The current study investigates the validity of the visual scanning hypothesis, which posits that rapid automatized naming (RAN) predicts reading skill partly because both require the ability to perform rapid sequential eye-movements. Our data consist of eye-movements collected while 124 young English speaking adults of variable reading skill read passages and performed six modifications of RAN. These modifications isolated articulatory, lexical, oculomotor and attentional task components of RAN. A further requirement for participants was to perform each of the RAN tasks in two directions—the habitual direction of reading (RAN forward) and from right to left and top to bottom (RAN backward). Participants who were better at oculomotor control in RAN-like tasks were better readers regardless of task type or direction. Our most crucial finding is that the explanatory contribution of oculomotor control in the RAN-reading relationship is independent of the practice effect afforded by the habitual direction of visual scanning in reading.

This chapter consists of two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it addresses the description of four types of verbal tense (the simple past, the imperfect, the compound past and the present) in English, French, Italian and Romanian, as presented by grammar books and pragmatic studies focusing on individual verbal tenses. Second, it reviews the semantics of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, which are the constituent categories of the generic notion verbal tense, as they are discussed in general linguistics.

Two related topics occupy this chapter, namely (1) producing a philosophical argument for unerringly determining in writing when to use “whether or not … ” or “whether … ” and (2) appealing to formal logic to certify that a category of questions is inappropriate or illogical. The arguments in favor of (1) derive from Aristotle’s De Interpretatione and from the logical Law of the Excluded Middle. The argument for (2) rests upon logicians’ and grammarians’ appeal to rules of inference that are at home in the canons of formal logic. Taken together, (1) and (2) show the extent to which a knowledge of logic can be invaluable to producing sensible and superior prose.

This chapter considers the kinds of classroom discourse generated by performative language teaching approaches, particularly process drama. It introduces the constructs of learner engagement, agency, and perception-in-action. It examines both the practice of Teacher Talk (TT) and some of its typical features in the second language classroom, and juxtaposes that with Teacher in Role (TiR), a core pedagogical strategy in process drama. It discusses pre-TiR and post-TiR phases, and how awareness of TT features can support or hinder engagement. The chapter also discusses the art of questioning and the difference between make-believe and make belief in classroom dynamics. It includes a drama structure, Pygmalion, a workshop that investigates the connection between teacher and learner, artist and the work of art, power and agency.

In this chapter, Hawkey analyses the qualitative data obtained through participant interviews and open-ended questionnaire responses. Discourses of geographical, social, and political space are salient in the text and talk studied. The present analysis reveals how spatial discourses address a range of themes pertinent to local identity, including authenticity and otherness. Spatial discourses are shown to contribute to the language ideological landscape of the region, most importantly in reinforcing the hegemonic position of French. However, when it comes to staking claims to local identity, a nuanced understanding of authenticity allows for the (limited) subversion of hegemony through the learning of Catalan as a second language.

The empirical focus of this paper is what looks like a verb third (V3) pattern in West Flemish (WF) in which an adverbial modifier (typically a temporal or conditional adjunct) is followed by a non-inverted subject-initial verb second (V2) root clause. This pattern will be referred to as the non-inverted V3 pattern. This paper has two goals. The first and major aim is to document the WF non-inverted V3 pattern, detailing both its syntactic and its semantic properties, in order to make these data available to the research community at large. We also develop an analysis in line with the hypothesis, substantiated in the paper, that WF is a genuine V2 language and that the apparent V3 data in do not jeopardise this assumption. The core hypothesis is that the initial adjunct in V3 patterns is extra-sentential or ‘main clause-external’ (cf. Broekhuis and Corver in Syntax of Dutch. Verbs and verb phrases. Volume 3: Chapter 14: main clause-external elements, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2016. http://www.oapen.org/ ), and that it combines with a full-fledged V2 clause by virtue of a discourse-structure (cf. Auer in Pragmatics 6:295–322, 1996). That the non-inverted V3 pattern is not acceptable in all varieties of Dutch is accounted for in terms of microvariation in the syntactic derivation of subject-initial V2 sentences.

This article argues for the importance of teaching multimodal literacy in schools so as to adequately equip students to navigate the multimodal communicative landscape. Developing multimodal literacy in students is about developing in them the ability to view multimodal texts critically and for them to represent their ideas through the production of effective multimodal texts. This article describes an instructional approach developed to teach multimodal texts and describes the trial of the approach in a secondary school in Singapore. The approach is informed by Systemic Functional Theory and is aligned to the Learning by Design Framework widely used in multiliteracies. The systemic functional approach provides scaffolds for students to access the meanings made in multimodal texts by introducing the features and typical functions of the text, as well as highlighting the common strategies used in these multimodal texts to make meaning.

Аннотация

В статье описываются коннекторы русского языка с формантом при: при этом, притом, причем и при том что. Автор определяет выражаемое ими отношение как отношение сопутствования, которое может быть установлено как на пропозициональном уровне, так и на уровне речевых актов, и описывает функциональные особенности каждого члена парадигмы. Анализ подкрепляется статистикой, полученной в надкорпусной русско-французской базе данных коннекторов и дополненной данными Национального корпуса русского языка (НКРЯ).