Volume 36, Issue 4

Although the middle construction has attracted significant attention from syntacticians, its identity still remains controversial and it is not treated as a separate grammatical category in any English learner’s dictionary. This article, based on the data collected from three English learner’s dictionaries, investigates the middle construction in terms of its syntactic and semantic properties and the constraints on its use. It shows that the three learner’s dictionaries treat the middle construction in inconsistent and problematic manners. The middle use of a verb is not distinguished from either transitive verbs with an implicit object or intransitive verbs, which may hinder English learners’ acquisition of the construction. The article proposes that middle verbs should be treated as a separate subcategory of verbs on a par with transitive and intransitive verbs so that learners will become more aware of them and learn to use them correctly.

This preliminary study sets out to examine the extent to which authentic materials affect Japanese university students’ classroom motivation, seeking an effective way to teach mixedlevel language classes at universities. The motivation questionnaires consisting of eight motivation items as quantitative data and journal entries and learners’ comments in semistructured interviews as qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results of null hypothesis tests on the questionnaires indicate that authentic materials had a significantly more positive effect on freshmen’s self-reported motivation than artificial textbook materials, but not on second-year and fourth-year students’. The study also explores the relationship between enjoyableness and meaningfulness of teaching materials to seek the most effective way of using authentic materials, and discusses the effects of other possible factors such as activities and topics. The conclusion suggests that appropriate use of authentic materials, especially enjoyable ones, can be helpful for university teachers of relatively larger classes of freshmen with mixed proficiency levels to raise their L2 motivation. The challenges of conducting this research and suggestions about future studies are also discussed.

This paper gives a comprehensive review of studies on foreign language anxiety. Foreign language anxiety has been recognized in the past few decades as a situation-specific emotional reaction that potentially impedes foreign language learning. Research has shown that foreign language anxiety is not only prevalent among foreign language learners, but also has various negative effects on foreign language learning. In order to help learners cope with this problem, researchers have identified a large number of sources of foreign language anxiety, which generally fall into four major categories, namely, the classroom environment, learner characteristics, the target language, and the foreign language learning process itself. Researchers have also investigated quite a number of factors associated with foreign language anxiety (including categorical background variables and quantitative learner variables) and have produced mixed results. Based on a thorough review of foreign language anxiety, the paper concludes with recommendations for future studies on foreign language anxiety.

The passive voice is an important construction for packaging information. Many textbooks, style manuals or academic papers, however, offer different or even contradictory advice on the use of passives. Previous findings show that passives exhibit disciplinary variation, thus special treatment should be given to different disciplines. However, even within the same discipline, such as linguistics, there are different types of academic writing, namely theoretical articles versus empirical ones. To test whether a difference in the use of passives exists between these two sub-disciplines, the passives in articles sampled from Language and Applied Linguistics are counted and compared. The results show that applied linguistics articles demonstrate a significantly higher ( Sig . = .000, p < .001) occurrence of passives than theoretical ones.

Focus on form has received much attention since 1991 when Long first proposed it. However, it has been little researched in China. The present study reveals how both upper-intermediate and lower-intermediate learners focus on form in the process of doing dictogloss. The study was intended to find whether dictogloss is an effective focus on form task for Chinese EFL students and whether proficiency is related to the extent to which these learners pay attention to form. The results were compared and interpreted in relation to those of other major studies concerning this particular area. It was found that dictogloss was an effective task for Chinese EFL students and there did exist differences between proficiency groups, and these differences seemed to be more complicated among Chinese EFL students.

Up to now there still lacks relevant study on what role participating in English public speaking contests plays in cultivating students’ English public speaking ability and the instruction of this course. The “CCTV CUP” English public speaking contest is one of the most important contests of this field. Despite a few studies on the “CCTV CUP” in the literature, none of them has focused on the contestants’ perspective. This paper first attempts to describe the “CCTV CUP” English public speaking contest from the perspective of sociocultural theory and social realism. Then it takes 7 final contestants’ “reactions to participating in the contest” for analysis, focusing on what impacts participating in this contest brought on them. The results show that participating in the “CCTV CUP” English public speaking contest not only deepened the contestants’ understandings about English public speaking, but brought significant harvests at ability training, and the increase of life experience and wisdom. At last, it gives relevant suggestions on the instruction of English public speaking course.

A good number of neurophysiological studies have been conducted to explore the neural mechanisms of metaphor processing, but few have taken the bilingual phenomenon into consideration. The current study, by using event related potentials (ERPs), investigated the neural mechanism employed by Chinese native speakers whose second language is English in comprehending Chinese and English metaphors. Amplitudes of the N400 ERP component (350-600 ms) were more negative for English metaphors compared with Chinese literal sentences, English literal sentences and Chinese metaphors. In addition, both hemispheres were more activated in processing English metaphors than other conditions. These findings provide electrophysiological evidence for a different mechanism used by Chinese – English bilinguals to comprehend Chinese and English metaphors.