Whereas there has been some research on the role of bottom-up and top-down processing in the learning of a second or foreign language, very little attention has been given to bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches to language teaching. The research reported here used a quasi-experimental design to assess the relative effectiveness of two modes of academic English vocabulary instruction, bottom-up and top-down, to Chinese university students (N = 120). The participants, divided into two groups-bottom-up and top-down-were exposed to 48 hours of explicit vocabulary instruction. Their achievement was measured with two vocabulary tests, Academic Vocabulary Size and Controlled Productive Knowledge, administered at the start (T1) and at the end (T2) of the treatment. Analyses of the test scores reveal that at T2 the bottom-up group slightly outperformed the top-down one on both vocabulary size and controlled productive knowledge. With respect to the former, the bottom-up group's superiority was found to be statistically significant, although with a relatively small effect size (g 2 = .05).doi: 10.1002/tesq.170 B ottom-up and top-down processing are well-established concepts in a wide range of fields, including psychology, cognitive science, pedagogy, and institutional management. They refer to two essentially different ways of processing and/or organising information. Broadly speaking, bottom-up is a form of inductive (or data-driven) processing starting with smaller and/or lower-ranked units and moving upwards through larger and/or higher-ranked units. Top-down is a form of deductive (or schemata-driven) processing working in the opposite TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 0, No. 0, xxxx 2014

The Passive Voice is a category which we find in the large majority of natural languages, and also in most artificial languages. The first major part of this paper offers a survey of passive constructions in a number of typologically distinct natural languages, with the basic aim of presenting the (prospective) artificial language constructor with the range of functional and formal properties of the Passive Voice which occur in natural languages. This survey shows that regardless of the fair amount of variation in the morphosyntactic form of passives that we find in different natural languages, crosslinguistically passives are remarkably uniform in inevitably occurring as a grammatical category marked (synthetically or analytically) on the verb; they are also remarkably uniform in relation to the basic function they perform: passivization inevitably involves demotion of a primary clausal term (the Subject) and in most of the cases also promotion of a non-primary term. The next part of the paper offers an overview of Passive Voice formation and function in artificial languages, which will provide the language constructor with a good idea of some of the 'design' decisions taken with regard to this grammatical category. Finally, the paper briefly discusses various design issues in relation to economy, explicitness/ambiguity, 102 Possibilities for Passives in Natural and Artificial Languages functionality, and learnability and presents some specific recommendations with regard to the possible design of passives in an artificial language.

No abstract

Korean and other Altaic languages are generally not well represented in artificial international auxiliary languages: the best known such languages (such as Esperanto and Ido) have borrowed almost nothing from them, instead almost exclusively using Indo-European languages as sources. In this paper I will present some auxiliary languages which have taken words and/or parts of their grammar from Altaic languages, looking at which items have been borrowed and in some cases what percentage of the vocabulary they account for. The languages discussed (most of which were created relatively recently) include Ardano, Dousha, Dunia, Konya, Kosmo, Kumiko, Lingwa de Planeta, Neo Patwa, NOXILO, Olingo, Pan-kel, Sambahsa-mundialect, Sona, and Unish. In the cases of most of these languages only a small

No abstract