information transfern
a type of activity often associated with communicative language teach-
ingin which students transfer meaning from one form to another, such as
when students select meaning from a reading or listening text and then
reproduce it in a different form, e.g. as a diagram or table or the reverse.
informative functionn
see developmental functions of language
informed consentn
a basic ethical requirement of all research, including research into lan-
guage learningand the efficacy of various teaching methods, that all
research subjects must give their consent to be included in the subject pool
and such consent must be based on an understanding of what the research
is about and how the results will be used. Obtaining informed consent
requires informing subjects of any risks that may be involved in their
participation, including risks that may seem minor to the researcher but
may matter to subjects such as feelings of discomfort or embarrassment.
Most institutions that sponsor research provide detailed guidelines for
ethical research and require that consent formsbe kept on file.
inherent lexical aspect hypothesisn
see lexical aspect hypothesis
inhibitionn
see attention, proactive inhibition
initialadj
occurring at the beginning of a linguistic unit, e.g. as word-initial,
clause-initial.
For example, a group of consonants at the beginning of a word, such as /spr/
in the English word spray, is an initial consonant cluster.
see also medial, final
initial staten
in language acquisition, the starting point from which acquisition
proceeds. In behaviourism, the starting point for first language acquisition
was sometimes assumed to be zero (a blank slate), but generative theory
assumes that children are equipped with universal grammaras the initial
state. In SLA, the initial state includes at least those resources transferred
from the first language; whether universal grammar remains available to
information transfer