With Russian as the target language, a proof of concept study was undertaken to determine whether it is possible to identify linguistic features, control over which is implicated in progress on the Interagency Linguistic Roundtable (ILR) proficiency scale, thereby better to inform the instructional process. Following its development in an instrumentation study, a revised version of a computer-delivered battery of 33 perception and production tasks was administered to 68 participants—57 learners between levels 2 and 3 (21 at ILR 2, 18 at 2+, and 18 at 3) on the ILR scale, and 11 native speaker controls—whose proficiency was tested via an ILR oral proficiency telephone interview. The tasks sampled subjects’ control of Russian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and collocations. Relationships between control of the linguistic features and the ILR levels of interest were assessed statistically. All 33 tasks, 18 of which assessed learners’ abilities in perception and 15 of which assessed their abilities in production, were found to differentiate ILR proficiency levels 2 and 3, and a subset was found to also distinguish levels 2 and 2+, and 2+ and 3. On the basis of the results, a checklist of linguistic features pegged to proficiency levels was produced that can be useful for syllabus designers, teachers, and learners themselves as well as providing the basis for future diagnostic tests.

Linguistic theory must be sufficiently rich and comprehensive to be able to account for the structure of the most complex or elaborate manifestation of language. In consequence any structurally less complex verbal behaviour is typically explained as a use of some ‘reduced’ or ‘simplified’ code or register. Many languages, if not all, are said to possess such reduced registers and it is said to be part of a native speaker's competence to be able to use such ‘reduced registers’ where appropriate. It is part of his total communicative competence to know when it is appropriate to use such registers. These reduced or simplified registers are associated with more or less well defined situations of language use or types of discourse. Telegraphese is obviously restricted by the medium of transmission as well as the restricted range of communicative functions it is used for, e.g. orders, reports and announcements of plans. Technical description in botanical and ornithological reference books have a purely referential function, while the so-called language of instructions has clearly restricted rhetorical functions.

The field of language acquisition is divided over the question of whether the inborn mechanisms underlying linguistic development include actual grammatical categories and principles or are of a more general character. Recent proposals suggest a possible convergence of views on this matter, with implications for the study of both first language acquisition and second language learning. This paper explores this possibility by examining the evolution of grammatical nativism with particular emphasis on a radical shift in the generality of the inborn principles that have been posited in recent work. The nature and implications of this shift are illustrated with the help of developmental data involving gap-containing structures in first and second language acquisition.

The present study examined second language (L2) development in the perceptual identification of a dialectal sound of the target language, through an investigation of the role of individual learner experiences in L2 phonological development. A total of 213 English-speaking learners of Spanish across five levels of study and with varying dialect contact experiences completed an identification task, which tested perceptual categorization of Spanish dialectal aspirated-s (e.g., siesta [ˈsi̯eh-ta]). In accordance with postulates of L2 speech perception models (PAM-L2, SLM, L2LP), findings revealed influence of the first language phonology on categorization at early levels shifting toward nativelike, dialect-specific categorizations of aspirated-s for more experienced learners. Dialect contact factors of prior study abroad location, native speaker social contacts, and metalinguistic training were found to be predictors of the dialectal perceptual targets toward which the L2 learners developed—for those learners past intermediate-level language courses—highlighting how individual experiences shape L2 perceptual abilities.

One way of characterizing communication in the FL classroom is in terms of what at a given time is in primary focus. Adopting a basic distinction between transactions with a focus on the FL code (meta transactions) and transactions with a focus on socio-literary or other non-linguistic content (content transactions), I argue that meta talk constitutes a largely neglected area of classroom research and address two aspects of this, each of which highlights significant aspects of meta talk: (1) The occurrence of scaffolded constructions, i.e., syntagms distributed over several turns at speech; and (2) the norms holding for talk about talk, i.e., what counts as an argument about the FL code. Following an exemplification from Danish classroom data (English and German as L2), I conclude by discussing the learning and pedagogical potential of each of these types of meta talk.

This study systematically examines the moderating effects of task type and L2 proficiency on the relationship between L1 and L2 simultaneously across reading and writing tasks with different levels of cognitive complexity. Main and moderating effects were evaluated through structural equation modeling analyses. First, both L1 skills and L2 proficiency were significant independent predictors of L2 reading and writing performance across tasks with different levels of cognitive complexity. Second, L2 proficiency had a much greater effect on L2 reading and writing performance across tasks with different cognitive loads than L1 skills. Third, the strength of the relationship between less cognitively demanding L1 and L2 reading tasks showed no significant difference between the low- and high-L2-proficiency groups. Fourth, the strength of the relationship between more cognitively demanding L1 and L2 reading tasks showed a significant difference between the low- and high-L2-proficiency groups. Fifth, the strength of the relationship between L1 and L2 writing tasks with different levels of cognitive complexity varied significantly depending on the level of L2 proficiency. These results are discussed theoretically and pedagogically.

This study investigates whether repeating a prime sentence aloud strengthens short-term and longer-term priming of adverb-first word order among adult intermediate L1 English-German L2 learners (N = 30). Compared to an earlier study (Jackson & Ruf, 2017), in which similarly proficient L1 English-German L2 learners heard, but did not repeat, prime sentences, participants in the present study exhibited greater short-term priming for adverb-first word order during the priming phase and significant longer-term priming in a posttest phase immediately following the priming phase. However, additional analyses revealed that only those participants who exhibited stronger short-term priming without lexical overlap during the priming phase continued to produce adverb-first sentences in the posttest phase, highlighting that even prime repetition may not support longer-term priming among intermediate L2 learners more generally.

To investigate the skill transfer and the effects of practice schedules in the learning of second language syntax, 129 intermediate-level English learners were divided into six groups, based on practice format (input vs. output practice) and practice schedule (blocked vs. interleaved vs. hybrid [blocked + interleaved]). Analyses revealed that the learners tested on the skill they had practiced outperformed those who were tested on the nonpracticed skill. This pattern was particularly pronounced in comprehension processing speed and production accuracy. Moreover, hybrid practice facilitated skill development more than blocked or interleaved practice alone. Furthermore, a dynamic interplay was detected among practice format, schedule, and learners’ prior knowledge. Hybrid practice led to the least transfer from receptive skills (gained through input practice) to productive skills. Unlike interleaved practice effects, the effects of blocked practice on comprehension speed were more susceptible to learners’ prior processing speed.

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between CHL learners and non-CHL learners. Sixty-two collegiate intermediate-level Chinese learners including 37 CHL learners and 25 non-CHL learners participated in this study. Drawing on multivariate analyses, the study found that CHL learners outperformed non-CHL learners on oral vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, but not on print vocabulary knowledge. In both groups of learners, print vocabulary knowledge was the strongest predictor of lexical inferencing ability. While oral vocabulary knowledge and print vocabulary knowledge were highly correlated in non-CHL learners, they were more distinct constructs in CHL learners. These findings seem to suggest that early exposure to spoken Chinese enhances the development of oral vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in CHL learners. Importantly, the latter appears to enhance the formation of the connection between oral vocabulary knowledge and print knowledge.

The primary goal of this research was to compare the improvement in the second language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing among fourth semester French students enrolled in a content course taught in French and similar level students enrolled in a traditional fourth semester French course where the focus was primarily on the teaching of the language itself. The research used a non-equivalent pretest-posttest design and the results were analyzed using an analysis of covariance to determine mean gain scores of intact experimental and control sections of fourth semester students on the MLA Cooperative French Test. Results showed significant improvement for the experimental group in three of the four skills (listening, speaking, writing) and in two (listening and writing) for the control group. When compared to each other, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the speaking skill while the latter significantly outperformed the experimental group in the writing skill. Attitudinal results showed a significantly more positive attitude toward the study of French among the experimental group. The study is important because it challenges the conventional assumptions regarding the way L2 skills are acquired and improved, and offers the student a valuable time and money saving option since he or she might be able to study a specific content while simultaneously improving L2 skills.

Different expectations for structure and content in the construction of text can lead to difficulties in cross-cultural communication. This study investigates letters of reference as one type of written text that is relatively frequent in the contexts of the international academic community. Sixty-five letters of reference written by American referees and 65 letters written by referees from five Asian cultures were analyzed to discover the conventions and expectations guiding readers and writers from these backgrounds. Although there were many similarities in the two sets of texts, there were also several differences in the structure, content, and implicature employed in the letters; there is a complex interaction between the tripartite conceptual structure of the letters (the introduction, body, and closing) and the occurrence of specific elements of content and the form those elements took.

This paper presents an empirical study of repetition in expository essays written by 24 nonnative speakers (NNS) and 16 native speakers (NS) of English. Repetition is coded according to three categories: the degree of particular types of repetition, the interaction between instances of repetition, and the location of these interactions (Hoey, 1991). Four quantitative measures devised for this study show no significant differences between the two groups. A qualitative comparison of three essays from each group, however, shows that the NSSs do not match their degree of repetition to the development of the argument structure of the text in the same way as the NSs. These examples from NNS texts show that when considering the significance of repetition the content of what is being repeated is as important as the quantity.

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study’s research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected, morphologically complex words like native speakers? Does this depend on proficiency? Does type of inflection (verbal or adjectival) play a role? Native speakers, advanced learners, and intermediate learners of Spanish completed two lexical-decision tasks. Response times were measured to target words (verbs or adjectives) preceded by masked primes that were either identical to the targets, morphologically, orthographically, or semantically related, or unrelated. All groups responded more quickly to targets when they were preceded by identical and morphologically related primes than when they were preceded by unrelated primes, with no differences due to either proficiency or inflection type.

Studies of learner-learner interactions have reported varying degrees of pronunciation-focused discourse, ranging from 1% (Bowles, Toth, & Adams, 2014) to 40% (Bueno-Alastuey, 2013). Including first language (L1) background, modality, and task as variables, this study investigates the role of pronunciation in learner-learner interactions. Thirty English learners in same-L1 or different-L1 dyads were assigned to one of two modes (face-to-face or audio-only synchronous computer-mediated communication) and completed three tasks (picture differences, consensus, conversation). Interactions were coded for language-related episodes (LREs), with 14% focused on pronunciation. Segmental features comprised the majority of pronunciation LREs (90%). Pronunciation LREs were proportionally similar for same-L1 and different-L1 dyads, and communication modality yielded no difference in frequency of pronunciation focus. The consensus task, which included substantial linguistic input, yielded greater pronunciation focus, although the results did not achieve statistical significance. These results help clarify the role of pronunciation in learner-learner interactions and highlight the influence of task features.

Recent advances in linguistic theory within the principles and parameters framework have exerted considerable influence on the field of second language acquisition. SLA researchers working within this framework of syntactic theory have investigated the extent to which developing second language grammars are constrained by principles of Universal Grammar (UG). Much of the UG-based SLA research in the 1980s focused on adult L2 acquisition, but the role of UG principles in child L2 acquisition remained largely unexplored. More recently, however, this state of affairs has begun to change as SLA researchers are becoming more and more interested in child second language syntactic development. In this paper, I review recent and current developments in UG-based child SLA research, and I argue that child SLA has a valuable role to play in enabling us to arrive at a better understanding of the role of biological factors in language acquisition and in strengthening the links between SLA and linguistic theory. Specifically, I discuss the findings of child SLA studies with respect to the following issues: the role of UG parameters in child SLA, the status of functional categories and their projections in child SLA, and the nature of the evidence available to and used by child L2 learners. The overall picture emerging from these studies suggests that child L2 developing grammars are indeed constrained by Universal Grammar. While it is not fully clear at the present time whether the child L2 learners& knowledge is a result of direct access to UG or indirect access to UG (i.e., through the mediation of the L1), the evidence indicates that L1 transfer (at least in certain syntactic domains) cannot be entirely ruled out.

This study is a conceptual replication of Rogers and Cheung’s (2018) investigation into distribution of practice effects on the learning of L2 vocabulary in child EFL classrooms in Hong Kong. Following a pretest, treatment, delayed posttest design, 66 primary school students (Cantonese L1) studied 20 vocabulary items over three training episodes under spaced-short (1-day interval) or spaced-long (8-day interval) learning conditions. The spacing of the vocabulary items was manipulated within-participants, and learning was assessed using crossword puzzles following a 4-week delay. While Rogers and Cheung (2018) resulted in minimal overall learning with a slight advantage for the spaced-short group, this study found large learning gains across the experimental conditions with no significant differences between the two learning schedules. Taken together, these results provide evidence that the results from previous research examining input spacing with adult populations in laboratory contexts might not generalize to authentic child learning contexts.

This study explored the impact of contextualized practice on second language (L2) learners’ production of wh-questions in the L2 classroom. It examined the quality of practice (correct vs. incorrect production) and the contribution of declarative knowledge to proceduralization. Thirty-four university-level English as a foreign language learners first completed a declarative knowledge test. Then, they engaged in various communicative activities over five weeks. Their production of wh-questions was coded for accuracy (absence of errors) and fluency (speech rate, mean length of pauses, and repair phenomena). Improvement was measured as the difference between the first and last practice sessions. The results showed that accuracy, speech rate, and pauses improved but with distinct patterns. Regression models showed that declarative knowledge did not predict accuracy or fluency; however, declarative knowledge assisted the learners to engage in targetlike behaviors at the initial stage of proceduralization. Furthermore, whereas production of accurate wh-questions predicted accuracy improvement, it had no impact on fluency.

We test the interpretation of pronominal forms in L2 speakers of English whose L1 is Spanish. Previous research on learners of nonnull subject languages has shown conflicting results. The aim of the present study is to reconcile previous evidence and shed light on the factors that determine learners’ difficulty to interpret pronominal forms in the L2. In six comprehension experiments, we found that intermediate L2 speakers did not show increased difficulty compared to native speakers in integrating multiple sources of information (syntactic, discourse, pragmatic) to resolve ambiguous pronouns in intrasentential anaphora and cataphora conditions. However, we also found that when two referents with equal prominence are introduced using a conjoined noun phrase in the preceding context, the learner’s performance is significantly different than the performance of the native speakers, both in intrasentential and intersentential anaphora. We suggest that L2 speakers may encounter difficulties evaluating the salience of the antecedents during pronoun resolution.

Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., “V with n,” illustrated by he always agrees with her) develops. We extracted VACs from subsets of the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database, altogether comprising more than 68,000 texts and 6 million words. For each VAC, L1 learner group, and proficiency level, we determined type and token frequencies, as well as the most dominant verb-VAC associations. To study effects of proficiency and L1 on VAC production, we carried out correlation analyses to compare verb-VAC associations of learners at different levels and different L1 backgrounds. We also correlated each learner dataset with comparable data from a large reference corpus of native English usage. Results indicate that with increasing proficiency, learners expand their VAC repertoire and productivity, and verb-VAC associations move closer to native usage.

This special issue presents results from comparative research into the principles constraining learner varieties (interlanguages) in use. The contributors analyze the oral production of complex verbal tasks (descriptions, instructions, narratives, retellings) in L2 Dutch, English, French, German, and Italian, concentrating on the way information from different semantic domains is organized across utterances (referential movement) and on a major aspect of the interaction between utterance-level and discourse-level constraints, namely, scope phenomena. We hope the results presented here will provide insights into the structural and communicative factors pushing, or hampering, L2 acquisition and will further our understanding of how the organizing principles interact at different levels of discourse production, be it in L1 or L2.