VanPatten (1990) found that L2 learners of Spanish have difficulty simultaneously attending to meaning and form of aural input. This partial replication of VanPatten (1990) addresses the effect of modality on attention to meaning and form by including a written mode and by using a different L2, that is, English as a foreign language. Six tasks were used in this study: (a) listening to the passage for content only, (b) listening for content while attending to the content word inflation, (c) listening for content while attending to the definite article the, (d) reading the passage for content only, (e) reading the passage for content while attending to the content word inflation, and (f) reading for content while attending to the definite article the. Task results in the aural mode mirrored those of VanPatten's original study, but significant differences were not observed for tasks in the written mode. Furthermore, results revealed that listening was more difficult than reading, suggesting that modality is a variable that influences how learners process input. Avenues for future research are discussed.

Goo and Mackey (this issue) outline several apparent design flaws in studies that have compared the impact of different types of corrective feedback (CF). Furthermore, they argue that SLA researchers should stop comparing recasts to other types of CF because they are inherently different kinds of phenomena. Our response to their article addresses (a) the claim that the recast-learning relationship has been “settled,” (b) the misleading representation of our views on uptake, (c) the characterization of the CF comparison studies as being weak and invalid, and (d) Goo and Mackey’s recommendations concerning the most appropriate approach to investigating the effect of feedback on second language learning.

This study used the bibliometric method to examine the field of second language acquisition (SLA) between 1997 and 2018 to provide a systematic overview of the field and to discover major trends in SLA. Based on citation/cocitation information and keywords retrieved from Web of Science, this study performed three types of bibliometric analyses to identify the prominent scholarly documents, authors, research institutions, geographic regions, and research topics that have been highly influential in the field of SLA over the last two decades. The scientific network maps and the keyword analysis revealed a number of significant changes as well as new trends in the field.

This study clarifies issues related to the transferability of bound morphology and reports on an empirical investigation of morphological transfer in the spatial expressions of Finnish-speaking (n= 140) and Swedish-speaking (n= 70) adolescent learners of English. The results indicate that both the bound, agglutinative morphology of the L1 Finnish spatial system and the free, prepositional morphology of the L1 Swedish spatial system constrain the types of options that learners pursue in their L2 English spatial reference. Additionally, however, the structural and semantic differences between the two L1 systems result in different patterns of spatial reference in the L2. We characterize these differences in terms of semantic transfer and simplification, and go on to show how transfer and simplification interact in our data.

Informed by the cognition hypothesis (Robinson, 2011), recent studies indicate that more cognitively complex tasks can result in better incorporation of feedback during interaction and, as a consequence, more learning. It is not known, however, how task complexity and feedback work together in computerized environments. The present study addressed this gap by investigating how cognitive complexity in face-to-face (FTF) versus computer-mediated communication (CMC) environments mediates the efficacy of recasts in promoting second language development. Eighty-four adult learners of Spanish as a foreign language at a mid-Atlantic university were randomly assigned to a control group or one of four experimental groups. The experimental groups engaged in one-on-one interaction and received recasts on the Spanish past subjunctive but differed according to (a) whether or not they had to reflect on another person’s intentional reasons during the task and (b) whether they interacted in FTF or CMC environments. Learning was measured with two production tasks and a multiple-choice receptive test in a Pretest-Posttest 1-Posttest 2 design. Results revealed that in the FTF mode, performing the cognitively complex task while receiving recasts led to the most learning. In the CMC mode, the cognitively complex task + recasts was not effective. Instead, the cognitively simple task led to the most development in CMC. The study also found that judgments of time on task were the only independent measure of cognitive complexity that held across mode.

The purpose of the present study was to determine what features associated with the macrolevel of lexical competence vary as a function of an increase in second language (L2) proficiency. The macrolevel of participants' word knowledge was described with respect to six variables that are commonly associated with three proposed macrolevel dimensions, namely quantity, quality, and metacognitive awareness. Sixty-four participants (native speakers of English, L2 advanced learners, and intermediate learners of English) self-rated their familiarity with 73 lexical items and were asked to generate word associations to the words they identified in a verifiable way as known. The data analyses showed that some measures, such as vocabulary size, word frequency effects, number of associations, and within-group consistency of participants' associative domain, are more sensitive to L2 learners' increasing proficiency than others (e.g., nativelike commonality of associations). We thus conclude that some aspects, such as quality and quantity of L2 lexical competence, develop as the proficiency of the L2 learners increases, whereas others, such as learners' metacognitive awareness, are not proficiency dependent. We also suggest that the measures that were identified as sensitive to capturing the overall state of L2 learners' vocabularies would also be reliable indexes of learners' proficiency development.

This study investigates the effect of the context of learning—“at home” (AH) classroom versus study abroad (SA)—on the number and types of communication strategies (CSs) used by learners of Spanish as a second language. Oral data from 46 learners—20 AH and 26 SA—were analyzed before and after the treatment period, to discern the effect of various factors on the learners' levels and choice of CS usage: type of CS category (L1 or L2 based, direct or interactional, and problem-orientedness [resource deficit, other performance, and self-performance]) and measures of language use. Posttest results showed a significant effect for context for CS categories and language use: Students in the SA context consistently used fewer CSs than their classroom counterparts, and their CS use correlated negatively with higher use of Spanish outside the classroom and with the host family. It is posited that the pragmatic exigencies of the AH and SA contexts may account for these findings.This research would not have been possible without the support of the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), which sponsored this team project, headed by Barbara F. Freed and Norman Segalowitz, to study the effects of the SA experience on L2 learners. I am very grateful to the members of the CIEE project team: Joe Collentine, Barbara Freed, Norman Segalowitz, and Manuel Díaz-Campos, for their insightful commentary on earlier versions of this work. Special appreciation also goes to Nicole Lazar for her expert assistance with the methodology and data analysis sections of this paper. My sincere appreciation also goes to Julie Sykes, Rosalind Freeman, and Sharma Martineau, graduate students in Spanish SLA and applied linguistics at Arizona State University, for their assistance with the partial transcription and the coding of the CS data.

The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in second or foreign language development, Williams (2005) offered empirical evidence that learning without awareness appears to be feasible. At the same time, it is also noted that Leow’s and Williams’s (2005) research designs measured unawareness at different stages (online encoding and offline retrieval, respectively) of the acquisitional process. The present study revisited and extended Williams’s (2005) study by using a hybrid design to gather concurrent data at the stage of encoding and during the testing phase as well as nonconcurrent data after the experimental exposure. Some methodological changes were also implemented to probe deeper into learners’ thought processes. The quantitative analyses performed on the data of 34 carefully screened participants revealed that, at the encoding stage, unaware learners do not appear capable of selecting or producing the correct determiner-noun combination when required to do so from options that include both animacy and distance information. The qualitative data underscore the importance of not only situating the measurement of the construct (un)awareness from different stages—that is, both online and offline—but also triangulating data from several sources in any report on its role in learning. Plausible explanations for the differences in findings are discussed.

This study examines the acquisition of the inflectional system by a Turkish child learner of English. Results from longitudinal data collected over 18 months are reported, presenting counterevidence for recent hypotheses on early L2 acquisition according to which missing functional items reflect missing functional categories (e.g., Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994, 1996a, 1996b). Despite robust evidence for the early production of copula be, auxiliary be, and overt subjects, the child L2 data analyzed in this paper do not show any evidence for tense and agreement morphology in the early stages of L2 development. In other words, although some functional elements related to IP are missing, the learner is able to perform other morphological and syntactic operations involving the functional projection IP. These findings lead us to question whether the lack of functional elements entails the lack of functional categories.

This study investigated the relationship between phonological memory and second language (L2) fluency gains in native English-speaking adults learning Spanish in two learning contexts: at their home university or abroad in an immersion context. Phonological memory (operationalized as serial nonword recognition) and Spanish oral fluency (temporal/hesitation phenomena) were assessed at two times, 13 weeks apart. Hierarchical regressions showed that, after the variance attributable to learning context was partialed out, initial serial nonword recognition performance was significantly associated with L2 oral fluency development, explaining 4.5–9.7% of unique variance. These results indicate that phonological memory makes an important contribution to L2 learning in terms of oral fluency development. Furthermore, these results from an adult population extend conclusions from previous studies that have claimed a role for phonological memory primarily in vocabulary development in younger populations.This study was conducted by the first author as part of her doctoral dissertation research, under the supervision of Norman Segalowitz. The research was funded by a grant to Barbara Freed from the Council for International Educational Exchange (New York), in part by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Norman Segalowitz, in part from the Dean's Office, Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University to Norman Segalowitz, and in part from the Fonds de recherche en santé du Québec to Irena O'Brien. The authors wish to thank Manuel Díaz-Campos, Barbara Lafford, and Nicole Lazar, who were members of the research team involved in the larger project of which this study is one part. The authors would also like to thank Peter Scherzer, Leif French, and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, the authors would like to thank Conchita Bueno, Hazel Casas, Elizabeth Gatbonton, Randall Halter, Guy Lacroix, Anne-Marie Linnen, Magnolia Negrete, Laura Renteria-Díaz, Marlene Taube-Schiff, and Naomi Yamasaki, who helped during various phases of this project.

Cognitive science has developed a number of experimental techniques for studying how people learn about sequentially structured stimulus material. We describe these techniques, review findings they have produced, and discuss the findings' relevance for understanding the mastery of syntax during second language learning. Three issues are addressed: (a) the nature or content of what is learned and how it might be represented in the language learner's knowledge base, paying special heed to acquiring abstract rules versus generalizing across stored examples, (b) the role of conscious awareness in syntactic learning, and (c) the role of limited-capacity processing or focal attention in syntactic learning. Care is taken to distinguish between the latter two factors—Focal attention to the task of learning about syntax and conscious awareness of particular syntactic structures are not the same thing and may well play different roles in successful acquisition.

The validity of two implicational universals regarding consonant clusters was tested in an analysis of the interlanguage of 11 subjects who were native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The results were strongly supportive of the two universals, suggesting the possibility that primary language universals hold also for nonprimary languages.

The present study examines whether and to what degree providing explicit phonetic information (EI) at the beginning of form-focused instruction (FFI) on second language pronunciation can enhance the generalizability and magnitude of FFI effectiveness by increasing learners’ ability to notice a new phone. Participants were 49 Japanese learners of English in English as a foreign language setting. Whereas the control group (n = 14) received meaning-oriented lessons without any focus on form, the experimental groups received 4 hr of FFI treatment designed to encourage them to practice the target feature of an English /ɹ/ in meaningful discourse. Instructors provided EI (i.e., multiple exposure to an exaggerated model pronunciation of /ɹ/ and rule presentation on the relevant articulatory configurations) to the FFI+EI group (n = 17) but not to the FFI-only group (n = 18). Their pre- and posttest performance was acoustically analyzed according to various lexical, task, and following vowel conditions. The results of the ANOVAs showed that (a) the FFI-only group demonstrated moderate improvement with medium effects (e.g., change from hybrid exemplars to poor exemplars), particularly in familiar lexical contexts, and (b) the FFI+EI group not only demonstrated considerable improvement with large effects (e.g., change from hybrid exemplars to good exemplars) but also generalized the instructional gains to unfamiliar lexical contexts beyond the instructional materials.

This paper measures the effect of the presence or absence of discourse markers such as so, right, well, OK, and now on second language lecture comprehension. A control group viewed a video recording of an extract of a naturally occurring lecture, whereas an experimental group viewed the same extract, but with discourse markers deleted. The results clearly indicate that subjects comprehended the lecture better when discourse markers were included than when they were deleted. This finding contrasts with earlier research that suggested discourse markers play no significant role in comprehension. This contrast is interpreted as being due to differences in experimental procedures.

Sixty English as a foreign language learners were divided into high-, intermediate-, and low-level groups based on their scores on pretests of target vocabulary and Vocabulary Levels Test scores. The participants read 10 Level 1 and 10 Level 2 graded readers over 37 weeks during two terms. Two sets of 100 target words were chosen from each set of graded readers and were tested on three occasions. The results showed that the relative gains from pretest to immediate posttest were 63.18%, 44.64%, and 28.12% for the high-, intermediate-, and low-level groups, respectively. There was little decay in knowledge on the Term 1 three-month delayed posttest; relative gains ranged from 21.05% for the low-level group to 59.01% for the high-level group. The learning gains in Term 2 were consistent with those from Term 1. The results indicate that prior vocabulary knowledge may have a large impact on the amount of vocabulary learning made through extensive reading.

In his 2007 study “Effects of Textual Enhancement and Topic Familiarity on Korean EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension and Learning of Passive Form,” Lee demonstrated that learners were better able to correct written sentences that contained incorrect English passive forms after exposure to texts flooded with enhanced (versus nonenhanced) passive forms. But with enhanced forms, learners did worse on comprehension tests, which arguably demonstrated a trade-off: More attention to forms resulted in less to meaning. In this study, a conceptual replication of Lee’s using eye-movement data, I assessed how English passive construction enhancement affects English language learners’ (a) learning of the form (via pre- and posttest gains on passive construction tests) and (b) text comprehension. In contrast to Lee’s results, I found enhancement did not significantly increase form correction gain scores, nor did enhancement significantly detract from comprehension. There was no trade-off effect. Form learning and comprehension did not correlate. By recording learners’ eye movements while reading, I found enhancement significantly impacted learners’ noticing of the passive forms through longer gaze durations and rereading times. Thus, enhancement in this study functioned as intuitively and originally (Sharwood Smith, 1991, 1993) proposed; it promoted noticing, but, in this case, without further explicit instruction, it appeared to have done little else.

This article takes a critical look at grammaticality judgment tasks in second language acquisition research. It begins by examining the theoretical assumptions that underlie grammaticality judgment tasks, pointing out that previous studies have reported considerable differences between the results obtained from grammaticality judgment tasks and from other, production-oriented tasks. A description of the design features of grammaticality judgment tasks that have been used to date is then provided. There follows an account of a small-scale study designed to investigate the nature of learner judgments. Twenty-one adult advanced Chinese learners of English were asked to judge sentences designed to test their knowledge of dative alternation. The results indicated that the learners rarely used the “not sure” option in the test. Eight of these subjects were then administered a reduced version of the original test as a think-aloud task 1 week later. The results showed that these learners were inconsistent in 22.5% of their judgments. The think-aloud protocols showed that they resorted to a variety of strategies in making judgments. The article concludes by arguing that grammaticality judgment tasks elicit a particular kind of performance that needs to be understood much more thoroughly before it is used as a basis for investigating second language acquisition.

Examining the role of instruction in second language acquisition (SLA) entails not only a specification of what aspects of SLA stand to be affected but also a clear conception of what is meant by instruction. In this paper the potential of various instructional strategies for promoting SLA among child second language (L2) learners is considered in relation to empirical findings in early French immersion programs. Several principles are proposed concerning the what, when, and how of code-focused L2 instruction in a communicatively oriented school-based acquisition context. These proposals need to be put to the test in further experimental research.

This paper presents results of a response-latency (RL) experiment with English-speaking learners of German that investigated to what extent—if any—two different groups of second language (L2) learners permit raising of the thematic verb. The framework under which the study was conducted involves varying theoretical predictions derived from the native-language (NL) transfer view of Schwartz and Sprouse (1994, 1996), the gradual-development view of Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994, 1996), the underspecification view of Eubank (1993/1994), and a local-impairment view that presents a more parsimonious solution to the L2 developmental problem than standard “no access” views. The L2 results reported here show that learners respond in different ways to stimulus sentences with raised and unraised verbs depending on the subjects' level of development. Surprisingly, it is the less advanced learners who exhibit an RL preference for apparently raised-verb experimental stimuli; the more advanced learners do not differentiate between raised-verb and unraised-verb stimuli. Analysis of these findings reveals that the less advanced group may only project VPs, consistent with the gradual-development view of Vainikka and Young-Scholten. Crucially, however, the Local Impairment Hypothesis is the only view that is consistent with the results from the more advanced learners, especially when they are seen in developmental context.

A number of recent studies in L1 listening comprehension have shown that background knowledge plays a crucial role in the comprehension process. The purpose of the present article is threefold: (a) to review the literature on background knowledge, (b) to present the findings of pertinent L1 and L2 research, and (c) to report the results of a preliminary study of L2 listening comprehension and background knowledge.