The effect of the presence of cafeteria noise on the perception of native English and Mandarin-accented speech was assessed in a sentence-verification task and a sentence-transcription (dictee) task. Ten advanced-level ESL learners and a comparison group of native English speakers read a set of simple true or false statements. These were presented in quiet and noisy conditions to 24 native English listeners who assessed their truth value and wrote out the utterances they heard. The outcomes of both tasks indicated strong adverse effects of noise on the intelligibility of many of the accented utterances. In fact, of the set of items that were verified perfectly in the noise-free condition, the Mandarin-accented ones were significantly less well verified in noise than the native English ones were. A large degree of interspeaker variability was also noted, particularly for the Mandarin speakers.

This paper offers an examination of classroom language learning from the perspectives of research and teaching. It addresses two questions: (1) What are the specific contributions of the classroom to the process of language development?; and (2) In what ways might the teacher exploit the social reality of the classroom as a resource for the teaching of language? The paper explores the classroom as a special social situation and identifies certain aspects of classroom language learning that seem to be neglected by current research. It offers also new directions for research and proposals for language teaching deduced from particular social and psychological characteristics of classroom life.

Using frequency findings from corpus linguistics, this paper explores the relationship between the information presented in ESL-EFL materials and what is known about actual language use based on empirical studies. Three aspects of materials development for grammar instruction are discussed: the grammatical features to be included, the order of grammatical topics, and the vocabulary used to illustrate these topics. For each aspect, we show that there are often sharp contrasts between the information found in grammar materials and what learners encounter in the real world of language use. In our conclusion, we argue that a selective revision of pedagogy to reflect actual use, as shown by frequency studies, could result in radical changes that facilitate the learning process for students.

This article follows up on a study by Dagut and Laufer (1985), who found that Hebrew learners of English avoid phrasal verbs, such as ‘let down’, while preferring one-word verbs, such as ‘;disappoint’, since phrasal verbs do not exist in Hebrew. A corollary derived from Dagut and Laufer's study is that Dutch learners of English would tend not to avoid English phrasal verbs, since phrasal verbs also exist in Dutch. It was hypothesized, however, that Dutch learners of English as a second language (ESL) would avoid phrasal verbs, too, not for structural, but for semantic reasons. Three tests (multiple choice, memorization, and translation) were administered to intermediate and advanced Dutch learners of English. Each test contained 15 sentences, eliciting preference for either a phrasal verb or an equivalent one-word verb. The results show that, as expected, Dutch learners of English do not avoid phrasal verbs categorically. However, they seem to avoid those idiomatic phrasal verbs that they perceive as too Dutch-like (lack of contrast between the first and second language). Furthermore, they exhibit a tendency to adopt a play-it-safe strategy, preferring one-word verbs with general, multi-purpose meanings over phrasal verbs with specific, sometimes idiomatic, meanings. It is argued that this semantic play-it-safe strategy may have also played a causal role in the avoidance behavior of the Hebrew ESL learners observed by Dagut and Laufer.

Phonological evidence supports the frequency-based model proposed in the article by Nick Ellis. Phonological reduction occurs earlier and to a greater extent in high-frequency words and phrases than in low-frequency ones. A model that accounts for this effect needs both an exemplar representation to show phonetic variation and the ability to represent multiword combinations. The maintenance of alternations conditioned by word boundaries, such as French liaison, also provides evidence that multiword sequences are stored and can accrue representational strength. The reorganization of phonetic exemplars in favor of the more frequent types provides evidence for some abstraction in categories beyond the simple registration of tokens of experience.

Second language (L2) research relies heavily and increasingly on ANOVA (analysis of variance)-based results as a means to advance theory and practice. This fact alone should merit some reflection on the utility and value of ANOVA. It is possible that we could use this procedure more appropriately and, as argued here, other analyses such as multiple regression may prove to be more illuminating in certain research contexts. We begin this article with an overview of problems associated with ANOVA; some of them are inherent to the procedure, and others are tied to the way it is applied in L2 research. We then present three rationales for when researchers might turn to multiple regression in place of ANOVA. Output from ANOVA and multiple regression analyses based on published and mock-up studies are used to illustrate major points.

Research concerning native speaker reactions to the speech of language learners has generally flowed from an interpersonal perspective (i.e. speaker/listener). On the other hand, the broader social psychological domain of language attitude research has typically been based on an intergroup perspective (i.e. ingroup/outgroup). The two perspectives are elaborated here and shown to provide complementary interpretations of evaluations of non-native speech. From the intergroup viewpoint, evaluations are based upon two processes: identification of the speaker's social group attributes and group-based inferences. The particularly complex role of identification for non-native speakers is discussed in detail. Within the interpersonal sphere, inferences regarding speaker competence and generalized negative affect are emphasized.

This article reports a study of the classroom acquisition of German word order rules by adult, successful language learners. Data elicited by an information-gap task performed by 39 learners of L2 Germanat two points in time are used to describe the sequence of acquisition of three obligatory word order rules. A comparison of this sequencewith that reported for naturalistic learners of German revealed no difference, despite the fact that the order in which the rules were introduced and the degree of emphasis given to the rules in the instruction differed from the naturalistic order. The classroom learners, however, did appear to be more successful than the naturalistic learnersin that they reached higher levels of acquisition in a shorter period of time. The results of this study support the claim that the classroom and naturalistic L2 acquisition of complex grammatical features such as word order follow similar routes. They also suggest that classroom learners may learn more rapidly. These findings are discussed with reference to both theories of L2 acquisition and language pedagogy.

This study investigates associative learning explanations of the limited attainment of adult compared to child language acquisition in terms of learned attention to cues. It replicates and extends Ellis and Sagarra (2010) in demonstrating short- and long-term learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in Latin. In Experiment 1, salient adverbs were better learned than less salient verb inflections, early experience of adverbial cues blocked the acquisition of verbal morphology, and, contrariwise—but to a lesser degree—early experience of tense reduced later learning of adverbs. Experiment 2 demonstrated long-term transfer: Native speakers of Chinese (no tense morphology) were less able than native speakers of Spanish or Russian (rich morphology) to acquire inflectional cues from the same language experience where adverbial and verbal cues were equally available. Learned attention to tense morphology in Latin was continuous rather than discrete, ordered with regard to first language: Chinese < English < Russian < Spanish. A meta-analysis of the combined results of Ellis and Sagarra and the current study separates out positive and negative learned attention effects: The average effect size for entrenchment was large (+1.23), whereas that for blocking was moderate (–0.52).

The shift in language classroom organization from teacher-fronted to student group work has received a growing amount of theoretical and empirical support (cf. Long, 1983; Long, Adams, McLean, and Castanos, 1976; Taylor, 1982). However, this practice is becoming so popular that it is in danger of turning into yet another ESL bandwagon. The following study was conducted, therefore, to evaluate the role of group work in the classroom, specifically in regard to its possible effects on classroom second language acquisition. Comparisons were made of three ESL classrooms during group vs. teacher-fronted classroom interaction on decision-making tasks.

Analysis focused on three broad categories: (1) grammaticality of input, (2) negotiation of input, and (3) individual input/production. Significant differences between the two participation patterns were indicated only in the increased amount of input and production for individual students during group interaction. Task, rather than participation pattern was shown to be a more important variable with regard to parameters (1) and (2). These results suggested that group work has a useful but somewhat restricted role in classroom second language acquisition.

Recent critical discussion of the Oral Proficiency Interview has questioned the adequacy and validity of the interview guidelines. The present study considers the role of accommodation in interview discourse and suggests that the extent of interviewer accommodation reveals an overlooked criterion for gauging the authenticity of the interview as simulated conversational interaction. The issue of misplaced accommodation as a threat to both the validity of the interview and the subsequent rating process is also raised, and supplementary criteria for training interviewers and evaluating the interview process are considered.

The current study investigates the limited attainment of adult language acquisition in terms of an associative learning phenomenon whereby earlier learned cues attentionally block those that are experienced later. Short- and long-term blocking are demonstrated in experimental investigations of learned attention in the acquisition of temporal reference in a small set of Latin phrases. In Experiment 1, previous experience with adverbial cues blocks the acquisition of verbal tense morphology, and, in contrast, early experience with tense blocks later learning of adverbs. Experiment 2 demonstrates long-term transfer effects: Native speakers of Chinese languages, which do not exhibit verb tense morphology, fail to acquire inflectional cues when adverbial and verbal cues are equally available.

This study examines the role of grammatical prerequisites on code-switching in young bilingual children. It is proposed that code-switching is constrained not only by grammatical properties of the languages involved; it is also regulated by principles and mechanisms of language use. Constraints on code-switching are therefore defined as processing principles that, however, depend on grammatical knowledge. They ensure that switching does not result in a violation of grammatical coherence, defined in terms of both linear sequencing and structural configuration. Some of these claims are tested empirically, analyzing the speech of two bilingual children acquiring French and German simultaneously. It is argued that even in the earliest uses of mixing, constraints are not violated; in many cases they do not apply because the relevant grammatical relations do not yet hold. Code-switching is nevertheless used from early on in accordance with these constraints, as soon as a certain kind of grammatical knowledge is accessible. Most importantly, functional categories have to be implemented in the child's grammar.

Grammaticality judgment tests (GJTs) have been, and continue to be, frequently used in the field of SLA as a measure of learners’ linguistic ability in the second language (L2). However, only a few studies have examined their construct validity as measures of implicit and explicit knowledge (Bowles, 2011; R. Ellis, 2005), and even fewer have explored in detail how features of these tests, such as time pressure and task stimulus, affect their construct validity (Loewen, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect that time pressure and task stimulus have on the type of knowledge representations on which L2 learners draw when performing GJTs. The results show that the grammatical and ungrammatical sections of a timed and an untimed GJT loaded differently in both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This finding can be interpreted as indicating that grammatical and ungrammatical sentences constitute measures of implicit and explicit knowledge, respectively. Additionally, the results show that time pressure and task stimulus have significant effects on learners’ performance on GJTs.

This study investigated first language (L1) orthographic influence on cognitive processing involved in second language (L2) reading. Using a fundamental unit of representation, three orthographic systems (i.e., alphabet, syllabary, and logography) can be categorized into two types: morphography and phonography. Previous L1 reading research has suggested that different strategies are used for phonological recoding by morphographic and phonographic readers. This study tested the possibility that these L1 recoding strategies are transferred and utilized in L2 reading. A cross-linguistic experiment involving adult L2 learners of English with contrasting L1 orthographic backgrounds (Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, and English—for native control) was conducted. The results indicate that reading among phonographic readers (Arabic, Spanish, and English) is seriously impaired when essential phonological information is inaccessible. Similar phonological inaccessibility, in contrast, apparently does not affect the reading performance of Japanese, or morphographic, readers. Further, the study demonstrated, first, that phonological inaccessibility exerts differential effects on the reading processes of phonographic and morphographic readers and, second, that L2 readers from different L1 orthographic backgrounds utilize their L1 strategies in reading English as an L2. Hence, the findings of the study verify cognitive strategy transfer during L2 reading.

A number of interaction researchers have claimed that recasts might be ambiguous to learners; that is, instead of perceiving recasts as containing corrective feedback, learners might see them simply as literal or semantic repetitions without any corrective element (Long, in press; Lyster & Ranta, 1997). This study investigates learners' interpretations of recasts in interaction. Videotapes of task-based interactions including recasts and repetitions were shown to advanced English as a second language students (N = 34). Although both groups viewed the teacher's feedback (recasts, repetitions, or other), one group saw video clips that had been edited to remove the learners' nontargetlike utterances that had triggered the feedback, and another group saw the same video clips with the initial nontargetlike utterances included. After each clip, learners in both groups were asked to indicate whether they thought they were hearing a recast, a repetition, or something else. A subset of learners (n = 14) provided verbal reports while they evaluated the clips. Results show that learners who did not overhear initial learner utterances were significantly less successful at distinguishing recasts from repetitions. The verbal protocol data suggest that learners were not looking for nonverbal cues from the speakers. A post hoc analysis suggests that morphosyntactic recasts were less accurately recognized than phonological or lexical recasts in this study. These findings suggest that the contrast between a problematic utterance and a recast contributes to learners' interpretations of recasts as corrective.We are grateful to Bo Ram Suh for her help with data collection and coding and Rebecca Sachs for her help with editing. We would also like to thank Mohammed Louguit from the Center for Applied Linguistics for statistical assistance. We are grateful for the comments made by the anonymous SSLA reviewers who helped us to improve the paper. Despite the assistance of these individuals, any errors remain our own.

A variety of studies have reported that learners of English as a second language find subject relative clauses easier to produce and comprehend than direct object relatives, but it is unclear whether this preference should be attributed to structural factors or to a linear distance effect. This paper seeks to resolve this issue and to extend our understanding of SLA in general by investigating the interpretation of subject and direct object relative clauses by English-speaking learners of Korean, a left-branching language in which subject gaps in relative clauses are more distant from the head than are object gaps. The results of a comprehension task conducted with 53 beginning and intermediate learners point toward a strong preference for subject relative clauses, favoring the structural account.

This paper synthesizes research on the acquisition of linguistic variation by learners of French as a second language—an overview that, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. It also presents a case study on French immersion students' acquisition of the pronouns nous and on “we,” an alternation in many varieties of spoken French. The study shows that the students use the mildly marked variant on slightly more often than the formal variant nous but much less often than native speakers (who use it almost categorically) and immersion teachers (who strongly favor it). Female and middle-class students favor nous, students with greater extracurricular French language exposure favor on, and students who speak a Romance language at home favor nous. Various explanations are proposed for these correlations. Finally, the students, like L1 Francophones, favor on in linguistic contexts in which the referent is both nonspecific and unrestricted.

Improvement in second-language (L2) perception has been posited to occur early in L2 learning when the L2 vocabulary is still small, whereas a large L2 vocabulary curtails perceptual learning (the perceptual assimilation model for SLA [PAM-L2]; Best & Tyler, 2007). This proposition is extended by suggesting that early L2 lexical development facilitates the establishment of phonological categories in a manner analogous to children’s first-language (L1) acquisition before as opposed to after the vocabulary spurt. According to this view, L2 speech should be assimilated more consistently to L1 phonological categories and cross-boundary contrasts should be discriminated more accurately by learners with larger L2 vocabularies. To test this proposition, a novel whole-system approach to evaluate perception of L2 vowels in two experiments was applied. In Experiment 1, Japanese learners of Australian English (AusE) with less than 12 weeks of L2 learning in Australia completed labeling and goodness ratings on all AusE vowels, selecting from among all monomoraic and bimoraic Japanese vowels and vowel combinations. They also discriminated four L2 vowel contrasts, representing a range of PAM-L2 contrast types, and completed a L2 vocabulary size assessment. Learners with larger vocabularies had more consistent L2-L1 vowel assimilation and more accurate cross-boundary discrimination than those with smaller vocabularies, supporting the proposition that lexical development assists L2 phonological acquisition. Experiment 2 compared the perception of AusE vowels by Japanese learners after only 4–8 weeks in Australia with their perception after 6–8 months of L2 exposure. The results also supported the predicted positive association between L2 vocabulary size and L2 vowel perception rather than a general prediction of increased exposure duration leading to improved perception.

This paper explores the relationship between formulaic language and creative construction in SLA by examining the production of interrogatives in an extensive naturalistic corpus of L2 French produced by early classroom learners. The paper first analyzes the production and breakdown of such formulaic language over time, before exploring the development of more creative structures. The interaction between the two processes “rote learning of formulas and creative construction” is then investigated. This interaction is shown to be a dynamic two-way process, with learners being driven forward in the development of their L2 system by their attempts to resolve the tension between structurally complex but communicatively rich formulas on the one hand, and structurally simple but communicatively inadequate creative structures on the other hand.