Pronunciation is an important yet often neglected subfield in Second Language Acquisition, both in pedagogy and research. One significant, under-researched area is the role peer assessment/review can play in shaping English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students’ pronunciation proficiency. Whereas there have been many studies demonstrating the effectiveness and benefits of peer review on EFL writing/oral proficiency etc., few studies exist that test the efficacy of similar approaches as applied to pronunciation learning/training tasks. To investigate the viability of computer assisted peer assessment of EFL pronunciation, we present in this study a prototypical web-based/mobile platform for peer review of EFL pronunciation with adaptively generated items for both training and testing purposes. We discuss some of the prominent features of the platform as well as the results from our preliminary studies involving more than 300 EFL students who used the platform for pronunciation training and peer review.

To explore the reactivity of think-aloud (i.e., whether think-aloud as a data collection tool would influence the data it collects), the present study compared 60 Chinese-English bilinguals' performances in solving Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) in two thinking modes, either thinking aloud or not. Furthermore, this study examined whether the potential task performance difference was modulated by the think-aloud instruction language, either first language (L1) or second language (L2). The participants were separated into two groups and instructed respectively in L1 and L2 to solve APM in two thinking modes (with the order of the two modes counterbalanced within group). Results show that there was no significant difference in task performance between the two thinking modes; moreover, the think-aloud instruction language did not have any significant modulating effect on the task performance difference between the two modes. Implications of this study for empirical research employing think-aloud as a data collection tool are discussed.

Adele E. Goldberg's recent book provides a new constructionist perspective on answering arguably the most fundamental question in linguistics: how do humans come to learn and use language? Goldberga prominent advocate of Construction Grammarposits that the basic building blocks of human language are CONSTRUCTIONS, or learned pairings of forms and functions, which can range from single morphemes to complex grammatical patterns. Constructions are partially productive, allowing speakers to use them in creative but constrained ways. Native speakers appear to be intuitively aware of the numerous, intricate rules and constraints that govern constructions, knowing when to accept certain expressions as valid while avoiding others. How do speakers acquire and navigate the complicated rules/constraints of constructions while remaining creatively expressive? This paradoxical question, which has puzzled linguists for decades, is the focus of Goldberg's book. The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introductory outline of the book. Goldberg begins with an intriguing phenomenon: native speakers tend to favor certain expressions over their slightly odd-sounding but otherwise perfectly understandable alternatives (e.g. our preference for the expression explain this to me over explain me this). These expressions are part of humans' vast repertoire of grammatical constructions. While constructions allow us to be productive with our language use, they are also limiting its full productivity without imposing obvious constraints (e.g. no obvious rule appears to exist that prevents us from saying 'explain me this'). Goldberg proposes that the usage-based, constructionist perspective proposed in this book can capture the intricacies of the constrained creativity of language. She summarizes the principles underlying the proposed perspective using the abbreviation CENCE ME (a pronounceable anagram of the original abbreviation of EEMCNCE): (i) Speakers balance between Expressiveness and Efficiency while conforming to conventions.

In this study, we adopt a corpus-based approach to the analysis of the distributional patterns of major types of pronouns across different genres in two comparable balanced corpora in English and Chinese. Utilizing results from state-of-the-art grammatical parsers, we find considerable variation in the distribution of pronouns in different genres. While English tends to employ consistently more pronouns in every genre than Chinese, the distributional patterns of pronouns in the two languages across the genres are highly patterned and significantly correlated with one another, suggesting that pronouns can play similar functional roles in varying contextual situations in the two languages. Of the subtypes of pronouns in the two languages, five are found to be directly comparable. Personal pronouns are found to have the most similar (correlated) genre distribution in the two languages, while demonstrative pronouns share the least similarity. The distributional patterns for each pronoun type are investigated and their underlying functional and cultural implications discussed. Our study suggests that the identification of these classes of pronouns can in large part be automated with the help of state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers and dependency parsers. The results of this study can inform future research and application involving pronouns, with implications ranging from cross-linguistic studies of grammatical features to second language acquisition.