon for students to complain about the frequency of encountering the same examples given on certain grammar topics, examples that often fail to be attuned with current real life situations, which obviously limits their productive skills by its failure to stimulate their ability to think of similar simple sentences. In order to overcome this, we propose a technique based on Data-Driven Language Learning with particular regard to corpus linguistics, and we consider the learner as research workers constructing their language themselves, and learning with less language description, hence they are expected to succeed in integrating meaning and form more. In this respect, the purpose of this article is to provide some insight into modern practices of teaching English language, and specifically to show a model lesson for grammar teaching from a critical perspective towards currently used English grammar books and textbooks. It will provide a brief and practical introduction to easily accessible concordances which can be utilized to assign the learner a constructive role by supplying him/her with input from real-life contexts, while touching on the principle of awareness with a few suggestions by using our data in our classes. It will also provide a brief outline of how online and offline programs can be easily adapted for grammar teaching and to generate authentic in-class materials.

Review of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Review of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Modern Communicative Methods of Teaching English Grammar to Intermediate Level Students

1 IntroductionLearning the grammar of a foreign language is important if you want to speak the language correctly. Nevertheless, the grammar of a foreign language can be tricky and not at all resembling the one of your mother tongue. That is why you need to be very well acquainted with your own grammar structures and only then try to learn another grammar.English grammar is not very difficult, although at first it appears to cause confusion. Grammar knowledge can be achieved through a lot of work and exercises, or even games. Of course it is a lot better if the student starts to learn it when he is very young - at a young age information is stored a lot faster - so that in high school, and later at university, new and difficult information can be placed on a solid base, thus reinforcing the student's ability to communicate more easily in the foreign language.Knowing only the theory of the English grammar is not enough, as a set of rules cannot help you communicate unless you have practice using them. Most teachers make the mistake of teaching a lot of rules and forget the essential part: exercises, games, assignments - in other words, their focus is mainly on the theory of the language rather than on its practice. In order to attract a student towards a foreign language you must also make grammar seem more accessible by using all the practice methods you can get. Teachers must always remember that only practice makes you better.What also helps is talking to foreigners (Americans, British, whatever they might be) as you get the chance to see English grammar in action this way. They use grammar constructions, sometimes sophisticated ones, without even thinking about the way they were formed, they use a tense without thinking what it might express, the same way Romanian students use Romanian without being able to explain some of its grammar rules.Over the past years emphasis has been laid on traditional methods, teachers trying to attempt only recently new modern methods, all these attempts being considered to make the student become more interested in the English language. But the question that comes up is the following: are we sure that these methods actually work? We all know that the traditional way of teaching is very relaxing for a student - he is not forced to think too much, he just writes the information and then uses it in exercises. The modern methods make students put their brain to use, communicate better, engage in conversation, thus acquiring the new knowledge during the English classes, at school.Starting from the hypothesis that traditional methods do not exactly help the student learn English more easily and that they definitely do not make the English class very enjoyable, I am going to prove in the following pages that modern methods help a student understand and improve grammar more easily and in a more entertaining way than the traditional ones. All these modern activities are meant to widen the students' horizon and make them realize that grammar is not only theory, but also practice and fun.2 Literature Review2.1 Oral communicative activitiesOral communication is a process that takes place between the speaker and the listener(s) and it involves the productive skill and the receptive skill of understanding (Byrne 1996:8).Teachers have to devote a large part of their class time to developing oral productive skills. It is very important for the students to develop the oral skills in the classroom so they can use them outside it, where they are supposed to have control over what is said to them and what they have to say. Poor understanding often results in nervousness, inhibiting the students' ability to speak.The texts the students have in their textbooks are not enough for them; they need a listening comprehension programme which will expose them to various models of natural speech. The learners have to be taught to listen as well as to speak. …

Grammar Structures and Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: A Review of Past Performance and a Report of New Findings

Results of a study are presented that suggest the grammatical structures of English some deaf and hard of hearing students struggle to acquire. A review of the literature from the past 40 years is presented, exploring particular lexical and morphosyntactic areas in which deaf and hard of hearing children have traditionally exhibited difficulty. Twenty-six participants from an urban day school for the deaf used the LanguageLinks software, produced by Laureate Learning Systems, for 10 minutes daily for 9 weeks. The descriptive analysis of the results expands on findings reported by Cannon, Easterbrooks, Gagne, and Beal-Alvarez (2011). The results indicated that many participants struggled with regular noun singular/plural; accusative first- and second-person singular; noun/verb agreement copular "be"; accusative third-person number/ gender; locative pronominals; auxiliary "be"/regular past "-ed;" and prenominal determiners plural.

Learning with hidden structure in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar: beyond Robust Interpretive Parsing

This paper explores the relative merits of constraint rankingvs. weighting in the context of a major outstanding learnability problem in phonology: learning in the face of hidden structure. Specifically, the paper examines a well-known approach to the structural ambiguity problem, Robust Interpretive Parsing (RIP; Tesar & Smolensky 1998), focusing on its stochastic extension first described by Boersma (2003). Two related problems with the stochastic formulation of RIP are revealed, rooted in a failure to take full advantage of probabilistic information available in the learner's grammar. To address these problems, two novel parsing strategies are introduced and applied to learning algorithms for both probabilistic ranking and weighting. The novel parsing strategies yield significant improvements in performance, asymmetrically improving performance of OT learners. Once RIP is replaced with the proposed modifications, the apparent advantage of HG over OT learners reported in previous work disappears (Boersma & Pater 2008).

A Vocabulary Learning Tool for L2 Undergraduates Reading Science and Technology Textbooks

Students of English as a second language who major in science and technology use English-language textbooks to ensure that they can read English materials upon graduation. Research indicates that teachers spend little time helping these students on the linguistic complexity of such textbooks. Vocabulary, grammar, and article structure are elements of this complexity, but to many students, these elements can be akin to locked doors. This study presents MyVLS-Reader, which focuses on unlocking the first of these doors—vocabulary—while assisting in reading. With explicit vocabulary learning, students learn and memorize individual vocabulary, but the context is lost if the depth of learning discards context. In implicit vocabulary learning, students acquire vocabulary through repeated exposure to contexts, but repeated encounters with new words are required. Few e-learning systems combine both vocabulary-learning approaches. MyVLS-Reader achieves such synergy by (1) using a keyword setting to provide context-matched vocabulary explanation while reading and (2) embedding multiple learning choices, such as keyword setting, the review and memorization of explicit vocabulary, and the option to ask instructors. This study includes two rounds of evaluations: (1) an evaluation of the learning achievements of control and treatment groups and (2) a quantitative and qualitative investigation of perceptions regarding the use of MyVLS-Reader. The evaluation results indicate that the treatment group developed a better vocabulary than the control group in significantly less time. The use of MyVLS-Reader also slightly improved higher-order thinking skills. This result suggests that MyVLS-Reader can effective assist students in building their vocabulary while reading.

A radically non-morphemic approach to bidirectional syncretism

This paper addresses the question of how certain kinds of overlapping syncretisms in inflectional paradigms can be accounted for that Baerman et al. (Language 80:807–824, 2005) refer to as convergent/divergent bidirectional syncretisms (based on earlier work by Stump, Inflectional morphology, 2001). Bidirectional syncretism strongly resists accounts in terms of standard rules of exponence (or similar devices) that correlate inflection markers with (often underspecified) morpho-syntactic specifications (such rules are used in many morphological theories; e.g., Anderson, A-morphous morphology, 1992; Halle and Marantz in The view from building, pp. 111–176, 1993; Aronoff, Morphology by itself, 1994; Wunderlich in Yearbook of morphology 1995, pp. 93–114, 1996; and Stump, Inflectional morphology, 2001). The reason is that it is difficult to capture overlapping distributions by natural classes. In view of this, rules of referral have been proposed to derive bidirectional syncretism (Stump, Inflectional morphology, 2001; Baerman et al. (Language 80:807–824, 2005)). In contrast, I would like to pursue the hypothesis that systematic instances of overlapping syncretism ultimately motivate a new approach to inflectional morphology—one that fully dispenses with the assumption that morphological exponents are paired with morpho-syntactic feature specifications (and that therefore qualifies as radically non-morphemic): First, rules of exponence are replaced with feature co-occurrence restrictions (FCRs; Gazdar et al., Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, 1985). For phonologically determined natural classes of exponents, FCRs state incompatibilites with morpho-syntactic feature specifications. Second, marker competition is resolved by a principle of Phonology-driven Marker Selection (PMS). PMS takes over the role of the Specificity (Blocking, Elsewhere, Panini) Principle of standard analyses. Empirically, the main focus is on Bonan declension; the analysis is subsequently extended to Gujarati conjugation and Latin o-declension, with further remarks on bidirectional syncretism in other inflectional paradigms.

Structurized grammar‐based fuzz testing for programs with highly structured inputs

ABSTRACTFuzz testing, also known as fuzzing, has long been recognized as an effective technique to detect software vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this approach is demonstrated noneffective when applied to test programs with highly structured inputs, such as interpreters and compilers. These programs usually process inputs in several stages as lexing and parsing, where the test input will be rejected if its structure does not obey the grammar. In this paper, we present a novel approach for fuzzing highly structured input programs. By disassembling the existing test cases into multiple grammatical fragments and inferring their grammar structures, we build a new series of test cases that can pass the validation and reach the previously unexplored places in the target program. We have implemented this approach in our general fuzzing framework BlendFuzz. Experiments have shown that BlendFuzz achieves higher code coverage compared with other blackbox fuzzing tools. BlendFuzz has also detected over two dozens of previously unreported vulnerabilities in real‐world applications, with seven of them being considered high risky. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pivots constructions as methods for perspective shift during turns at talk

This paper reports results from a conversation analytic (CA) study on how participants use pivot constructions as methods to shift perspective during on-going turn construction while engaging in local communicative tasks and projects. Data are drawn from a corpus of everyday and institutional Swedish talk-in-interaction. Three main variants of perspective shifts are presented: shifts into explanatory talk; shifts in epistemic stance; and shifts during turns within an extended telling sequence. Perspective shifts with pivot construction may be used as an incremental method of redesigning the incipient turn for next actions (by self or other), as a method for avoiding involvement into the turn construction by other participants, or as a turn-keeping method when facing overlapping talk. The results indicate that grammar and grammatical structure are organized dialogically on a local level and emerge from speakers’ turn construction methods and turn-taking practices when participating in talk-in-interaction.

The Spoken Errors and Mistakes Committed by Senior English Students at Princess Alia University College

The researchers have carried out an analysis of ungrammatical sentences uttered by some senior Jordanian English students in order to explore whether they are errors or mistakes. This paper claims in general that most Jordanian English students are unable to speak English accurately although many of them have learned a great deal of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary. In recent years, the teaching method is changed from focusing on the grammar structure into communicative teaching in order to facilitate oral English development. However, fluency of language becomes a hot research topic in second language acquisition, and that makes the teachers’ corrective feedback indispensable part in foreign language teaching. Researchers have carried out studies on corrective feedback from various perspectives in order to check whether corrective feedback has a positive effect on improving oral English accuracy.

Annotation System for the Construction of Synchronous Grammar Tree Alignment Relationships

The construction of syntactic tree structures is vital to different Natural Language Processing applications. In the meanwhile, the use of monolingual or bilingual structures directly affects the quality of Machine Translation systems. However, manually annotated syntactic tree structures are not only considered as a time consuming task but also a very expensive work, and automatic construction approaches cannot always guarantee the quality of the syntactic trees. In this paper, a system for annotating and constructing synchronous grammar tree structures in a semi-automatic way is proposed. The system is built in the Web environment with a graphical display for users to review and modify alignment relationships between nodes of the tree and strings or trees of the other language. The core part relies on the parsing of Constraint Synchronous Grammar, and consists of several modules in establishing alignments at different levels between the languages, including relationships between syntactic tree and strings of the other language, and bilingual tree alignments. Moreover, it provides import functions in obtaining monolingual skeletal bracketing syntactic tree and Translation Corresponding Tree structures for the creation of synchronous rules in order to have wider applicability.

Nine Drama Activities for Foreign Language Classrooms: Benefits and Challenges

This paper aims to exemplify nine types of drama activities that can be used in foreign language classrooms. Drama can be integrated into all foreign language classrooms effectively to achieve communicative purposes by integrating the four basic language skills, the lexis, and grammar structures. In this presentation, providing the teachers of English with nine types of drama activities (drama and language games, role play, improvisation, simulation, mime, skits, frozen image building, scriptwriting, and reader's theatre) compiled from a range of resources, benefits of implementing drama activities are emphasized. Regarding the criteria that should be used during the implementation of drama activities, challenges of implementing drama activities into foreign language classrooms will be shared.

Age Constraint on Foreign Language Learning in Monolingual Versus Bilingual Learners

This research aims at investigating the effect of age constrains and monoligualism/bilingualism on foreign language learning. In so doing, 50 Persian monolinguals and 25 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals were tested on a wide variety of structures of English grammar using a grammatically judgment task. The results demonstrated a strong advantage for learning in age up to puberty; moreover, at this stage there were no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual performances. But after puberty, the performance of both monolinguals and bilinguals was low but bilinguals’ performance was significantly higher than monolinguals.

Untangling Reading Comprehension Strategy Instruction: Assisting Struggling Readers in the Primary Grades

Although early reading instruction focuses on phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, research indicates that reading comprehension strategies can be effectively taught to young students. Peer-reviewed studies that employed experimental or quasi-experimental designs and included children between the ages of five and nine, some of whom had disabilities or were determined to be at-risk for academic failure, were examined. Five categories of reading comprehension strategies (peer learning, self-questioning, story grammar and text structure, story mapping and graphic organizers, and vocabulary development) that have increased the reading comprehension abilities of young students were identified and discussed. Students appeared to be most successful when two or more strategies were combined. Instructional choices teachers might make in light of the current research are discussed.

Teaching Grammar in Context: Why and How?

Grammar instruction is one of the most difficult issues of language teaching. Context-based grammar holds an important place for effective learning. It will be more motivating for learners if grammar is taught in context as students will have an opportunity to perceive how the new grammar structures work. Grammar rules are made easier if they are given in a context and teaching grammar in context provides accuracy in the target language. This article explains why we should teach grammar in context and presents two sample lessons.

Direct versus Indirect Explicit Methods of Enhancing EFL Students’ English Grammatical Competence: A Concept Checking-based Consciousness-raising Tasks Model

Two approaches to grammar instruction are often discussed in the ESL literature: direct explicit grammar instruction (DEGI) (deduction) and indirect explicit grammar instruction (IEGI) (induction). This study aims to explore the effects of indirect explicit grammar instruction on EFL learners’ mastery of English tenses. Ninety-four eleventh-graders were conveniently selected and randomly assigned into either the experimental group (EG) or the control group (CG). A pre-post tests design was used to collect the data. Before and after the treatment, the following tests were administered: rule analysis, grammar, and speaking. A delayed written test was given to both groups to assess students’ retention of structure acquired; in addition, a questionnaire was provided to the EG to investigate their perception on the treatment. The results indicated that the EG significantly outperformed the CG in the analysis of grammar rules and the oral proficiency, except for the use of grammar structures in a pre-defined context. Convincingly, there was a positive correlation between the grammar rules and their subsequent use. This validates the cause and effect of grammar rules’ acquisition and the use of them in receptive and productive stages. Also, the EG had favorable attitudes towards the instruction. This study may provide practical implications and techniques for improving EFL students’ grammar performance in high schools in Vietnam.

The direct evidential -te in Korean: Its interaction with person and experiencer predicates

This paper discusses the complex relations among the direct evidential -te, person, and experiencer predicates in Korean. The questions of the paper are: (i) how the three components are related with each other in the evidential sentences, and (ii) how the interactions of the three components can be formally analyzed to correctly license only the well-formed evidential sentences. I show that in direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate (e.g. pwutulep- ‘soft’), the asserter/epistemic authority (i.e. the speaker na ‘I’ in declarative or the addressee ne ‘you’ in question) must be the experiencer of the predicate, but there is no such constraint in direct evidential construction with a private predicate (e.g. aphu- ‘sick’). I also show that the direct evidential construction with a non-private predicate is an instance of self-ascription. Then I propose an analysis of the experiencer predicates and associated lexical rules in the Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) (Copestake, et al., 2005) of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Sag, et al., 2003).